Poland
14 May 1955
14 May: Warsaw Pact established
After Stalin’s death in 1955, the USSR set up the “Warsaw Pact to ensure more rigorous control over the countries within its sphere of influence, a system subjecting the armies of individual communist countries to the command of the Soviet armed forces. The military bloc of communist states was to be a counterweight for the North-Atlantic Alliance (NATO), a defence pact of the US and Western Europe. As Churchill said, post-war Europe was divided for nearly half a century by the “Iron Curtain”.