In 1945, the provisional French president Charles de Gaulle had allowed the country's communist party to be included in its newly recreated political system. Only a year later, the West, to its alarm, discovered that the communist party was one of the three largest political parties in France. In another part of the world, China's communist party-in control of 100 million people in North China by the end of the war-grew until it overwhelmed its opponents in 1949 and proclaimed the country the People's Republic of China, a communist nation.
Back in 1946, the wartime prime minister of Great Britain, Sir Winston Churchill, speaking in the United States, warned that an "iron curtain" had closed Eastern Europe to the view of the West. Behind this curtain, Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, bolstered communist ideology by destroying books that depicted life and history in the non-communist West in a too-favorable light, and by forbidding future publication of such books. It was a policy that had been practiced with some success by Adolf Hitler during the 1930s as he created a fascist dictatorship in Germany.
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