3. The US moved to contain the spread of Communism in the late 1940s
In 1948 the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, with Soviet support, initiated a coup which overturned the last democratic government in Eastern Europe. Among the casualties of the coup was Jan Masaryk. Masaryk, a leading Czech diplomat and statesman passed from defenestration from a third-floor room, wearing only his pajamas. Whether it was intentional or accident has never been proved, but his end helped solidify the new communist grip on the Czech government. Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States implemented measures to stop communism from spreading further. Strong communist influences existed in Greece, Italy, France, Iran, Iraq, and in the Pacific in Korea. North of the 38th parallel, the People’s Republic of Korea committees aligned with the Soviet government. South of the line the US Army Military Government in Korea outlawed the committees and supported a South Korean government.
The Soviets, unlike the Americans and British, did little to demobilize the huge armies occupying Eastern Europe. American, British, and French troops remained in their respective occupation zones, though in troop strength well below that of the Soviets. At that time, none of the Allies, including the Soviets, envisioned rearming Germany. Ostensibly at peace, the world instead was a daily mess of assassinations, vengeance, arrests and executions of spies and dissidents, and insurrections. Large armies in Europe faced each other warily, the peace kept by the fact that the United States possessed the atomic bomb, and the Soviets did not. America initiated the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe. Stalin denied Marshall Plan aid to Eastern Europe (it was offered) and the Eastern Bloc found itself descending into an era of poverty and want, where hundreds perished due to Soviet policy and Soviet-trained police.