The ‘naughty document’ that helped to split Eastern Europe

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S “naughty document” on which he and Joseph Stalin carved up Eastern Europe after the Second World War goes on public display for the first time tomorrow.

Written in October 1944 during a late night whisky-fuelled meeting in the Kremlin, it saw Churchill and Stalin attempt to agree how Russia and the West should share Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania when Nazi Germany was eventually defeated.

The document goes on show at the National Archives at Kew as part of a Cold War exhibition, with Churchill’s handwritten proposals that Hungary and Yugoslavia should be divided 50:50 and Bulgaria 75 per cent to Russia and 25 per cent to the West.

Stalin appears to have approved the suggestions with a big blue tick.

Mark Dunton, the exhibition’s curator, said Churchill called the paper his “naughty document, not for public eyes” as he and civil servants were aware it could come across as “callous”.

Mr Dunton said: “They both had a fair bit of whisky. But there’s great significance in that little square of paper – the fate of millions being decided with the stroke of a pen. It obviously didn’t quite pan out like this, but it is nonetheless a powerful document and an amazing piece of history.”

The exhibition also shows MI5 files on Soviet Union spies, such as Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who passed Western atomic secrets to the Soviets and was sentenced to 14 years after confessing to espionage. It also reveals details of nuclear war preparations made in the Sixties, with a domestic nuclear shelter recreated. The exhibition runs until Nov 9.

Bomb shelter Items stored in an under-the-stairs fall-out bunker of the 1980s Spoils of war Churchill and Stalin met at the Kremlin to note down their post-war plans Fallout map A chilling graphic illustrates the predicted damage from a nuclear bomb blast