I take the liberty of starting a new string. Andy MacBrayne wrote that historian Geoffrey Roberts believes the Churchill-Stalin "Percentages" agreement was irrelevant, did not condemn Eastern Europe to communism, nor save Greece from it: http://www.historia.ru/2003/01/roberts.htm
After stripping away the wooly verbiage, Roberts' argument comes to this: "The problem with this justification is that Churchill's winning of British freedom of action in Greece was a somewhat pyrrhic victory, since it had already been conceded by Moscow, and long before the percentages deal." It may have been a pyrrhic victory, but it doesn't alter the fact that Britain did interfere with Greece, Stalin did not react, and the Communist insurrection was forestalled. Roberts continues: "The evidence on Moscow's policy towards Greece is fragmentary but fairly clear: Soviet policymakers saw the country as lying in a British sphere of interest in the Eastern Mediterranean, which Moscow had no means or intention of interfering with." Hmm...They seemed to have fairly solid ideas about what policy to pursue in places like Hungary and Yugoslavia. And wasn't the Truman Doctrine enunciated in part after a renewed Soviet effort in Greece in 1948? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ChurchillChat?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
