cold war

1. often Cold War A state of political tension and military rivalry between nations that stops short of full-scale war, especially that which existed between the United States and Soviet Union following World War II.
2. A state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation.

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So named because vast resources were poured into a bitter ‘bi-polar’ ideological struggle between the West, led by the USA, and the East, led by the USSR, which never quite led to open or ‘hot’ hostilities between the principals. Churchill coined or at least popularized the term ‘iron curtain’ in a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, but before that it was obvious that the two main victors of WW II were heading for confrontation. The two occasions when the war nearly got hot were both Soviet provocations, their 1948 blockade countered by the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when a US blockade forced them to take secretly introduced IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Weapons) out of Cuba.

The Cold War might be said to have been declared in 1949, when the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb, congealing into NATO, SEATO (South-East Asia Treaty Organisation), and other organizations, perceived as passive ‘containment’ by the USA and her allies and as hostile ‘encirclement’ by the USSR and her satellites. The latter formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, countering overwhelming US nuclear superiority with massive conventional forces. Although war never did break out in Europe, there were a number of ‘proxy’ conflicts elsewhere, in the Korean, Vietnam, and Arab-Israeli wars, which both sides used to test their weaponry and each other's resolve.

The world communist threat was perceived as monolithic until Pres Nixon visited China in the early 1970s, but by that time the Soviets had achieved parity in both nuclear warheads and delivery systems, and a protracted effort to halt further attempts to achieve unilateral advantage was known as détente. Pres Reagan reversed this policy in the early 1980s and in terms of investment in military equipment, the Cold War probably peaked in about 1985, having bankrupted the Soviet system. From the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost tried to make the best of a bad job, but the floodgates burst and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 is regarded as the end of the Cold War.

The Warsaw Pact and the USSR broke up, leaving the successor state Russia to thrash about in search of a new purpose, and a triumphant NATO to develop interventionist policies it would never have dared to pursue previously. This has confirmed fears of ‘encirclement’ in Russia and it is not unimaginable that this could evolve into a new Cold War.

— Christopher Bellamy

Causes
External Course
Domestic Course
Changing Interpretations

1. a state of international tension wherein political, economic, technological, sociological, psychological, paramilitary, and military measures short of overt armed conflict involving regular military forces are employed to achieve national objectives.

2. (the Cold War) the state of political hostility that existed between the Soviet bloc countries and the U.S.-led Western powers from 1945 to 1990.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The name normally given to the period of intense conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the period after the Second World War.

In 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two leading powers in Europe, with the Soviet Union effectively occupying the countries of Eastern Europe and the United States as the liberator (or in the case of Britain creditor and underwriter) of the countries of Western Europe. In Germany these two ‘superpowers’, along with France and Britain, established zones of occupation and a framework for four-power control. In the conferences at Yalta (February) and Potsdam (July/August) 1945 the two superpowers and Britain attempted to define the framework for a post-war settlement in Europe. However, by the time of the Potsdam conference serious differences had emerged, in particular over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe. Both conferences also discussed the Far East, in particular the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan.

By 1947 a general ‘East-West’ division of states was emerging. The Soviets were intent, according to the West, on undermining democracy and establishing puppet communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and in Germany on crippling her wealth and creating an exclusive influence in their zone of occupation. The Soviets defended their actions in Eastern Europe in terms of establishing broadly based anti-Fascist governments which were friendly towards the Soviet Union. Other conflicts elsewhere emerged and the two states began to denounce each other in increasingly violent ideological terms—the Soviet Union portraying the United States as bent on destroying communism while the United States portrayed the Soviet Union as intent on undermining liberal democracy in Western Europe and the United States itself.

The Cold War from 1947 onwards is marked by the Berlin Blockade Crisis of 1948-9, the victory of Mao's Red Army over the American-backed Nationalist Government in China in 1949, the Korean War in 1950, the Soviet military occupation of Hungary in 1956, Soviet pressure on Berlin from 1958 culminating in the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. During this period the Americans consolidated their new role as leader of the West: they offered assistance to the economies of the Western European states through the Marshall Plan of 1947; formally allied themselves to an emerging alliance of Western European states in the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949; took the lead in establishing the Federal Republic of Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in 1949 and in the early 1950s worked for the rearmament of this new state and its full membership of NATO in 1955. The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany as the German Democratic Republic in 1949 and established a formal alliance with its Eastern European ‘partners’ in 1955 (the Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization).

In Asia the Americans concluded an alliance and then a peace treaty with Japan in 1951 and 1952 and brought other states, including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines, within a series of alliances, while the Soviet Union concluded an alliance with China in 1950. The war in Korea ended in 1953 but the Americans gradually became entangled in a more complex war in Vietnam in which it supported the Republic of (South) Vietnam against the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam which was backed by the Soviet Union and China.

Throughout this period the two sides also pursued policies of nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the homeland of the other.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis relations improved. Agreements were concluded to ‘normalize’ the situation in Europe, particularly the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin in 1971, agreements which led to the two German states entering the United Nations in 1973 and the Helsinki Accords agreed by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975 which appeared to mark a tacit peace treaty to conclude both the Second World War and the Cold War. Agreements limiting the nuclear arms race were also concluded. Conflict between the superpowers continued even through this period of détente, particularly in new areas of rivalry such as Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa (i.e. north-eastern Africa), and the Middle East. However, improved relations between the United States and China, the work of President Nixon, Secretary of State Kissinger, and Premier Chou En-Lai, together with the détente between the United States and the Soviet Union and the worsening of relations between the Soviet Union and China, gave a new shape to relations between the two (or perhaps three) superpowers in the 1970s.

By the mid-1970s the Cold War in its original form can be said to have died away. The arms race between East and West had all the characteristics of a classic ‘action-reaction’ model of international conflict in which each side reacts to an earlier step by the other side. The explanation of the origins of the conflict is more complex, though three broad categories of explanation can be identified. First, some analysts have emphasized that the Cold War occurred primarily as a result of the destruction of German power, the resulting ‘power vacuum’ in Central Europe and the new bipolar balance of power between the superpowers. From this perspective, the Cold War was a traditional great power conflict in which ideological rivalry was essentially secondary and the structural constraints of bipolarity crucial in throwing the two sides apart. A second explanation, sometimes called the orthodox or liberal interpretation, stresses the American desire for a return to a much more limited international role after the Second World War. However, after having begun to disarm and disengage from Europe, the Americans were obliged by Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe to take up in 1947 a much more active, and unsought for, role in Europe in order to contain Soviet power. A third explanation stresses the long-term objective of the American capitalist power to undermine communism and to expand American power throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. Some writers in this category thus trace the Cold War back to American opposition to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Of course, many accounts weave together two or even all three of these broad categories.

In the 1980s there was a short-lived but intensive reawakening of the Cold War, sometimes called the New Cold War. Détente petered out in the late 1970s, arms control faltered, and in December 1979 the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. From 1980 onwards the Soviet Union exerted intense pressure over the government of Poland. In the United States and in Britain the governments of Reagan and Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms unheard since the worst days of the Cold War. On the Western side there was rearmament in Europe, under the so-called double-track policy of NATO, changes in the American doctrine of deterrence which appeared to emphasize the political utility of limited nuclear war, and the American pursuit of defences against Soviet missiles (the Strategic Defense Initiative). As in the post-1945 period it is difficult to disentangle action and reaction between the two sides.

In any case, by 1987 the two superpowers had moved decisively back towards agreement and by 1989 Soviet power itself had crumbled. The US and Russian agreements to work together against terrorism after 11 September 2001 mark the most dramatic change in their relations since the start of the Cold War.

— Peter Byrd

The antagonism between the USA and USSR lasting from the late 1940s until the late 1980s, ‘cold’ because it was waged through diplomatic and ideological means rather than force. Britain was allied to the USA. The Cold War came to an end with the collapse of Soviet power, largely as a result of its intervention in Afghanistan, and its progress towards democracy.

In December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, signaling the end not only of communist rule in that country but also of the Cold War. Just a few years earlier, no one could have imagined the dramatic changes that were to occur in the world from 1989 to 1991. While the Cold War in the 1980s was not at its coldest point ever, it was still going strong. Yet, through the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, the Cold War came to an end and a new era in world history began.

The Cold War remained an ominous cloud over the world from the end of World War II to the early 1990s. Although every country in the world experienced different events and issues during this time, few escaped the influence of the Cold War. Historians may disagree as to exactly when the Cold War began, who should be blamed for its start, and why it lasted so long, but they all accept that it started soon after World War II and left an indelible imprint on the world.

Roots of the Conflict

The Cold War began when the World War II alliance between the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain fell apart in the face of misunderstandings, mistrust, and at times, deliberate actions. To begin to understand the collapse of this wartime partnership, one must recognize that the alliance had been anything but natural. Prior to 1941, the United States and other Western powers looked upon the Soviet Union with tremendous mistrust, and the feelings were mutual. This animosity originated with the communist seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and the resulting disagreements between the Western powers—including the United States, Great Britain, and France—and the new regime. For example, when Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany in 1918, ending its involvement in World War I as an ally of the Western powers, tensions were raised with these countries. Soon thereafter, the intervention of these same allies in support of noncommunist forces during the Russian civil war poisoned the Russians' view of the West.

Relations did not improve much before the start of World War II. Communist leader Vladimir Lenin changed the name of Russia to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union) in the early 1920s and began the process of consolidating communist control, which continued after 1925 under Joseph Stalin, but the United States refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Soviet government until 1933. Even after this recognition, relations did not improve substantially as the world drifted toward a new war. As the Western powers and the Soviet Union attempted to deal with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, they struggled without success to find a common policy. The result was that each country looked out for its own interests, and in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. In the pact, both countries pledged their neutrality in wars the other might wage and agreed to divide Poland between them. This pact and the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939 shocked and angered the Western powers.

These feelings of mistrust did not ease until June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in violation of their nonaggression pact. With the Soviet Union now clearly in need of assistance against the seemingly unstoppable Nazi machine, an uneasy alliance developed. The United States, although still not officially in the war, immediately began to send aid to the Soviet Union. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the United States entered the war, the alliance took a fuller form. For the next three and a half years, the Western powers and the Soviet Union put aside most of their differences to wage war against their common foe.

While the war encouraged greater cooperation, the differences between the two sides never went away. Although they shared a common goal, cooperation remained limited, and generally speaking, the two sides fought separate wars. The Russians suffered the most as they fought the Germans on the Eastern Front, while the British, Americans, and other allies battled the Axis powers in North Africa, Italy, and eventually western Europe. After Germany collapsed in May 1945 and Japan surrendered in September, the one truly unifying feature for the alliance, a common enemy, ended. Very quickly in 1945, the limited level of cooperation that had been reached in the war fell victim to mutual incriminations, mistrust, and differing views of what constituted world security.

The beginning of the collapse of the Grand Alliance could already be seen before the final bombs dropped on Germany and Japan. At meetings in 1943 and 1944, the Allied powers sought agreements concerning the structure of the postwar world. The United States, which had emerged as the dominant Western power in the war, championed an international system built on democratic principles and the capitalist economic system. The Soviet Union saw these ideas as the antithes is of communism and desired more than anything to maintain its security by creating a buffer zone between itself and a potentially resurgent Germany. The result was the development of a bipolar world divided between those nations that generally supported the United States and its policies and those countries that supported the Soviet Union. Ultimately this bipolar world would grow more complex as nations like China, France, India, and others asserted a degree of independence from either so-called superpower.

Many of the problems in the immediate postwar years resulted from different interpretations of agreements reached during the war itself. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Allied powers agreed to the establishment of the United Nations, the temporary division and occupation of Germany, and basic policies involving eastern European countries. All of these decisions precipitated disagreements between the United States and Soviet Union after the war. The structure of voting in the United Nations ensured contention; no plan was established describing how Germany would eventually be reunited, and the question of what constituted free elections in the eastern European countries was left undefined. Not surprisingly, the mistrust that preceded World War II quickly resurfaced.

Postwar Years

In 1945 and 1946, disagreements between the Western powers and the Soviet Union arose over many issues, including the end of U.S. Lend-Lease aid, elections in eastern European countries, and the withdrawal of Allied forces from Iran. Whatever the disagreement, each side perceived the other as acting in a threatening manner. Simply put, neither side could overcome the mistrust that had already existed for almost thirty years. For example,

Soviet leaders did allow elections in the eastern European countries that from their perspective met the promises in the Yalta accords. The United States and other Western powers did not agree with this assessment, since they believed elections that involved a limited number of candidates and generally guaranteed communist dominance were patently undemocratic. While Western leaders assumed the communists were simply trying to expand their power, the Soviet Union saw control over the eastern European countries as essential in providing a buffer zone against a future German resurgence.

Although there were efforts to maintain a semblance of cooperation until 1947, U.S. President Harry S. Truman's initiation of the Truman Doctrine in March of that year clearly marked the end of the alliance. In many ways, the Truman Doctrine marked the formal acceptance of the strategy that would dominate U.S. thinking throughout the Cold War—containment. First articulated by George F. Kennan in 1946, the strategy called for the United States to contain communism within its current areas of control. The continuity of the strategy of containment can be seen in following examples where the United States actively tried to stop the spread of communism: the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Grenada Invasion in 1983. While there were other national security issues that the United States had to deal with in the second half of the twentieth century, the idea of containing communism was never too far removed.

The passage of the Truman Doctrine, the development of the Marshall Plan in 1948, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 formed the foundation for U.S. efforts in waging the Cold War. Besides representing the broad theme of containing the spread of communism, the Truman Doctrine specifically called for aid to Greece and Turkey to combat communist influences. The United States established the Marshall Plan to provide funds for rebuilding western Europe after the devastation of World War II. American leaders saw a rebuilt Europe as a bulwark against communism as well as a valuable trading partner. The creation of NATO grew out of concerns that only through collective security could Western countries resist Soviet expansion.

The Soviet Union followed similar paths in cementing its control of eastern European countries by taking steps to integrate their economies with its own. It also provided limited funds and supplies to groups attempting to facilitate the rise of communism in different areas of the world, such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam. Furthermore, it created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 to counter NATO. From the Soviet perspective, these actions were needed not only to preserve communism at home but also to reduce the danger of enemies arising on its borders.

The acceleration of the divisions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s led to several crises and at times open confrontations. One of the legacies of the Yalta Conference was the division of Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones with France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union controlling one zone each. The French, British, and Americans gradually consolidated their zones into West Germany and West Berlin, while the Soviet Union established a separate East Germany. The location of West Berlin in the center of East Germany sparked several crises including the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948, the Berlin Airlift to circumvent it over the next year, and finally the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to completely separate West Berlin from East Germany.

After the 1948–1949 Berlin crisis came to an end, other events occurred pointing to the growing dangers of the Cold War. The Soviet test of an atomic bomb and the triumph of communism in China in the fall of 1949 seemed to indicate that the Soviet Union was indeed winning the Cold War. Even more important, especially in terms of the American military, the Korean War began in June 1950 when communist forces from North Korea attacked South Korea. Under the auspices of the United Nations, the United States and almost fifty other countries intervened to save South Korea. For three years the war raged, costing the lives of several million Korean and Chinese as well as almost 37,000 Americans.

1950s and 1960s

During this period there was not much improvement in relations, as little common ground could be found to begin discussions. Even worse, the 1950s witnessed the acceleration of the arms race as the superpowers introduced new delivery and weapons systems—intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers—that both countries would rely upon throughout the Cold War. By the end of the decade, both countries were quickly obtaining the capability of destroying each other.

The late 1950s and early 1960s revealed the growing complexity of the Cold War as well as the dangers of a confrontation. In the mid to late 1950s, the United States became involved in two separate disputes between Communist China and Taiwan over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. While the crises did not lead to a war, the countries went to the brink before pulling back. A more dangerous situation arose when the Soviet Union began constructing nuclear missile sites in Cuba in the summer of 1962, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world closer to a nuclear war than ever before. For a week at the end of October, the world waited for an end to the crisis. Fortunately, the two countries did reach an agreement ending the standoff.

The decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis witnessed the Cold War expanding into new areas. While the United States continued to try to contain the Soviet Union in Europe and also to beat the Russians to the moon, the main concern of the 1960s and early 1970s was the Vietnam War. Since 1945, the United States had kept a careful eye on events in Vietnam. Although opposed to colonization, the United States found it necessary to aid France in Vietnam in order to preserve French support in the Cold War. The collapse of French efforts in 1954 led to more direct American involvement in preserving a noncommunist government in what became South Vietnam. Starting in 1965, the United States began a major military commitment that lasted until 1973. In the name of containing communism, 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.

While the United States struggled with the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union experienced its own share of problems. In 1964, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev lost a power struggle in the Kremlin with Leonid Brezhnev, a hard-liner in the Communist Party, and was forced into retirement. Under Brezhnev's leadership in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union expanded its military arsenal, experienced open hostilities with China, and cracked down on opposition to communism in eastern Europe by intervening militarily in Czechoslovakia. The dynamics of the Cold War had definitely changed by 1970, as neither superpower could any longer afford to focus its attention solely on the other.

1970–1991

The changes in the world in the late 1960s actually facilitated a thaw in the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had begun to realize the futility of their ongoing feud and the need to work toward a better relationship. In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon took important steps by making historic visits to both China and the Soviet Union. These visits led to improved American relations with both countries and the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. While these treaties had only a limited impact, they signaled a thaw in the Cold War known as détente. Further more, there were increased efforts at cooperation in the form of cultural exchanges and economic transactions. Unfortunately these improvements proved relatively short-lived as tensions increased again in the late 1970s.

Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union reached new lows after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Responding to this action, the United States led a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and withdrew its support for a new arms-control treaty. Additionally, after being elected in 1980, Ronald Reagan initiated a massive military buildup and showed a greater willingness to confront communism. Calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," he provided aid to anti-communist forces in Latin America and ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983 to prevent the establishment of a communist government there.

As the United States became more assertive in the 1980s, the Soviet Union entered a period of decline. Its invasion of Afghanistan proved a debacle as Soviet forces struggled there until 1988 without success. Their difficulties in Afghanistan paled in comparison to other problems the Soviet leadership faced. By the early 1980s, Brezhnev was old and ineffective and the country was nearly bankrupt. After his death in 1982, the Soviet Union struggled until 1985 to find a new leader who could help the country out of its economic doldrums. It seemed to find that leader in Mikhail Gorbachev, who was younger than previous Soviet leaders, independent of the hard-liners in the Communist Party, and willing to seek reform. However, no one, including Gorbachev, realized how bad the situation was. In essence the Soviet Union was dying from inefficiency and corruption. Although Gorbachev set out to modernize and reform the Soviet Union without abandoning the basic tenets of communism, he actually unleashed the forces of change that ultimately would lead to his downfall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the realm of foreign policy, Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet Union could no longer afford the arms race. With this in mind he initiated talks with the United States, where he found a surprisingly receptive president. Despite his rhetoric, Reagan was horrified by the prospects of a nuclear war. Even before Gorbachev made his initiatives, Reagan was already thinking along similar lines. Although difficult negotiations had to occur, the two leaders reached a significant agreement in 1987 eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. This agreement led to more talks between Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, that reduced tensions even further.

While making efforts to improve relations with the United States, Gorbachev also encouraged internal reforms in Soviet society and in eastern Europe. As he struggled to reform communism at home, Gorbachev made clear to the eastern European countries that they could also make changes without fear of Soviet intervention. Little did he know that this freedom would spark the revolutions of 1989 that saw the overthrow of communist regimes throughout eastern Europe and the rise of opponents in the Soviet Union who wanted even more reform than he could deliver. After an abortive coup by communist hard-liners in August 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into separate states, Gorbachev resigned in December, effectively ending both communist rule in Russia and the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War represented a dramatic turn in the world's history. For almost fifty years, the two superpowers and their various allies waged an undeclared war. Although historians will continue to debate different issues related to the Cold War, all would agree that few events in the world between 1945 and 1991 can be completely understood outside its context.

Bibliography

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—David L. Snead

The term Cold War refers to the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States that lasted from roughly 1945 to 1990. The term predates the Cold War itself, but it was first widely popularized after World War II by the journalist Walter Lippmann in his commentaries in The New York Herald Tribune.

Two features of the Cold War distinguished it from other periods in modern history: (1) a fundamental clash of ideologies (Marxism-Leninism versus liberal democracy); and (2) a highly stratified global power structure in which the United States and the Soviet Union were regarded as "superpowers" that were preeminent over - and in a separate class from - all other countries.

The Stalin Era

During the first eight years after World War II, the Cold War on the Soviet side was identified with the personality of Josef Stalin. Many historians have singled out Stalin as the individual most responsible for the onset of the Cold War. Even before the Cold War began, Stalin launched a massive program of espionage in the West, seeking to plant spies and sympathizers in the upper levels of Western governments. Although almost all documents about this program are still sealed in the Russian archives, materials released in the 1990s reveal that in the United States alone, at least 498 individuals actively worked as spies or couriers for Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930s and early 1940s.

In the closing months of World War II, when the Soviet Union gained increasing dominance over Nazi Germany, Stalin relied on Soviet troops to occupy vast swathes of territory in East-Central Europe. The establishment of Soviet military hegemony in the eastern half of Europe, and the sweeping political changes that followed, were perhaps the single most important precipitant of the Cold War.

The extreme repression that Stalin practiced at home, and the pervasive suspicion and intolerance that he displayed toward his colleagues and aides, carried over into his policy vis-à-vis the West. Stalin's unchallenged dictatorial authority within the Soviet Union gave him enormous leeway to formulate Soviet foreign policy as he saw fit. The huge losses inflicted by Germany on the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 - a pact that Stalin had upheld even after he received numerous intelligence warnings that a German attack was imminent - made Stalin all the more unwilling to trust or seek a genuine compromise with Western countries after World War II. Having been humiliated once, he was determined not to let down his guard again.

Stalin's mistrustful outlook was evident not only in his relations with Western leaders, but also in his dealings with fellow communists. During the civil war in China after World War II, Stalin kept his distance from the Chinese communist leader, Mao Zedong. Although the Soviet Union provided crucial support for the Chinese Communists during the climactic phase of the civil war in 1949, Stalin never felt particularly close to Mao either then or afterward. In the period before the Korean War in June 1950, Stalin did his best to outflank Mao, giving the Chinese leader little choice but to go along with the decision to start the war.

Despite Stalin's wariness of Mao, the Chinese communists deeply admired the Soviet Union and sought to forge a close alliance with Moscow. From February 1950, when the two countries signed a mutual security treaty, until Stalin's death in March 1953, the Soviet Union and China cooperated on a wide range of issues, including military operations during the Korean War. On the rare occasions when the two countries diverged in their views, China deferred to the Soviet Union.

In Eastern Europe, Stalin also tended to be distrustful of indigenous communist leaders, and he gave them only the most tenuous leeway. At Stalin's behest, the communist parties in Eastern Europe gradually solidified their hold through the determined use of what the Hungarian communist party leader Mátyás Rákosi called "salami tactics." By the spring of 1948, "People's Democracies" were in place throughout the region, ready to embark on Stalinist policies of social transformation.

Stalin's unwillingness to tolerate dissent was especially clear in his policy vis-à-vis Yugoslavia, which had been one of the staunchest postwar allies of the Soviet Union. In June 1948, Soviet leaders publicly denounced Yugoslavia and expelled it from the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), set up in 1947 to unite European communist parties under Moscow's leadership. The Soviet-Yugoslav rift, which had developed behind the scenes for several months and had finally reached the breaking point in March 1948, appears to have stemmed from both substantive disagreements and political maneuvering. The chief problem was that Stalin had declined to give the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, any leeway in diverging from Soviet preferences in the Balkans and in policy toward the West. When Tito demurred, Stalin sought an abject capitulation from Yugoslavia as an example to the other East European countries of the unwavering obedience that was expected.

In the end, however, Stalin's approach was highly counterproductive. Neither economic pressure nor military threats were sufficient to compel Tito to back down, and efforts to provoke a high-level coup against Tito failed when the Yugoslav leader liquidated his pro-Soviet rivals within the Yugoslav Communist Party. A military operation against Yugoslavia would have been logistically difficult (traversing mountains with an army that was already overstretched in Europe), but one of Stalin's top aides, Nikita Khrushchev, later said he was "absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had had a common border with Yugoslavia, Stalin would have intervened militarily." Plans for a full-scale military operation were indeed prepared, but the vigorous U.S. military response to North Korea's incursion into South Korea in June 1950 helped dispel any lingering notion Stalin may have had of sending troops into Yugoslavia.

The Soviet Union thus was forced to accept a breach in its East European sphere and the strategic loss of Yugoslavia vis-à-vis the Balkans and the Adriatic Sea. Most important of all, the split with Yugoslavia raised concern about the effects elsewhere in the region if "Titoism" were allowed to spread. To preclude further such challenges to Soviet control, Stalin instructed the East European states to carry out new purges and show trials to remove any officials who might have hoped to seek greater independence. Although the process took a particularly violent form in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, the anti-Titoist campaign exacted a heavy toll all over the Soviet bloc.

Despite the loss of Yugoslavia, Soviet influence in East-Central Europe came under no further threat during Stalin's last years. From 1947 through the early 1950s, the East-Central European states embarked on crash industrialization and collectivization programs, causing vast social upheaval yet also leading to rapid short-term economic growth. Stalin relied on the presence of Soviet troops, a tightly woven network of security forces, the wholesale penetration of the East European governments and armies by Soviet agents, the use of mass purges and political terror, and the unifying threat of renewed German militarism to ensure that regimes loyal to Moscow remained in power. By the early 1950s, Stalin had established a degree of control over East-Central Europe to which his successors could only aspire.

The Soviet leader had thus achieved two remarkable feats in the first several years after World War II: He had solidified a Communist bloc in Europe, and he had established a firm Sino-Soviet alliance, which proved crucial during the Korean War. These twin accomplishments marked the high point of the Cold War for the Soviet Union.

Changes After Stalin

Soon after Stalin's death in 1953, his successors began moving away from some of the cardinal precepts of Stalin's policies. In the spring of 1953, Soviet foreign policy underwent a number of significant changes, which cumulatively might have led to a far-reaching abatement of the Cold War, including a settlement in Germany. As it turned out, no such settlement proved feasible. In the early summer of 1953, uprisings in East Germany, which were quelled by the Soviet Army and the latest twists in the post-Stalin succession struggle in Moscow, notably the arrest and denunciation of the former secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, induced Soviet leaders to slow down the pace of change both at home and abroad. Although the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a ceasefire in the Korean War in July 1953, the prospects for radical change in Europe never panned out.

Despite the continued standoff, Stalin's death did permit the intensity of the Cold War to diminish. The period from mid-1953 through the fall of 1956 was a time of great fluidity in international politics. The United States and the Soviet Union achieved a settlement with regard to Indochina at the Geneva Conference in July 1954 and signed the Austrian State Treaty in May 1955, bringing an end to a decade-long military occupation of Austria. The Soviet Union also mended its relationship with Yugoslavia, an effort that culminated in Nikita Khrushchev's visit to Yugoslavia in May 1955. U.S.-Soviet relations improved considerably during this period; this was symbolized by a meeting in Geneva between Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower in July 1955 that prompted both sides to build on the "spirit of Geneva."

Within the Soviet Union as well, considerable leeway for reform emerged, offering hope that Soviet ideology might evolve in a more benign direction. At the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, Khrushchev launched a "de-Stalinization" campaign by delivering a "secret speech" in which he not only denounced many of the crimes and excesses committed by Stalin, but also promised to adopt policies that would move away from Stalinism both at home and abroad.

The condemnation of Stalin stirred a good deal of social ferment and political dissent throughout the Soviet bloc, particularly in Poland and Hungary, where social and political unrest grew rapidly in the summer of 1956. Although the Soviet-Polish crisis was resolved peacefully, Soviet troops intervened in Hungary to overthrow the revolutionary government of Imre Nagy and to crush all popular resistance. The fighting in Hungary resulted in the deaths of some 2,502 Hungarians and 720 Soviet troops as well as serious injuries to 19,226 Hungarians and 1,540 Soviet soldiers. Within days, however, the Soviet forces had crushed the last pockets of resistance and had installed a pro-Soviet government under János Kádár to set about "normalizing" the country.

By reestablishing military control over Hungary and by exposing - more dramatically than the suppression of the East German uprising in June 1953 had - the emptiness of the "roll-back" and "liberation" rhetoric in the West, the Soviet invasion in November 1956 stemmed any further loss of Soviet power in East-Central Europe. Shortly after the invasion, Khrushchev acknowledged that U.S.-Soviet relations were likely to deteriorate for a considerable time, but he said he was more than ready to accept this tradeoff in order to "prove to the West that [the Soviet Union is] strong and resolute" while "the West is weak and divided."

U.S. officials, for their part, were even more aware than they had been during the East German uprising of the limits on their options in Eastern Europe. Senior members of the Eisenhower administration conceded that the most they could do in the future was "to encourage peaceful evolutionary changes" in the region, and they warned that the United States must avoid conveying the impression "either directly or by implication that American military help will be forthcoming" to anti-Communist forces. Any lingering U.S. hopes of directly challenging Moscow's sphere of influence in East-Central Europe thus effectively ended.

The Khrushchev Interlude: East-West Crises and the Sino-Soviet Rift

The Soviet invasion of Hungary coincided with another East-West crisis - a crisis over Suez, which began in July 1956 when President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal Company. The French, British, and U.S. governments tried to persuade (and then coerce) Nasser to reverse his decision, but their efforts proved of no avail. In late October 1956, Israeli forces moved into Suez in an operation that was broadly coordinated with Britain and France. The following day, French and British forces joined the Israeli incursions. Soviet leaders mistakenly assumed that the United States would support its British and French allies. The Soviet decision to intervene in Hungary was based in part on this erroneous assumption, and it also was facilitated by the perception that a military crackdown would incur less international criticism if it occurred while much of the world's attention was distracted by events in the Middle East.

As it turned out, the Eisenhower administration sided against the British and French and helped compel the foreign troops to pull out of Egypt. The U.S. and Soviet governments experienced considerable friction during the crisis (especially when Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin made veiled nuclear threats against the French and British), but their stances were largely compatible. The U.S. decision to oppose the French and British proved to be a turning point for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed in 1949 to help cement ties between Western Europe and the United States against the common Soviet threat. Although NATO continued to be a robust military-political organization all through the Cold War, the French and British governments knew after the Suez crisis that they could not automatically count on U.S. support during crises even when the Soviet Union was directly involved.

In these various ways, the events of October - November 1956 reinforced Cold War alignments on the Soviet side (by halting any further loss of Soviet control in East-Central Europe) but loosened them somewhat on the Western side, as fissures within NATO gradually emerged. The Warsaw Pact - the Soviet-led alliance with the East European countries that was set up in mid-1955 - was still largely a paper organization and remained so until the early 1960s, but the invasion of Hungary kept the alliance intact. In the West, by contrast, relations within NATO were more strained than before as a result of the Suez crisis.

A number of other East-West crises erupted in the late 1950s, notably the Quemoy-Matsu offshore islands dispute between communist China and the United States in 1958 and the periodic Berlin crises from 1958 through 1962. Serious though these events were, they were soon over-shadowed by a schism within the communist world. The Soviet Union and China, which had been staunch allies during the Stalin era, came into bitter conflict less than a decade after Stalin's death. The split between the two communist powers, stemming in part from genuine policy and ideological differences and in part from a personal clash between Khrushchev and Mao, developed behind the scenes in the late 1950s. The dispute intensified in June 1959 when the Soviet Union abruptly terminated its secret nuclear weapons cooperation agreement with China. Khrushchev's highly publicized visit to the United States in September 1959 further antagonized the Chinese, and a last-ditch meeting between Khrushchev and Mao in Beijing right after Khrushchev's tour of the United States failed to resolve the differences between the two sides. From then on, Sino-Soviet relations steadily deteriorated. The Soviet Union and China vied with one another for the backing of foreign Communist parties, including those long affiliated with Moscow.

The spillover from the Sino-Soviet conflict into East-Central Europe was evident almost immediately. In late 1960 and early 1961 the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, openly aligned his country with China, a decision that caused alarm in Moscow. The loss of Albania marked the second time since 1945 that the Soviet sphere of influence in East-Central Europe had been breached. Even worse from Moscow's perspective, Soviet leaders soon discovered that China was secretly attempting to induce other East-Central European countries to follow Albania's lead. China's efforts bore little fruit in the end, but Soviet leaders obviously could not be sure of that at the time. The very fact that China sought to foment discord within the Soviet bloc was enough to spark consternation in Moscow.

The emergence of the Sino-Soviet split, the attempts by China to lure away one or more of the East-Central European countries, the competition by Moscow and Beijing for influence among nonruling Communist parties, and the assistance given by China to the Communist governments in North Vietnam and North Korea complicated the bipolar nature of the Cold War, but did not fundamentally change it. International politics continued to revolve mainly around an intense conflict between two broad groups: (1) the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, and (2) the United States and its NATO and East Asian allies. The fissures within these two camps, salient as they may have been, did not eliminate or even diminish the confrontation between the Communist East and the democratic West. Individual countries within each bloc acquired greater leverage and room for maneuver, but the U.S.-Soviet divide was still the primary basis for world politics.

The Early 1960s: a Lull in the Cold War

The intensity of the Cold War escalated in the early 1960s with the arrival of a new U.S. administration headed by John F. Kennedy that was determined to resolve two volatile issues in East-West relations: the status of Cuba, which had aligned itself with the Soviet Union after Communist insurgents led by Fidel Castro seized power in 1959; and the status of Berlin. These issues gave rise to a succession of crises in the early 1960s, beginning with the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and continuing through the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. At the Bay of Pigs, a U.S.-sponsored invading force of Cuban exiles was soundly rebuffed, and Castro remained in power. But the Kennedy administration continued to pursue a number of top-secret programs to destabilize the Castro government and get rid of the Cuban leader.

Khrushchev, for his part, sought to force matters on Berlin. The showdown that ensued in the late summer and fall of 1961 nearly brought U.S. and Soviet military forces into direct conflict. In late October 1961, Soviet leaders mistakenly assumed that U.S. tanks deployed at Checkpoint Charlie (the main border point along the Berlin divide) were preparing to move into East Berlin, and they sent ten Soviet tanks to counter the incursion. Although Khrushchev and Kennedy managed to defuse the crisis by privately agreeing that the Soviet forces would be withdrawn first, the status of Berlin remained a sore point.

The confrontation over Berlin was followed a year later by the Cuban missile crisis. In the late spring of 1962, Soviet leaders approved plans for a secret deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the summer and early fall of 1962, the Soviet General Staff oversaw a secret operation to install dozens of missiles and support equipment in Cuba, to deploy some 42,000 Soviet combat forces to the island to protect the missiles, and to send nuclear warheads to Cuba for storage and possible deployment. Operation Anadyr proceeded smoothly until mid-October 1962, when U.S. intelligence analysts reported to Kennedy that an American U-2 reconnaissance flight had detected Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba. Based on this disclosure, Kennedy made a dramatic speech on October 22 revealing the presence of the missiles and demanding that they be removed.

In a dramatic standoff over the next several days, officials on both sides feared that war would ensue, possibly leading to a devastating nuclear exchange. This fear, as much as anything else, spurred both Kennedy and Khrushchev to do their utmost to find a peaceful way out. As the crisis neared its breaking point, the two sides arrived at a settlement that provided for the withdrawal of all Soviet medium-range missiles from Cuba and a pledge by the United States that it would not invade Cuba. In addition, Kennedy secretly promised that U.S. Jupiter missiles based in Turkey would be removed within "four to five months." This secret offer was not publicly disclosed until many years later, but the agreement that was made public in late October 1962 sparked enormous relief around the world.

The dangers of the Cuban missile crisis prompted efforts by both sides to ensure that future crises would not come as close to a nuclear war. Communications between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the crisis had been extremely difficult at times and had posed the risk of misunderstandings that might have proven fatal. To help alleviate this problem, the two countries signed the Hot Line Agreement in June 1963, which marked the first successful attempt by the two countries to achieve a bilateral document that would reduce the danger of an unintended nuclear war.

The joint memorandum establishing the Hot Line was symbolic of a wider improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations that began soon after the Cuban missile crisis was resolved. Although neither side intended to make any radical changes in its policies, both leaders looked for areas of agreement that might be feasible in the near term. One consequence of this new flexibility was the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) in August 1963, an agreement that Kennedy had strongly promoted in his June 1963 speech. Negotiations on the test ban had dragged on since the 1950s, but in the new climate of 1963 a number of stumbling blocks were resolved. The resulting agreement permitted the two countries to continue testing nuclear weapons underground, but it prohibited explosions in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space.

The Rise and Fall of DÉtente

This burst of activity in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis reduced the intensity of the Cold War, but the two core features of the Cold War - the fundamental ideological conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism, and the military preeminence of the two superpowers - were left intact through the early to mid-1980s. So long as the conditions underlying the bipolar confrontation remained in place, the Cold War continued both in Europe and elsewhere.

A number of important developments complicated the situation at the same time. The sharp deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s, culminating in border clashes in 1969, intensified the earlier disarray within the communist world and paved the way for a momentous rapprochement between the United States and China in the 1970s. The situation within the communist world also was complicated by the rise of what became known as "Eurocommunism" in the 1970s. In several West European countries, notably Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, communist parties either had long been or were becoming politically influential. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, several of these parties (the French party was a notable exception) sought to distance themselves from Moscow. This latest fissure within the world communist movement eroded Soviet influence in Western Europe and significantly altered the complexion of West European politics.

The Cold War was also affected - though not drastically - by the rise of East-West détente. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union significantly improved, leading to the conclusion of strategic arms control accords and bilateral trade agreements. The U.S.-Soviet détente was accompanied by a related but separate Soviet-West European détente, spurred on by the Ostpolitik of West Germany. A series of multilateral and bilateral agreements regarding Berlin and Germany in the early 1970s, and the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, symbolized the spirit of the new European détente. Even after the U.S.-Soviet détente began to fray in the mid-to late 1970s, the Soviet-West European rapprochement stayed largely on track.

The growing fissures within the Eastern bloc and the rise of East-West détente introduced important new elements to the global scene, but they did not fundamentally change the nature of the Cold War or the structure of the international system. Even when détente was at its height, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cold War politics intruded into far-flung regions of the globe. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which brought an end to the "Prague Spring," demonstrated the limits of what could be changed in East-Central Europe. Soviet leaders were not about to tolerate a major disruption of the Warsaw Pact or to accept far-reaching political changes that would undercut the stability of the Communist bloc. Similarly, the Vietnam War, which embroiled hundreds of thousands of American troops from 1965 through 1975, is incomprehensible except in a Cold War context.

In the 1970s as well, many events were driven by the Cold War. U.S.-Soviet wrangling in the Middle East in October 1973, and even more the confrontations over Angola in 1975 - 1976 and Ethiopia in 1977 - 1978, were among the consequences. Soviet gains in the Third World in the 1970s, coming on the heels of the American defeat in Vietnam, were depicted by Soviet leaders as a "shift in the correlation of forces" that would increasingly favor Moscow. Many American officials and commentators voiced pessimism about the erosion of U.S. influence and the declining capacity of the United States to contain Soviet power.

In the late 1970s, U.S.-Soviet relations took a sharp turn for the worse. This trend was the product of a number of events, including human rights violations in the Soviet Union, domestic political maneuvering in the United States, tensions over Soviet gains in the Horn of Africa, NATO's decision in December 1979 to station new nuclear missiles in Western Europe to offset the Soviet Union's recent deployments of SS-20 missiles, and above all the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Acrimonious exchanges between the two sides intensified.

The Endgame

The collapse of the U.S.-Soviet détente in the late 1970s left no doubt about the staying power of the Cold War. One of the reasons that Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency in 1980 is that he was perceived as a stronger leader at a time of heightened U.S.-Soviet antagonism. Although the renewed tensions of the early 1980s did not spark a crisis as intense as those in the early 1950s and early 1960s, the hostility between the two sides was acute, and the rhetoric became inflammatory enough to spark a brief war scare in 1983.

Even before Reagan was elected, the outbreak of a political and economic crisis in Poland in the summer of 1980, giving rise to the independent trade union known as "Solidarity," created a potential flashpoint in U.S.-Soviet relations. The relentless demand of Soviet leaders that the Polish authorities crush Solidarity and all other "anti-socialist" elements, demonstrated once again the limits of what could be changed in Eastern Europe. Under continued pressure, the Polish leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, successfully imposed martial law in Poland in December 1981, arresting thousands of Solidarity activists and banning the organization. Jaruzelski's "internal solution" precluded any test of Moscow's restraint and helped prevent any further disruption in Soviet-East European relations over the next several years.

Even if the Polish crisis had never arisen, East-West tensions over numerous other matters would have increased sharply in the early 1980s. Recriminations about the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe, and the rise of antinuclear movements in Western Europe and the United States, dominated East-West relations in the early 1980s. The deployment of NATO's missiles on schedule in late 1983 and 1984 helped defuse popular opposition in the West to the INF, but the episode highlighted the growing role of public opinion and mass movements in Cold War politics.

Much the same was true about the effect of antinuclear sentiment on the Reagan administration's programs to modernize U.S. strategic nuclear forces and its subsequent plans to pursue the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). These efforts, and the rhetoric that surrounded them, sparked dismay not only among Western antinuclear activists, but also in Moscow. For a brief while, Soviet leaders even worried that the Reagan administration might be considering a surprise nuclear strike. In the United States, however, public pressure and the rise of a nuclear freeze movement induced the Reagan administration to reconsider its earlier aversion to nuclear arms control. Although political uncertainty in Moscow in the first half of the 1980s made it difficult to resume arms control talks or to diminish bilateral tensions, the Reagan administration was far more intent on pursuing arms control by the mid-1980s than it had been earlier.

This change of heart in Washington, while important, was almost inconsequential compared to the extraordinary developments in Moscow in the latter half of the 1980s. The rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 was soon followed by broad political reforms and a gradual reassessment of the basic premises of Soviet foreign policy. Over time, the new thinking in Soviet foreign policy became more radical. The test of Gorbachev's approach came in 1989, when peaceful transformations in Poland and Hungary brought noncommunist rulers to power. Gorbachev not only tolerated, but actively encouraged this development. The orthodox communist regimes in East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania did their best to stave off the tide of reform, but a series of upheavals in October - December 1989 brought the downfall of the four orthodox regimes.

The remarkable series of events following Gorbachev's ascendance, culminating in the largely peaceful revolutions of 1989, marked the true end of the Cold War. Soviet military power was still enormous in 1989, and in that sense the Soviet Union was still a superpower alongside the United States. However, Gorbachev and his aides did away with the other condition that was needed to sustain the Cold War: the ideological divide. By reassessing, recasting, and ultimately abandoning the core precepts of Marxism-Leninism, Gorbachev and his aides enabled changes to occur in Europe that eviscerated the Cold War structure. The Soviet leader's decision to accept and even facilitate the peaceful transformation of Eastern Europe undid Stalin's pernicious legacy.

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—MARK KRAMER

The Cold War, a contest between antithetical ideologies, democratic capitalism and Soviet socialism, emerged shortly after World War II and dominated global politics for the latter half of the twentieth century. Its origins, however, go back to the late nineteenth century when the United States decried Russia's colonial claims on the Manchurian region of China. In the early twentieth century, opposition stiffened further over Russia's brutal pogroms against its Jewish citizens. The Bolshevik cooptation of the peasant revolution against the Russian Czar in 1917, and their subsequent creation of the Soviet state, heightened mutual suspicion and opened the gulf between Russia and the West. World War II brought a temporary reprieve in animosities, but tensions reemerged over questions concerning the postwar world. President Harry Truman, successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, launched the first blow in the Cold War by insisting that Russia honor its prewar commitment to self-determination under the Atlantic Charter, and permit a democratic government in Poland. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin steadfastly refused any concession, and the Polish issue became the first beachhead in Cold War politics. The Polish crisis alarmed American leaders who interpreted it as confirmation that Russia intended to carry the Bolshevik revolution westward.

The thaw caused great anxiety in the United States as it turned to the Pacific theater and planned the settlement of Germany. Each situation loomed ominously with the prospect of an entrenched Soviet presence clouding negotiations. These fears compelled Truman to end the Japanese campaign as swiftly as possible. The administration made the decision to deploy the world's first atomic bomb with both the unyielding Japanese and intransigent Russians in mind.

Once the Japanese surrendered in the summer of 1945, the Cold War began in earnest. In almost rapid succession, the threat of Communist infiltration troubled Truman. The war left many nations, particularly those in the Third World, vulnerable to Communist influence. Additionally, a few countries, most notably China, erupted in civil war between Capitalist and Communist factions at the close of World War II. The loss of China's vast natural resources, unlimited commercial potential, and immense population concerned American policymakers, who had supported the ultra-nationalist Chiang Kai Shek from the conflict's inception. To Truman's dismay, Communist leader Mao Tse Tung's made significant strides in battles as early as 1946 and gained the upper hand permanently, forcing Chiang off the mainland to the neighboring island of Taiwan, in 1949.

Simultaneous to the Chinese civil war were political fluctuations in the Middle East. The Soviet schemes on making Iran, Turkey, and Greece strategic footholds in the Mediterranean compelled Truman to take a tough stance. In 1946, America funneled well over $600 million in appropriations to democratic forces battling the Communist led and funded National Liberation Front in Greece for control in the upcoming national elections. While in Iran and Turkey, Truman met Soviet incursions through the newly formed United Nations and with the threat of American military reprisal.

George F. Kennan, charge d'affaires in Russia, provided a rationalization for the events of 1946 in his alarm driven 8000 word dispatch from Moscow on the Soviet postwar intentions. Providing the first part in what became the intellectual mooring of the Cold War, his long telegram depicted Russia as irretrievably expansionist and guided by messianic ideology that the United States to resist. Truman read the events in the Mediterranean through Kennan's lens and assumed it justified a spirited response, even though Truman had made no official declaration of a "cold war" to this point. Stalin and Churchill had already made their Cold War declarations early in 1946, ruman rendered his own salvo in March 1947.

The Truman Doctrine argued that the world's future was split between totalitarianism and democracy. To preserve the American way of life, they would have to respond to Communist-inspired uprisings anywhere in the world. Funding the democratic forces in Greece was the first manifestation of this task; next, Truman requested a larger economic stimulus program for Western Europe that might rescue them from Communist subversion. His request became the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, which the administration intended to supplement with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank created at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944. Next, Truman created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a vast military alliance premised upon multilateral response to Communist attack. The Marshall Plan and NATO gave Truman the tools for fighting the Cold War and promoting democratic capitalism in the Third World.

At home, Truman's anticommunist rhetoric energized a Republican Party resurgence. Midterm elections of 1946 ushered a new class of hawkish congressmen, the most notable were Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and

California Congressman Richard M. Nixon, who defined themselves as Cold War activists. Republicans accused the Democratic Party with compromising America's postwar ambitions, giving Russia advantage in Western Europe. The capture of Russian spy of Klaus Fuchs in Great Britain, and then American counterparts Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, along with the Alger Hiss case, validated Republican claims for many. Further proof came with the Soviet detonation of a nuclear device in 1949, and victory of Mao Tse Tung in China.

George Kennan again proved a useful guide for Truman with his Foreign Affairs article published July 1947 under the pseudonym Mister X. In the X Article, titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Kennan warned that Russia operated on a mechanistic and fanatical faith that America had to meet wherever possible. The Soviet system, he advised, suffered from internal contradictions that would destroy it from within if given exposure. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, interpreted Kennan's argument as "containment" and constructed the domestic tools for its execution. That July, Truman presented Congress with the National Security Act, which restructured the military establishment creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA. Soon thereafter, he created loyalty policies aimed at rooting out Communists in the government.

The preemptory steps were not enough to meet the myriad strategic and political crises of the Cold War; therefore the administration attempted to streamline America's response even more with the creation of National Security Council Memorandum (NSC) 68. As the top-secret blueprint for fighting the Cold War, NSC 68 called for a massive increase in military appropriations, the creation of the enormously more powerful hydrogen bomb, and levying taxes on the American public to pay for the program. Congress was reluctant to appropriate the sums of money needed for the Cold War, so Truman needed a dramatic event to shake them from their parochialism. That event came when North Korea, a Communist nation, crossed 38th parallel and invaded its democratic counterpart South Korea on June 24, 1950.

The Korean conflict proved to be a double-edged sword for Truman; it provided him the public mandate to institutionalize the Cold War, but it also laid the seeds for the political undoing of the Democratic Party. The battle itself swung unevenly, with the North Koreans at first advancing southward, and then United Nations forces led by General Douglass MacArthur recapturing ground. The turning point in the conflict occurred when a "volunteer" force from China crossed the river separating Korea and China, and sent MacArthur's forces into retreat. The Chinese attack threatened war, but Truman decided to quell to situation for the sake of American lives and global peace. His decision placed him at odds with MacArthur, which resulted in a war of words that ended with Truman unceremoniously removing the general from his command.

The Korean War, however, justified NSC 68 and a stronger stance in East Asia. Aside from the decision to support the South Koreans financially and militarily, Truman used it as a vehicle for funding the French colonial war against the Vietnamese. Additionally, he created a military alliance for East Asia, the Australia, New Zealand, and United States (ANZUS) pact, and began rearming Germany as a buffer to Soviet advances west.

Domestic politics could not escape the gravitational pull of the Cold War, and its questions particularly burdened the presidential election of 1952. Red-baiters in the Republican Party, most notably Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, created such a relentless and fantastic attack on Truman's handling that it implicated the entire Democratic Party. The Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower (referred to as Ike), stayed above the fray, and allowed his reputation as the great general of World War II's European theater to win him the White House. Eisenhower took a pragmatic approach to the Cold War, and established the tradition that would remain in place until its end.

The death of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in March 1953 cast a shroud of uncertainty over Eisenhower's first year as president. Undeterred, however, he began defusing the anxious economy and international policies that dominated Truman's administration, with his "New Look" program. The New Look consisted of nuclear deterrence, designated by what his secretary of state John Foster Dulles called brinksmanship, massive relation, nation building in the Third World, the diffusion of American culture internationally, and a heavy investment in technological innovation. Eisenhower detested wasteful spending and thought a combination of brinksmanship, technological innovation, and massive retaliation would streamline the military, yet preserve the nation's ability to respond quickly to crisis. Eisenhower gauged success in the Cold War effort broadly, thereby making the household washing machine as important in the Cold War arsenal as the B-52. In 1959, this correlation sparked the famous "kitchen debate" between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow over which political economy promoted the better home life. As Eisenhower eschewed Truman's containment program for a policy of rolling back Communist expansion, reducing the size of conventional forces meant that the administration had to rely on the CIA to keep order in the Third World through counterintelligence and espionage.

International crises in Iran, Guatemala, and off the coast of mainland China tested Eisenhower's New Look early in his administration. Nationalist leaders in Iran and Guatemala assumed power in an attempt to redress grave social and economic inequalities in their countries, forcing the United States to respond. Although the Cold War implications were not necessarily apparent, America gained access to one of the world's largest oil depository by returning the Shah of Iran to power, and defeating the Arbenz regime guaranteed American businesses open access to the resources of Guatemala. The marriage of

Cold War politics and market concerns became a signature attribute of the New Look.

The Tachen Straits crisis presented a different problem. In 1954, mainland China began shelling two of the islands that neighbored Chiang Kai-Shek's Taiwan, Matsu and Quemoy with the threat that it was the start of a full-scale invasion to repatriate it citizens. To the surprise of the entire world, Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan unless China stopped the bombardment. Frightened by the possibility of nuclear calamity, neighboring countries India and Pakistan pressured China to desist, and the Tachen Straits crisis came to an uneasy end. The conflict, however, was a coarse example of brinksmanship and a precursor to America's deepening involvement in East Asia under the auspices of the "domino theory" of foreign policy. The image of Asian democracies, falling like dominos in rapid succession to nationalist or Communist infiltration, justified a greater presence in conflict between France and Vietnam.

Vietnam became a crisis for the United States at the Geneva Conference of 1954, when it was learned the French were on the verge of collapse in the region, signified by their surrender at Dienbienphu. To preserve democracy in Southeast Asia, the United States urged the division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel on the promise the country would have open elections within two years. In an attempt to thwart a potential Communist takeover in the upcoming elections, America installed Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's prime minister. Additionally, Eisenhower created a regional defense apparatus, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), modeled after NATO, to protect the new nation as it bloomed into an independent state. Diem was an archconservative with autocratic tendencies who soon declared South Vietnam an independent state and cancelled the scheduled national elections. The United States supplemented Diem with vast amounts of capital, goods, machinery, weaponry, and advisors to train his soldiers. This effort marked the nation-building phase of the Cold War. The decision to build a nation as a response to what was essentially a civil war, committed the United States to the success and failure of South Vietnam, and would have dire consequences for America's place in the Cold War.

The Middle East became bothersome for Eisenhower in the later years of his administration, forcing him to make his own Cold War declaration in 1957. Egyptian president, Gamal Nassar created the Baghdad Pact, a military alliance between Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey in 1955 with the belief they could exploit the Cold War division for the benefit of Arab and Muslim nations. As part of his "middle road" strategy, Nassar opened relations with communist nations, Czechoslovakia and China, which soured America's attitude toward Egypt and compelled Dulles to cancel funds for the Aswan hydroelectric dam. Nassar responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal and assuming control of the oil traveling into the Mediterranean from the East. The situation escalated when Israel attacked Egypt over disputed territory, and Great Britain and France took that as an opening to seize the Suez Canal. The conflict placed the world oil trade and Middle Eastern stability in jeopardy, and forced Eisenhower to pressure the European nations to relinquish control of the canal. Although resolved, the specter of Soviet influence in the oil-bearing region forced Eisenhower to take a stronger stand in the Middle East. The concern culminated in the "Eisenhower Doctrine," which held that the United States defend any Middle Eastern nation against communism. Eisenhower invoked the doctrine only twice, in the Jordanian uprising that spring and Lebanon in 1958, but it set precedence for future presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter.

By the end of his term as president, Eisenhower faced ironic opposition. His administration privileged modernization, and ended under the suspicion of technological backwardness. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and began America's reach for the heavens. The Russian launch of Sputnik, the unmanned satellite in late 1957, and the downing of the American U2 surveillance plane in 1960, demanded a greater investment in science and technology. John F. Kennedy drew upon this anxiety when he argued that America lagged behind the Soviet Union in missile production. The Missile Gap critique helped Kennedy capture the White House, but it also placed unrealistic burdens on the way he and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson conducted the Cold War.

In the 1960s, the Vietnam conflict pervaded America's Cold War politics. The decade began with President Kennedy suffering profound Cold War failures, the failed attempted overthrow of Cuba's Communist leader Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, the CIA-sponsored assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Needing to silence critics, Kennedy decided to take a more rigid stand against the Communists in South Vietnam. With Diem's popularity at a nadir due to his oppressive policies, Kennedy signed off on a plan to depose him. During the junta, however, the operatives assassinated Diem, foreshadowing Kennedy's own murder three weeks later.

When Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency, he inherited the burden of not losing the Cold War in Vietnam. Weighted by fluctuations in the civil rights movement and burgeoning antiwar sentiment, Johnson accelerated both nation building in South Vietnam and military resistance to Communists. The entire conflict, and to some degree American prestige, came crashing to the ground in 1968 when Communist forces launched a massive attack against American and South Vietnamese forces in the major cities. Although the siege only had temporary success, it had a leveling effect on domestic sentiment. Cold War arguments carried less significance and the trouble became finding a way out. That responsibility fell to Richard Nixon who inherited the Vietnam and the Cold War in 1969.

In the midst of the conflict, Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, began to redefine the Cold War into a mutual understanding of the boundaries between the U.S. and Russia. He coupled this with the Nixon Doctrine, which held that America would relinquish some of its military commitments. Breaking precedent, Nixon went to China and began arms reduction talks, or détente, with the Russians. To counter his critics, Nixon coupled détente with a brinkmanship-like tactic he called the "mad man theory." According to this strategy, American allies would warn Third World nationalists that Nixon was insane and willing to use nuclear weapons to end disputes. The crazy man tactic had little to no effect on its intended audience, North Vietnam, or any of the other Cold War dissidents. Nixon's Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), begun in 1969 and concluded May 1972, between the United States and Brezhnev regime exemplified the spirit his doctrine. While SALT I failed to reduce the creation and stockpiling of new, more destructive weapons, it was a progressive gesture toward an international dialogue on nuclear weapons.

Buoyed by the apparent success of détente and the belief that China could help end the war in Vietnam, Nixon went into the presidential election of 1972 confident in his Cold War program. Indeed, twenty-five years had shifted the Cold War from security concerns, to a contest of development, to Nixon's program of limited contact, and ended the 1960s with the possibility of an uneasy coexistence between Soviet socialism and democratic capitalism. Many questions were still unanswered regarding the conflict in Vietnam, rising nationalism in the Middle East, the global economy, domestic dissent, and nuclear control. These issues would dominate the last seventeen years of the Cold War.

Further Reading

Books

Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1998.

La Feber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War. McGraw-Hill Humanities, 2001.

McDougall, Walter. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

McMahon, Rober. The Cold War on the Periphery. New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Cocacolonization and the Cold War. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Periodicals

Frank Costigliola, "Unceasing Penetration": Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War." Journal of American History 83 (March, 1997): 1309–1939.

The cold war was a pivotal era in the twentieth century. The term cold war itself, popularized in a 1946 speech by Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain, describes the ideological struggle between democracy and Communism that began shortly after the end of World War II and lasted until 1991. For the foreign policy of the United States, the cold war defined the last half of the twentieth century. It was a war of ideas, of threats, and of actual fighting in the countries of Korea and Vietnam, pitting western nations against the Soviet Union and China and their Communist allies. The 1940s and 1950s saw the cold war bloom into a period of unparalleled suspicion, hostility, and persecution. Anti-Communist hysteria ran through each branch of government as the pursuit of U.S. Communists and their sympathizers consumed the energies of the executive branch, lawmakers, and the courts. Rarely in the nation's history have constitutional rights been so widely and systematically sacrificed.

The cold war began in the aftermath of World War II. Although only recently allied against Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union saw their relationship quickly disintegrate. The division of Europe, with the Soviet bloc countries sealed off behind what Churchill called the iron curtain, had been the first blow. A fear that Communism would undermine the security of the United States took hold of the nation's leaders and citizens alike. Measures had to be taken to safeguard the country from infiltration, it was popularly believed, and the government began a vigorous campaign against Communist activity. On March 21, 1947, President Harry S. Truman took a significant early step toward protecting the country from Communism by issuing an order establishing so-called loyalty boards within each department of the executive branch (Exec. Order No. 9835, 3 C.F.R. 627). These boards were designed to hear cases brought against employees "disloyal to the Government" and, on the evidence presented, remove disloyal employees from federal service.

The loyalty boards deviated from the traditional standard of presumed innocence. Instead, the boards made their determinations based on whether "reasonable grounds exist for belief" that an accused employee was disloyal. Thus, instead of having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused person was guilty of disloyalty, it was sufficient to bring enough evidence against the accused person to damn that person in the eyes of the board. This abridgment of due process, which ended jobs and ruined reputations, grew harsher under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. By amending the order in 1951, Eisenhower made it even harder for an accused employee to prove his or her innocence (Exec. Order No. 10,241, 16 Fed. Reg. 3690). Now, the burden of proof was reduced to a showing of "reasonable doubt as to the loyalty of [the] person," a standard amenable to trumped-up charges.

The intensity of domestic fears grew in 1949, following the announcement by President Truman that the Soviets had developed the atomic bomb. Only a year later, the Korean War broke out. These events ushered in a period of bomb shelters; air raid drills in schools; civilian anti-Communist organizations; and suspicion of anyone whose ideas, behavior, personal life, or appearance suggested belief in or sympathy for Communism. Terms like Pinko, Red, and Communist sympathizer found their way into the national vocabulary.

During the late 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created to investigate subversives, provoked widespread concern that government officials had given secrets to the Soviets. Over the next decade, in a climate of general suspicion that it helped foster, it also investigated union leaders, academics, and, most dramatically, Hollywood. The right to freedom of association meant little to congressional investigators. HUAC subpoenaed private citizens and confronted them with a no-win choice: cooperate in naming Communists, or face contempt charges. Crucial to the success of these hearings was the cooperation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which provided the committee with both public support and information.

At the same time, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy conducted his own hearings through the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy's charges about alleged Communist operatives in the State Department and the Army captivated the nation. Like HUAC's, his witch-hunt shattered reputations and lives, but it backfired when he attacked the U.S. Army. Censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954, he ultimately gave history a word that symbolizes the zealous disregard for fairness in accusation: McCarthyism.

Starting in 1948, the Justice Department prosecuted members of the American Communist party under the Smith Act of 1940 (18 U.S.C.A. § 2385), a broadly written law that prohibited advocating the violent overthrow of the government. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld twelve convictions in Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 71 S. Ct. 857, 95 L. Ed. 1137 (1951), and this ruling cleared the way for 141 subsequent indictments. Over the next several years, twenty-nine convicted party members were sent to jail. In time, Congress provided prosecutors with new ammunition through the McCarran Act of 1950 (50 U.S.C.A. § 781 et seq.) and the Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C.A. § 841).

Anti-Communist hysteria decreased somewhat following the embarrassment of McCarthy. However, the cold war continued. HUAC operated throughout the 1960s, as did the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; both continued to locate the nation's troubles in the work of alleged subversives. And from the late 1950s to the 1960s, the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, secretly fought Communists and other targets through its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

Although the domestic waging of the cold war had diminished by the early 1970s, the international struggle continued. Over the next two decades the cold war drew the United States into military involvement in Asia, Africa, and Central America. After Vietnam, the United States fought communism through support of anti-communist factions in Angola, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Afghanistan. During the 1980s, the United States shifted to an economic strategy, hoping to bankrupt the Soviet Union through an arms race of unprecedented scale. The cold war effectively ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

See: COINTELPRO; Hiss, Alger; Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel.

(DOD) A state of international tension wherein political, economic, technological, sociological, psychological, paramilitary, and military measures short of overt armed conflict involving regular military forces are employed to achieve national objectives.

A constant nonviolent state of hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States. The cold war began shortly after World War II, with the rapid extension of Soviet influence over eastern Europe and North Korea. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the cold war ended. (See Berlin airlift, Berlin wall, and Iron Curtain.)

For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation).

United States President Ronald Reagan (left) and President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev meet in 1985.

Part of a series on the Cold War
Origins of the Cold War
World War II War Conferences Eastern Bloc Iron Curtain
Cold War (1947–1953)
Cold War (1953–1962)
Cold War (1962–1979)
Cold War (1979–1985)
Cold War (1985–1991)

The Cold War (1945–1991) was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II (1939–1945), primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States. Although the primary participants' military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, a nuclear arms race, espionage, proxy wars, propaganda, and technological competition, e.g. the Space Race.

Despite being allies against the Axis powers, the USSR, the US, the United Kingdom and France disagreed during and after World War II, especially about the configuration of the post-war world. At war's end, they occupied most of Europe, with the US and USSR the most powerful military forces.

The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some as Soviet Socialist Republics and maintaining others as satellite states, some of which were later consolidated as the Warsaw Pact (1955–1991). The US and some western European countries established containment of communism as a defensive policy, establishing alliances (e.g. NATO, 1949) to that end.

Several such countries also coordinated the rebuilding of western Europe, especially western Germany, which the USSR opposed. Elsewhere, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR fostered communist revolutions, opposed by several western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, yet non-aligned country blocs also emerged.

The Cold War featured periods of relative calm and of international high tension – the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would likely guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures against the USSR, which had already suffered severe economic stagnation. Thereafter, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power, and Russia possessing most of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

Contents 1 Origins of the term 2 Background 3 World War II and post-war (1939–47) 3.1 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-41) 3.2 Allies against the Axis (1941-45) 3.3 Wartime conferences regarding post-war Europe 3.4 Beginnings of the Eastern Bloc 3.5 Potsdam Conference and defeat of Japan 3.6 Tensions build 4 Containment through the Korean War (1947–53) 4.1 Soviet satellite states 4.2 Containment and the Truman Doctrine 4.3 Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak coup d'état 4.4 Berlin Blockade and airlift 4.5 NATO beginnings and Radio Free Europe 4.6 Chinese Revolution and SEATO 4.7 Korean War 5 Crisis and escalation (1953–62) 5.1 Khrushchev, Eisenhower and De-Stalinization 5.2 Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution 5.3 Berlin ultimatum and European integration 5.4 Worldwide competition 5.5 Sino-Soviet split, space race, ICBMs 5.6 Berlin Crisis of 1961 5.7 Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev ouster 6 Confrontation through détente (1962–79) 6.1 Dominican Republic and French NATO withdrawal 6.2 Czechoslovakia invasion 6.3 Brezhnev Doctrine 6.4 Third World escalations 6.5 Sino-American relations 6.6 Nixon, Brezhnev, and détente 6.7 Late 1970s deterioration of relations 7 Second Cold War (1979–85) 7.1 Afghanistan war 7.2 Reagan and Thatcher 7.3 Polish Solidarity movement 7.4 Soviet and US military and economic issues 8 End of the Cold War (1985–91) 8.1 Gorbachev reforms 8.2 Thaw in relations 8.3 Faltering Soviet system 8.4 Soviet dissolution 9 Legacy 10 Historiography 11 See also 12 Footnotes 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External links

Origins of the term

The first use of the term Cold War ^[1] describing the post–World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its Western European Allies is attributed to Bernard Baruch, a US financier and presidential advisor.^[2] In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech (by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope)^[3] saying, “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.”^[4] Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency, with the book Cold War (1947).^[5]

Previously, during the war, George Orwell used the term Cold War in the essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a “peace that is no peace”, which he called a permanent “cold war”,^[6] Orwell directly referred to that war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.^[7] Moreover, in The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that “. . . [a]fter the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a ‘cold war’ on Britain and the British Empire.”^[8]

Background

Main article: Origins of the Cold War

Further information: Red Scare

American troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

There is disagreement among historians regarding the starting point of the Cold War. While most historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began towards the end of World War I, although tensions between the Russian Empire, other European countries and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th century.^[9]

As a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (followed by its withdrawal from World War I), Soviet Russia found itself isolated in international diplomacy.^[10] Leader Vladimir Lenin stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement", and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with the establishment of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals abroad.^[11]

Subsequent leader Joseph Stalin, who viewed the Soviet Union as a "socialist island", stated that the Soviet Union must see that "the present capitalist encirclement is replaced by a socialist encirclement."^[12] As early as 1925, Stalin stated that he viewed international politics as a bipolar world in which the Soviet Union would attract countries gravitating to socialism and capitalist countries would attract states gravitating toward capitalism, while the world was in a period of "temporary stabilization of capitalism" preceding its eventual collapse.^[13]

Several events fueled suspicion and distrust between the western powers and the Soviet Union: the Bolsheviks' challenge to capitalism;^[14] the 1926 Soviet funding of a British general workers strike causing Britain to break relations with the Soviet Union;^[15] Stalin's 1927 declaration that peaceful coexistence with "the capitalist countries . . . is receding into the past";^[16] conspiratorial allegations in the Shakhty show trial of a planned French and British-led coup d'etat;^[17] the Great Purge involving a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in which over half a million Soviets were executed;^[18] the Moscow show trials including allegations of British, French, Japanese and German espionage;^[19] the controversial death of 6-8 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine; western support of the White Army in the Russian Civil War; the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933;^[20] and the Soviet entry into the Treaty of Rapallo.^[21] This outcome rendered Soviet–American relations a matter of major long-term concern for leaders in both countries.^[9]

World War II and post-war (1939–47)

Main article: Origins of the Cold War

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-41)

Further information: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Nazi-Soviet economic relations

Soviet relations with the West further deteriorated when, one week prior to the start of the World War II, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.^[22] Beginning one week later, in September 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe through invasions of the countries ceded to each under the Pact.^[23][24]

For the next year and a half, they engaged in an extensive economic relationship, trading vital war materials^[25][26] until Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union through the territories that the two countries had previously divided.^[27]

Allies against the Axis (1941-45)

Further information: Eastern Front (World War II), Western Front (World War II), and Lend-Lease

During their joint war effort, which began thereafter in 1941, the Soviets suspected that the British and the Americans had conspired to allow the Soviets to bear the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany. According to this view, the Western Allies had deliberately delayed opening a second anti-German front in order to step in at the last moment and shape the peace settlement.^[28] Thus, Soviet perceptions of the West left a strong undercurrent of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.^[29]

Wartime conferences regarding post-war Europe

The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

Further information: Tehran Conference and Yalta Conference

The Allies disagreed about how the European map should look, and how borders would be drawn, following the war.^[30] Each side held dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security.^[30] The western Allies desired a security system in which democratic governments were established as widely as possible, permitting countries to peacefully resolve differences through international organizations.^[31]

Following Russian historical experiences with frequent invasions^[32] and the immense death toll (estimated at 27 million) and destruction the Soviet Union sustained during World War II,^[33] the Soviet Union sought to increase security by controlling the internal affairs of countries that bordered it.^[30][34] In April 1945, both Churchill and new American President Harry S. Truman opposed, among other things, the Soviets' decision to prop up the Lublin government, the Soviet-controlled rival to the Polish government-in-exile, whose relations with the Soviets were severed.^[35]

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies failed to reach a firm consensus on the framework for post-war settlement in Europe.^[36] Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe,^[36] while strong US and Western allied forces remained in Western Europe.

The Soviet Union, United States, Britain and France established zones of occupation and a loose framework for four-power control of occupied Germany.^[37] The Allies set up the United Nations for the maintenance of world peace, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed by individual members' ability to use veto power.^[38] Accordingly, the UN was essentially converted into an inactive forum for exchanging polemical rhetoric, and the Soviets regarded it almost exclusively as a propaganda tribune.^[39]

Beginnings of the Eastern Bloc

Further information: Eastern Bloc

During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union laid the foundation for the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were initially (and effectively) ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These included eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs),^[40] Latvia (which became the Latvian SSR)^[41],^[41][42] Estonia (which became the Estonian SSR),^[41][42] Lithuania (which became the Lithuanian SSR),^[41][42] part of eastern Finland (which became the Karelo-Finnish SSR)^[24] and eastern Romania (which became the Moldavian SSR).^[43][44]

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned that, given the enormous size of Soviet forces deployed in Europe at the end of the war, and the perception that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was unreliable, there existed a Soviet threat to Western Europe.^[45] In April-May 1945, the British War Cabinet's Joint Planning Staff Committee developed Operation Unthinkable, a plan "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire".^[46] The plan, however, was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.^[45]

Potsdam Conference and defeat of Japan

Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference.

Further information: Potsdam Conference and Surrender of Japan

At the Potsdam Conference, which started in late July after Germany's surrender, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and eastern Europe.^[47] Moreover, the participants' mounting antipathy and bellicose language served to confirm their suspicions about each others' hostile intentions and entrench their positions.^[48] At this conference Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed a powerful new weapon.^[49]

Stalin was aware that the Americans were working on the atomic bomb and, given that the Soviets' own rival program was in place, he reacted to the news calmly. The Soviet leader said he was pleased by the news and expressed the hope that the weapon would be used against Japan.^[49] One week after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan.^[50]

Tensions build

Further information: Long Telegram, Iron Curtain, and Restatement of Policy on Germany

In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, and became the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War.^[51] That September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war".^[52]

On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely.^[53] As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle between us and Russia over minds [...]"^[54]

A few weeks after the release of this "Long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri.^[55] The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic".^[56][57]

Containment through the Korean War (1947–53)

Main article: Cold War (1947–1953)

Soviet satellite states

Formation of the Eastern Bloc

Further information: Eastern Bloc and Cominform

After annexing several occupied countries as Soviet Socialist Republics at the end of World War II, other occupied states were added to the Eastern Bloc by converting them into puppet Soviet Satellite states,^[57] such as East Germany,^[58] the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary,^[59] the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,^[60] the People's Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania.^[61]

The Soviet-style regimes that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economies, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition.^[62] In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the war, and went on to occupy the large swath of Korean territory located north of the 38th parallel.^[63]

In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform, the purpose of which was to enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc.^[64] Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito–Stalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained Communist but adopted a non-aligned position.^[65]

As part of the Soviet domination of the Eastern Bloc, the NKVD, led by Lavrentiy Beria, supervised the establishment of Soviet-style secret police systems in the Bloc that were supposed to crush anti-communist resistance.^[66] When the slightest stirrings of independence emerged in the Bloc, Stalin's strategy matched that of dealing with domestic pre-war rivals: they were removed from power, put on trial, imprisoned, and in several instances, executed.^[67]

Containment and the Truman Doctrine

European military alliances

Main articles: Containment and Truman Doctrine

By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman's advisers urged him to take immediate steps to counter the Soviet Union's influence, citing Stalin's efforts (amid post-war confusion and collapse) to undermine the US by encouraging rivalries among capitalists that could precipitate another war.^[68] In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents.

The American government's response to this announcement was the adoption of containment,^[69] the goal of which was to stop the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech that called for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes.^[69] Even though the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia,^[20] US policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence.^[70]

Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War, but ultimately held steady.^[71][72] Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance,^[73] while European and American Communists, paid by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations,^[74] adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of consensus politics came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the CND and the nuclear freeze movement.^[75]

Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak coup d'état

Map of Cold-War era Europe and the Near East showing countries that received Marshall Plan aid. The red columns show the relative amount of total aid per nation.

European economic alliances

Main articles: Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948

In early 1947, Britain, France and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for a plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets.^[76] In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union.^[76]

The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions or elections.^[77] The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery.^[78] One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, creating a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War.^[79]

Stalin believed that economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that the US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe.^[64] Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid.^[64] The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Comecon).^[20] Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union.^[80]

In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Soviet operatives executed a coup d'état of 1948 in Czechoslovakia, the only Eastern Bloc state that the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures.^[81][82] The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.^[83]

The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, and Greece and Turkey. With US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war,^[79] The Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist-Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.^[84] Increases occurred in intelligence and espionage activities, Eastern Bloc defections and diplomatic expulsions.^[85]

Berlin Blockade and airlift

C-47s unloading at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin during the Berlin Blockade.

Main article: Berlin Blockade

The United States and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into "Bizonia" (later "trizonia" with the addition of France's zone).^[86] As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives of a number of Western European governments and the United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system.^[87] In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan, they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark currency to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased.^[88]

Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade, one of the first major crises of the Cold War, preventing food, materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin.^[89] The United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other provisions.^[90]

The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against the policy change, communists attempted to disrupt the elections of 1948 preceding large losses therein,^[91] 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue,^[92] and the US accidentally created "Operation Vittles", which supplied candy to German children.^[93] In May 1949, Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade.^[66][94]

NATO beginnings and Radio Free Europe

Main articles: NATO, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Eastern Bloc information dissemination

President Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of 1949 with guests in the Oval Office.

Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).^[66] That August, Stalin ordered the detonation of the first Soviet atomic device.^[20] Following Soviet refusals to participate in a German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948,^[87][95] the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in May 1949.^[47] The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic that October.^[47]

Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party, with radio and television organizations being state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party.^[96] Soviet propaganda used Marxist philosophy to attack capitalism, claiming labor exploitation and war-mongering imperialism were inherent in the system.^[97]

Along with the broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Company and the Voice of America to Eastern Europe,^[98] a major propaganda effort begun in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the Communist system in the Eastern Bloc.^[99] Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press.^[99] Radio Free Europe was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan.^[100]

American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles, acknowledged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas.^[100] The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the Communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world.^[101]

In the early 1950s, the US worked for the rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, secured its full membership of NATO.^[47] In May 1953, Beria, by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of a neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO.^[102]

Chinese Revolution and SEATO

Further information: Chinese Revolution and Southeast Asia Treaty Organization

In 1949, Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China, and the Soviet Union promptly created an alliance with the newly-formed People's Republic of China.^[103] Confronted with the Chinese Revolution and the end of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand the containment policy.^[20] In NSC-68, a secret 1950 document,^[104] the National Security Council proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defense.^[20]

US officials moved thereafter to expand containment into Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by Communist parties financed by the USSR, fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in South-East Asia and elsewhere.^[105] In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the "Pactomania"), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS and SEATO), thereby guaranteeing the United States a number of long-term military bases.^[47]

Korean War

Main article: Korean War

One of the more significant impacts of containment was the outbreak of the Korean War. In June 1950, Kim Il-Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea.^[106] To Stalin's surprise,^[20] the UN Security Council backed the defense of South Korea, though the Soviets were then boycotting meetings to protest that Taiwan and not Communist China held a permanent seat on the Council.^[107] A UN force of personnel from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Canada, Australia, France, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand and other countries joined to stop the invasion.^[108]

Among other effects, the Korean War galvanised NATO to develop a military structure.^[109] Public opinion in countries involved, such as Great Britain, was divided for and against the war. British Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross repudiated the sentiment of those opposed when he said:^[110]

I know there are some who think that the horror and devastation of a world war now would be so frightful, whoever won, and the damage to civilization so lasting, that it would be better to submit to Communist domination. I understand that view–but I reject it.

Even though the Chinese and North Koreans were exhausted by the war and were prepared to end it by late 1952, Stalin insisted that they continue fighting, and a cease-fire was approved only in July 1953, after Stalin's death.^[47] In North Korea, Kim Il Sung created a highly centralized and brutal dictatorship, according himself unlimited power and generating a formidable cult of personality.^[111][112]

Crisis and escalation (1953–62)

Main article: Cold War (1953–1962)

Khrushchev, Eisenhower and De-Stalinization

In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.^[79] Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president that January. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defense budget had quadrupled, and Eisenhower moved to reduce military spending by a third while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively.^[20]

In March, following the death of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev became the Soviet leader following the deposition and execution of Lavrentiy Beria and the pushing aside of rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shocked delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by cataloguing and denouncing Stalin's crimes.^[113] As part of a campaign of de-Stalinization, he declared that the only way to reform and move away from Stalin's policies would be to acknowledge errors made in the past.^[79]

On November 18, 1956, while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Khrushchev used his famous "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you" expression, shocking everyone present.^[114] However, he had not been talking about nuclear war, he later claimed, but rather about the historically determined victory of communism over capitalism.^[115] He then declared in 1961 that even if the USSR might indeed be behind the West, within a decade its housing shortage would disappear, consumer goods would be abundant, its population would be "materially provided for", and within two decades, the Soviet Union "would rise to such a great height that, by comparison, the main capitalist countries will remain far below and well behind".^[116]

Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated a "New Look" for the containment strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime.^[79] Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation", threatening a severe US response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, allowed Eisenhower to face down Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis.^[20]

Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution

Main articles: Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Map of the Warsaw Pact countries

While Stalin's death in 1953 slightly relaxed tensions, the situation in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce.^[117] The Soviets, who had already created a network of mutual assistance treaties in the Eastern Bloc by 1949,^[118] established a formal alliance therein, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.^[47]

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi.^[119] In response to a popular uprising,^[120] the new regime formally disbanded the secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. The Soviet Red Army invaded.^[121] Thousands of Hungarians were arrested, imprisoned and deported to the Soviet Union,^[122] and approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary in the chaos.^[123] Hungarian leader Imre Nagy and others were executed following secret trials.^[124]

From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city. However, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's belief in the inevitability of war, and declared his new goal was to be "peaceful coexistence".^[125] This formulation modified the Stalin-era Soviet stance, where international class struggle meant the two opposing camps were on an inevitable collision course where Communism would triumph through global war; now, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own,^[126] as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities,^[127] which remained for decades until Gorbachev's later "new thinking" envisioning peaceful coexistence as an end in itself rather than a form of class struggle.^[128]

US pronouncements concentrated on American strength abroad and the success of liberal capitalism.^[129] However, by the late 1960s, the "battle for men's minds" between two systems of social organization that Kennedy spoke of in 1961 was largely over, with tensions henceforth based primarily on clashing geopolitical objectives rather than ideology.^[130]

Berlin ultimatum and European integration

During November 1958, Khrushchev made an unsuccessful attempt to turn all of Berlin into an independent, demilitarized "free city", giving the United States, Great Britain, and France a six-month ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the sectors they still occupied in West Berlin, or he would transfer control of Western access rights to the East Germans. Khrushchev earlier explained to Mao Tse-tung that "Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin."^[131] NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid-December and Khrushchev withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question.^[132]

More broadly, one hallmark of the 1950s was the beginning of European integration—a fundamental by-product of the Cold War that Truman and Eisenhower promoted politically, economically, and militarily, but which later administrations viewed ambivalently, fearful that an independent Europe would forge a separate détente with the Soviet Union, which would use this to exacerbate Western disunity.^[133]

Worldwide competition

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Iran, the Philippines, and Indochina were often allied with communist groups—or at least were perceived in the West to be allied with communists.^[79] In this context, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s;^[134] additionally, the Soviets saw continuing losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.^[135]

The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support allied ones.^[79] The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran's first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 (see 1953 Iranian coup d'état) and Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (see 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état).^[104] Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam's pro-Western regime.^[20]

Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East-West competition. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War.^[136] The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.^[79] Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.^[20]

Sino-Soviet split, space race, ICBMs

Charting the Space Race in context of Sputnik and other nuclear threats.

Main articles: Sino-Soviet split and Space Race

The period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, beginning the Sino-Soviet split. Mao had defended Stalin when Khrushchev attacked him after his death in 1956, and treated the new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost his revolutionary edge.^[137]

After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal.^[137] The Chinese and the Soviets waged an intra-Communist propaganda war.^[138] Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement,^[139] and the two clashed militarily in 1969.^[140]

On the nuclear weapons front, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other.^[47] In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)^[141] and in October, launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik.^[142] The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. This culminated in the Apollo Moon landings, which astronaut Frank Borman later described as "just a battle in the Cold War"^[143] with superior spaceflight rockets indicating superior ICBMs.

Berlin Crisis of 1961

Soviet tanks face US tanks at Checkpoint Charlie, on October 27, during the Berlin Crisis of 1961

Main articles: Berlin Crisis of 1961, Berlin Wall, and Eastern Bloc emigration and defection

The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post-World War II Germany. By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to restricting emigration movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc.^[144] However, hundreds of thousands of East Germans annually emigrated to West Germany through a "loophole" in the system that existed between East and West Berlin, where the four occupying World War II powers governed movement.^[145]

The emigration resulted in a massive "brain drain" from East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals, such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West Germany by 1961.^[146] That June, the Soviet Union issued a new ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of allied forces from West Berlin.^[147] The request was rebuffed, and in August, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the Berlin Wall, effectively closing the loophole.^[148]

Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev ouster

Main article: Cuban Missile Crisis

The Soviet Union formed an alliance with Fidel Castro-led Cuba after the Cuban Revolution in 1959.^[149] In 1962, President John F. Kennedy responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before.^[150] It further demonstrated the concept of mutually assured destruction, that neither nuclear power was prepared to use nuclear weapons fearing total destruction via nuclear retaliation.^[151] The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts in the nuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations,^[117] although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961.^[152]

In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement.^[153] Accused of rudeness and incompetence, he was also credited with ruining Soviet agriculture and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.^[153] Khrushchev had become an international embarrassment when he authorised construction of the Berlin Wall, a public humiliation for Marxism-Leninism.^[153]

Confrontation through détente (1962–79)

Main article: Cold War (1962–1979)

The United States reached the moon in 1969—a symbolic milestone in the space race.

United States Navy F-4 Phantom II intercepts a Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 D aircraft in the early 1970s

In the course of the 1960s and '70s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs.^[79] From the beginning of the post-war period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and '60s, with per capita GDPs approaching those of the United States, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated.^[79][154]

As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower.^[105] Moscow, meanwhile, was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems.^[79] During this period, Soviet leaders such as Alexey Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev embraced the notion of détente.^[79]

Dominican Republic and French NATO withdrawal

Main article: United States invasion of the Dominican Republic

President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in Operation Power Pack, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America.^[20] NATO countries remained primarily dependent on the US military for its defense against any potential Soviet invasion, a status most vociferously contested by France's Charles de Gaulle, who in 1966 withdrew from NATO's military structures and expelled NATO troops from French soil.^[155]

Czechoslovakia invasion

Main articles: Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

In 1968, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia called the Prague Spring took place that included "Action Program" of liberalizations, which described increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of movement, along with an economic emphasis on consumer goods, the possibility of a multiparty government, limiting the power of the secret police^[156][157] and potentially withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact.^[158]

The Soviet Red Army, together with most of their Warsaw Pact allies, invaded Czechoslovakia.^[159] The invasion was followed by a wave of emigration, including an estimated 70,000 Czechs initially fleeing, with the total eventually reaching 300,000.^[160] The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania and China, and from Western European communist parties.^[161]

Brezhnev Doctrine

Brezhnev and Nixon during Brezhnev's June 1973 visit to Washington; this was a high-water mark in détente between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Main article: Brezhnev Doctrine

In September 1968, during a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party one month after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev outlined the Brezhnev Doctrine, in which he claimed the right to violate the sovereignty of any country attempting to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism. During the speech, Brezhnev stated:^[158]

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

The doctrine found its origins in the failures of Marxism-Leninism in states like Poland, Hungary and East Germany, which were facing a declining standard of living contrasting with the prosperity of West Germany and the rest of Western Europe.^[162]

Third World escalations

Main articles: Vietnam War, Operation Condor, and Yom Kippur War

The US continued to spend heavily on supporting friendly Third World regimes in Asia. Conflicts in peripheral regions and client states—most prominently in Vietnam—continued.^[163] Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and their North Vietnamese allies in the Vietnam War, but his costly policy weakened the US economy and, by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations.^[20]

Additionally, Operation Condor, employed by South American dictators to suppress leftist dissent, was backed by the US, which (sometimes accurately) perceived Soviet or Cuban support behind these opposition movements.^[164] Brezhnev, meanwhile, attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.^[20]

Moreover, the Middle East continued to be a source of contention. Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, was a troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist in both the 1967 Six-Day War (with advisers and technicians) and the War of Attrition (with pilots and aircraft) against US ally Israel;^[165] Syria and Iraq later received increased assistance as well as (indirectly) the PLO.^[166]

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, rumors of imminent Soviet intervention on the Egyptians' behalf brought about a massive US mobilization that threatened to wreck détente;^[167] this escalation, the USSR's first in a regional conflict central to US interests, inaugurated a new and more turbulent stage of Third World military activism in which the Soviets made use of their new strategic parity.^[168]

Sino-American relations

Main article: 1972 Nixon visit to China

As a result of the Sino-Soviet split, tensions along the Chinese-Soviet border reached their peak in 1969, and US President Richard Nixon decided to use the conflict to shift the balance of power towards the West in the Cold War.^[169] The Chinese had sought improved relations with the US in order to gain advantage over the Soviets as well.

In February 1972, Nixon announced a stunning rapprochement with Mao's China^[170] by traveling to Beijing and meeting with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. At this time, the USSR achieved rough nuclear parity with the US while the Vietnam War weakened US influence in the Third World and cooled relations with Western Europe).^[171] Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease.^[117]

Nixon, Brezhnev, and détente

Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter sign SALT II treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna

Main articles: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Helsinki Accords, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Following his China visit, Nixon met with Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev in Moscow.^[172] These Strategic Arms Limitation Talks resulted in two landmark arms control treaties: SALT I, the first comprehensive limitation pact signed by the two superpowers,^[173] and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned the development of systems designed to intercept incoming missiles. These aimed to limit the development of costly anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear missiles.^[79]

Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence" and established the groundbreaking new policy of détente (or cooperation) between the two superpowers. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties,^[20] including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, détente would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually.^[172]

Meanwhile, these developments coincided with the "Ostpolitik" of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.^[161] Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.^[174]

Late 1970s deterioration of relations

In the 1970s, the KGB, led by Yuri Andropov, continued to persecute distinguished Soviet personalities such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, who were criticising the Soviet leadership in harsh terms.^[175] Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia and Angola.^[176]

Although President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979,^[177] his efforts were undermined by the other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US regimes, and his retaliation against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.^[20]

Second Cold War (1979–85)

This map shows the two essential global spheres during the Cold War in 1980–the US in blue and the USSR in red. See the legend on the map for more details.

Main article: Cold War (1979–1985)

The term second Cold War has been used by some historians to refer to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tensions greatly increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic.^[14]

Afghanistan war

Main article: Soviet war in Afghanistan

During December 1979, approximately 75,000 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in order to support the Marxist government formed by ex-Prime-minister Nur Muhammad Taraki, assassinated that September by one of his party rivals.^[178] As a result, US President Jimmy Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from the Senate, imposed embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, demanded a significant increase in military spending, and further announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. He described the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".^[179]

Reagan and Thatcher

In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the US presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere.^[180] Both Reagan and new British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and predicted that Communism would be left on the "ash heap of history".^[181]

Polish Solidarity movement

Main articles: Solidarity (Polish trade union) and Martial law in Poland

Pope John Paul II provided a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centered on the Solidarity movement that galvanized opposition and may have led to his attempted assassination two years later.^[182] Reagan also imposed economic sanctions on Poland to protest the suppression of Solidarity.^[183] In response, Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's top ideologist, advised Soviet leaders not to intervene if Poland fell under the control of Solidarity, for fear it might lead to heavy economic sanctions, representing a catastrophe for the Soviet economy.^[183]

Soviet and US military and economic issues

US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2006

Further information: Brezhnev stagnation, Strategic Defense Initiative, RSD-10 Pioneer, and MGM-31 Pershing

Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors.^[184] Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which saw at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.

Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges.^[185] The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military–industrial base.^[186] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West.^[187]

After ten year old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union.

By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Previously, the US had relied on the qualitative superiority of its weapons, but the gap had been narrowed.^[188] Ronald Reagan began massively building up the United States military not long after taking office. This led to the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history.^[189]

Tensions continued intensifying in the early 1980s when Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer program that was canceled by the Carter administration, produced LGM-118 Peacekeepers,^[190] installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced his experimental Strategic Defence Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight.^[191]

With the background of a buildup in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the deployment of Soviet RSD-10 Pioneer ballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany.^[192] This deployment would have placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.^[193]

After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military^[194] because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy.^[195] At the same time, Reagan persuaded Saudi Arabia to increase oil production,^[196] even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production.^[197] These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union, as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues.^[184][195] Issues with command economics,^[198] oil prices decreases and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to stagnation.^[195]

On September 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, when it violated Soviet airspace just past the west coast of Sakhalin Island—an act which Reagan characterized as a "massacre". This act increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.^[199] The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, has been called most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership keeping a close watch on it considered a nuclear attack to be imminent.^[200]

US domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.^[201] The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost counter-insurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts.^[201] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua.^[105] While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the US, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy.^[202]

Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US and other countries, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion.^[203] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam".^[203] However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system.

A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay".^[204][205] The Soviets were not helped by their aged and sclerotic leadership either: Brezhnev, virtually incapacitated in his last years, was succeeded by Andropov and Chernenko, neither of whom lasted long. After Chernenko's death, Reagan was asked why he had not negotiated with Soviet leaders. Reagan quipped, "They keep dying on me".^[206]

End of the Cold War (1985–91)

Main article: Cold War (1985–1991)

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the INF Treaty at the White House, 1987

Gorbachev reforms

Further information: Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, and glasnost

By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985,^[181] the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s.^[207] These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.^[207]

An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring.^[208] Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector.^[208]

Despite initial scepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader proved to be committed to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition instead of continuing the arms race with the West.^[117][209] Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced glasnost, or openness, which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions.^[210] Glasnost was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power in the Central Committee.^[211] Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating détente between the two nations.^[212]

Thaw in relations

Further information: Reykjavík Summit, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, START I, and Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany

In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race.^[213] The first was held in November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland.^[213] At one stage the two men, accompanied only by a translator, agreed in principle to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by 50 percent.^[214]

Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988

A second Reykjavík Summit was held in Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which Gorbachev wanted eliminated: Reagan refused.^[215] The negotiations failed, but the third summit in 1987 led to a breakthrough with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The INF treaty eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400 miles) and their infrastructure.^[216]

East–West tensions rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s, culminating with the final summit in Moscow in 1989, when Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signed the START I arms control treaty.^[217] During the following year it became apparent to the Soviets that oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels, represented a substantial economic drain.^[218] In addition, the security advantage of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe.^[219]

In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan^[220] and by 1990 Gorbachev consented to German reunification,^[218] the only alternative being a Tiananmen scenario.^[221] When the Berlin Wall came down, Gorbachev's "Common European Home" concept began to take shape.^[222]

On December 3, 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit;^[223] a year later, the two former rivals were partners in the Gulf War against longtime Soviet ally Iraq.^[224]

Faltering Soviet system

Further information: Economy of the Soviet Union, Revolutions of 1989, and Baltic Way

By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power.^[220] In the USSR itself, glasnost weakened the bonds that held the Soviet Union together^[219] and by February 1990, with the dissolution of the USSR looming, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power.^[225]

At the same time freedom of press and dissent allowed by glasnost and the festering "nationalities question" increasingly led the Union's component republics to declare their autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic states withdrawing from the Union entirely.^[226] The 1989 revolutionary wave that swept across Central and Eastern Europe overthrew the Soviet-style communist states, such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria,^[227] Romania being the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state.^[228]

Soviet dissolution

Further information: January 1991 events in Latvia, 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, and History of the Soviet Union (1985–1991)

Gorbachev's permissive attitude toward Eastern Europe did not initially extend to Soviet territory; even Bush, who strove to maintain friendly relations, condemned the January 1991 killings in Latvia and Lithuania, privately warning that economic ties would be frozen if the violence continued.^[229] The USSR was fatally weakened by a failed coup and as a growing number of Soviet republics, particularly Russia, threatened to secede the USSR was declared officially dissolved on December 25, 1991.^[230]

Legacy

Formation of the CIS, the official end of the Soviet Union

Created on December 21, 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States is viewed as a successor entity to the Soviet Union but according to Russia's leaders its purpose was to "allow a civilized divorce" between the Soviet Republics and is comparable to a loose confederation.^[231]

Following the Cold War, Russia cut military spending dramatically, but the adjustment was wrenching, as the military-industrial sector had previously employed one of every five Soviet adults^[232] and its dismantling left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed.^[232] After Russia embarked on capitalist economic reforms in the 1990s, it suffered a financial crisis and a recession more severe than the US and Germany had experienced during the Great Depression.^[233] Russian living standards have worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth since 1999.^[233]

The legacy of the Cold War continues to influence world affairs.^[14] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world is widely considered as unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower.^{[234][235][236]} The Cold War defined the political role of the United States in the post-World War II world: by 1989 the US held military alliances with 50 countries, and had 1.5 million troops posted abroad in 117 countries.^[237] The Cold War also institutionalized a global commitment to huge, permanent peacetime military-industrial complexes and large-scale military funding of science.^[237]

Military expenditures by the US during the Cold War years were estimated to have been $8 trillion, while nearly 100,000 Americans lost their lives in the Korean War and Vietnam War.^[238] Although the loss of life among Soviet soldiers is difficult to estimate, as a share of their gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was far higher than that of the US.^[239]

In addition to the loss of life by uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia.^[240] Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; the incidence of interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises has declined sharply in the post-Cold War years.^[241]

No separate campaign medal has been authorized for the Cold War; however, in 1998, the United State Congress authorized Cold War Recognition Certificates "to all members of the armed forces and qualified federal government civilian personnel who faithfully and honorably served the United States anytime during the Cold War era, which is defined as Sept. 2, 1945 to Dec. 26, 1991." ^[242]

The legacy of Cold War conflict, however, is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute.^[14] The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.^[14] In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and a large increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure.^[14]

Historiography

Main article: Historiography of the Cold War

As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists.^[243] In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet–US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided.^[244] Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.^[14]

Although explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism", and "post-revisionism".^[237]

"Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.^[237] "Revisionist" writers place more responsibility for the breakdown of post-war peace on the United States, citing a range of US efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II.^[237] "Post-revisionists" see the events of the Cold War as more nuanced, and attempt to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold War.^[237] Much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.^[47]

See also

Cold War portal

• American Empire
• Culture during the Cold War
• Nuclear war
• Post-World War II boom
• Soviet Empire
• Timeline of events in the Cold War
• Western betrayal
• World War III

Footnotes

1. ^ "“Cold War” – noun . . . (3) (initial capital letters) rivalry after World War II between the Soviet Union and its satellites and the democratic countries of the Western world, under the leadership of the United States." Dictionary, unabridged, based on the Random House Dictionary, 2009
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206. ^ Karaagac, p. 67
207. ^ ^{a b} LaFeber 2002, p. 331–333
208. ^ ^{a b} Gaddis 2005, p. 231–233
209. ^ LaFeber 2002, p. 300–340
210. ^ Gibbs 1999, p. 7
211. ^ Gibbs 1999, p. 33
212. ^ Gibbs 1999, p. 61
213. ^ ^{a b} Gaddis 2005, p. 229–230
214. ^ 1985: "Superpowers aim for 'safer world'", BBC News, November 21, 1985. Retrieved on July 4, 2008.
215. ^ "Toward the Summit; Previous Reagan-Gorbachev Summits". The New York Times. May 29, 1988. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DA1F3BF93AA15756C0A96E948260. Retrieved 2008-06-21. 
216. ^ "Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces". Federation of American Scientists. http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/inf/index.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21. 
217. ^ Gaddis 2005, p. 255
218. ^ ^{a b} Shearman 1995, p. 76
219. ^ ^{a b} Gaddis 2005, p. 248
220. ^ ^{a b} Gaddis 2005, p. 235–236
221. ^ Shearman 1995, p. 74
222. ^ "Address given by Mikhail Gorbachev to the Council of Europe". Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe. 1989-07-06. http://www.ena.lu/?doc=11160. Retrieved 2007-02-11. 
223. ^ Malta summit ends Cold War, BBC News, December 3, 1989. Retrieved on June 11, 2008.
224. ^ Goodby, p. 26
225. ^ Gorbachev, pp. 287, 290, 292
226. ^ Gaddis 2005, p. 253
227. ^ Lefeber, Fitzmaurice & Vierdag 1991, p. 221
228. ^ Gaddis 2005, p. 247
229. ^ Goldgeier, p. 27
230. ^ Gaddis 2005, p. 256–257
231. ^ Soviet Leaders Recall ‘Inevitable’ Breakup Of Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 8, 2006. Retrieved on May 20, 2008.
232. ^ ^{a b} Åslund, p. 49
233. ^ ^{a b} Nolan, pp. 17–18
234. ^ Country profile: United States of America. BBC News. Retrieved on March 11, 2007
235. ^ Nye, p. 157
236. ^ Blum 2006, p. 87
237. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Calhoun, Craig (2002). "Cold War (entire chapter)". Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195123719. http://books.google.com/books?id=SvSZHgAACAAJ&dq=Dictionary+of+the+Social+Sciences. Retrieved 2008-06-16. 
238. ^ LaFeber 2002, p. 1
239. ^ Gaddis 2005, p. 213
240. ^ Gaddis 2005, p. 266
241. ^ Monty G. Marshall and Ted Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2005 (PDF), Center for Systemic Peace (2006). Retrieved on June 14, 2008.
242. ^ "Cold War Certificate Program" (PDF). https://www.hrc.army.mil/site/active/tagd/coldwar/default.htm. Retrieved 2009-10-17. 
243. ^ Nashel, Jonathan (1999). "Cold War (1945–91): Changing Interpretations (entire chapter)". in Whiteclay Chambers, John. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195071980. http://books.google.com/books?id=xtMKHgAACAAJ&dq=The+Oxford+Companion+to+American+Military+History. Retrieved 2008-06-16. 
244. ^ Brinkley, pp. 798–799

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Further reading

Main article: List of primary and secondary sources on the Cold War

External links

Find more about Cold War on Wikipedia's sister projects:

Definitions from Wiktionary
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Archives

• Open Society Archives, Budapest (Hungary), one of the biggest history of communism and cold war archives in the world
• An archive of UK civil defence material
• CONELRAD Cold War Pop Culture Site
• CBC Digital Archives – Cold War Culture: The Nuclear Fear of the 1950s and 1960s
• The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP)
• The Cold War Files
• CNN Cold War Knowledge Bank comparison of articles on Cold War topics in the Western and the Soviet press between 1945 and 1991
• The CAESAR, POLO, and ESAU Papers–This collection of declassified analytic monographs and reference aids, designated within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directorate of Intelligence (DI) as the CAESAR, ESAU, and POLO series, highlights the CIA's efforts from the 1950s through the mid-1970s to pursue in-depth research on Soviet and Chinese internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations. The documents reflect the views of seasoned analysts who had followed closely their special areas of research and whose views were shaped in often heated debate.

Bibliographies

• Annotated bibliography for the arms race from the Alsos Digital Library
• Annotated bibliography from Citizendium

News

• Video and audio news reports from during the cold war

Educational Resources

• Minuteman Missile National Historic Site: Protecting a Legacy of the Cold War , a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan

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