WHEN STALIN and CHURCHILL DIVIDED EUROPE: the "percentage agreement" October, 1944 On October 9, 1944, just after “dusk crept over the sky from the […] horizon”1 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin set down in one of the dark rooms of the Kremlin in Moscow, in order to discuss the future of Eastern-Europe. At this point in World War II, the Soviet Red Army had already liberated most of the motherland from German invaders, and occupied most of Romania and Bulgaria, as well as it was standing on the Eastern frontiers of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia with no intention to halt its Westward advance. One of the most memorable events of this otherwise 6 day long British-Soviet summits is the so-called “Percentage Agreement”, which both in the historiography and public memory is remembered as a document that divided Eastern European into Western and Soviet spheres of influence. In this document, Churchill proposed an agreement to Stalin, one that would provision Western predominance in one sphere, and Soviet predominance in another sphere in the region. According to Churchill's account of the incident, he suggested that the Soviet Union should have 90% influence in Romania and 75% in Bulgaria (while the West would control 10% and 25% respectively); the United Kingdom should have 90% in Greece (a strategically crucial country for British imperial communications in the Mediterranean Sea); and the West and the Soviet Union should have shared 50-50% dominance both in Hungary and Yugoslavia. Churchill wrote this proposal on a piece of paper which he pushed across to Stalin, who ticked it off and passed it back. (Later, the percentages of Soviet influence in Bulgaria and Hungary were amended to 80%). For a long period of time, the agreement was kept secret, and was only made officially public by Churchill twelve years later in 1956 in the final volume of his memoir. Since then, historians have written extensively about this infamous document...