Romania's bounderyes afther the Territorial Losses in 1940

Broken Romania

After the First World War, the victorious Entente powers handed down the Treaty of Trianon, 1920 , to Hungary -- a now independent leftover state from the defeated Austria-Hungary. At Trianon, Hungary proper lost 3/4 of her territory and 2/3 of her population. France justified the severity of the truncation with the principle of national self-determination, but the Hungarians suspected mainly power politics, and spent the interwar era in general protest, as the political poster indicates above. More than anything else, the desire to recover land and population drove Budapest into the Axis camp of Germany and Italy, all the way to a tragic participation in the war against the USSR, i.e., World War 2.

The Treaty of Trianon & Hungary's Protest Poster

Crafty and politically astute, vicious but single-minded, Stalin was responsible for saving the Russian realm in World War II by having established a strong industrial base, and by having built a powerful and huge Red Army. A brutal, bloody dictator who made many wartime mistakes, nevertheless, he drove the USSR to a crucial military victory against a powerful foe.