democracy during the depression years of the 1930s, in favor of autocratic, strong-man or single-party states. The new states were unable to form stable military alliances, and one by one were too weak to stand up against Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, which took them over between 1938 and 1945. World War II and onset of the Cold War Russia ended its participation in the First World War in March 1918 and lost territory, as the Baltic countries and Poland became independent. The region was the main battlefield in the Second World War (1939–45), with German and Soviet armies sweeping back and forth, with millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, and millions of others killed by disease, starvation, and military action, or executed after being deemed as politically dangerous. During the final stages of World War II the future of Eastern Europe was decided by the overwhelming power of the Soviet Red Army, as it swept the Germans aside. It did not reach Yugoslavia and Albania, however. Finland was free but forced to be neutral in the upcoming Cold War. Throughout Eastern Europe, German-speaking populations were expelled to the reduced borders of Germany in one of the largest ethnic cleansing operations in history. Regions where Germans had formed the local population majority were re-settled with Polish- or Czech-speakers. The region fell to Soviet control and Communist governments were imposed. Yugoslavia and Albania had their own Communist regimes independent of Moscow. The Eastern Bloc at the onset of the Cold War in 1947 was far behind the Western European countries in economic rebuilding and economic progress. Winston Churchill, in his famous "Sinews of Peace" address of 5 March 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, stressed the geopolitical impact of the "iron curtain": Eastern Bloc Eastern Europe after 1945 usually meant all the European countries liberated from Nazi Germany and then occupied by the Soviet army. It included the German Democratic Republic (also known as East Germany), formed by the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. All the countries in Eastern Europe adopted communist modes of control by 1948. These countries were officially independent of the Soviet Union, but the practical extent of this independence was quite limited. Yugoslavia and Albania had Communist control that was independent of the Kremlin. The communists had a natural reservoir of popularity in that they had destroyed the Nazi invaders. Their goal was to