In February 1946, Stalin gave a speech for the Russian elections. It contained the normal Communist attacks on capitalism, but included one sentence in which Stalin claimed: 'world capitalism proceeds through crisis and the catastrophes of war'. American politicians took it as a threat.

The American State Department asked the American Embassy in Moscow for an analysis of Soviet policy. Their question was answered by George Kennan, an Embassy official who had lived in Moscow since 1933, and who hated Communism and the Soviet system. Kennan's 8,000-word reply - nicknamed 'the Long Telegram' - advised:
1. The Russians are determined to destroy the American way of life and will do everything they could to oppose America.
2. This is the greatest threat the US has ever faced.
3. The Soviets can be beaten.
4. The Soviets must be stopped.
5. This can be done without going to war.
6. The way to do it is by educating the public against Communism, and by making people wealthy, happy and free.

On 5 March 1946, on the invitation of President Truman, Winston Churchill went to Fulton in America and gave a speech.
He said ‘a shadow’ had fallen on eastern Europe, which was now cut off from the free world by ‘ an iron curtain’. Behind that line, he said, the people of eastern Europe were ‘subject to Soviet influence . . . totalitarian control [and] police governments’.

Source A Mr Churchill has called for a war on the USSR. Stalin, writing in the Russian newspaper Pravda in March 1946.

Source B The Cold War set in. Churchill had given his famous speech in Fulton urging the imperialistic forces of the world to fight the Soviet Union. Our relations with England, France and the USA were ruined. Khrushchev, writing in 1971. In 1946 he had been a member of the Soviet government.

Source C This cartoon from 1946 by the British cartoonist Leslie Gilbert shows Churchill peeping under the Iron Curtain. ‘Joe’ is Joseph Stalin. In fact, the ‘iron curtain’ was a 2,000-km. line of barbed wire, look-out posts and road blocks.

Churchill’s speech did not start the Cold War, but he was the first person to stop pretending to be friends with Russia. Thus, his Fulton speech was the start of the Cold War; after it, America and Russia got into a number of conflicts.