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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
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
For more information on Cold War, visit Britannica.com.
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
Ambrose, Stephen E., and Douglas Brinkley. Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938. 8th rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Cohen, Warren I. The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945–1991. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Fischer, Beth A. The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.
Gaddis, John L. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Judge, Edward H., and John W. Langdon. A Hard and Bitter Peace: A Global History of the Cold War. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996.
LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2000. 9th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford University Press, 1992.
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Levering, Ralph, et al. Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. 2ded. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
—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.
Bibliography
Andrew, Christopher M., and Mitrokhin, Vasili. (1999). The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. New York: Basic Books.
Cohen Warren I., and Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf, eds. (1994). Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963 - 1968. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cold War International History Project Bulletin (1992 - ). Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Naftali, Timothy. (1997). "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958 - 1964. New York: Norton.
Gaddis, John Lewis. (1972). The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941 - 1947. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gaddis, John Lewis. (1982). Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Haynes, John Earl Haynes, and Klehr, Harvey. (1999). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hogan, Michael J. (1998). A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Holloway, David. (1994). Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939 - 1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Journal of Cold War Studies (quarterly, 1999 - ). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leffler, Melvyn P. (1992). A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Naimark, Norman, and Gibianskii, Leonid, eds. (1997). The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Schmidt, Gustáv, ed. (2001). A History of NATO: The First Fifty Years, 3 vols. New York: Palgrave.
Stokes, Gale. (1993). The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taubman, William C. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton.
Thornton, Richard C. (2001). The Nixon-Kissinger Years: Reshaping America's Foreign Policy, rev. ed. St. Paul: Paragon House.
—MARK KRAMER
From our Archives: Today's Highlights, October 22, 2005
The Iron Curtain and Containment
Mutual suspicion had long existed between the West and the USSR, and friction was sometimes manifest in the Grand Alliance during World War II. After the war the West felt threatened by the continued expansionist policy of the Soviet Union, and the traditional Russian fear of incursion from the West continued. Communists seized power in Eastern Europe with the support of the Red Army, the Russian occupation zones in Germany and Austria were sealed off by army patrols, and threats were directed against Turkey and Greece. Conflict sometimes grew intense in the United Nations, which was at times incapacitated by the ramifications of the cold war, at others effective in dealing with immediate issues.
In a famous speech (1946) at Fulton, Mo., Sir Winston Churchill warned of an implacable threat that lay behind a Communist “iron curtain.” The United States, taking the lead against the expansion of Soviet influence, rallied the West with the Truman Doctrine, under which immediate aid was given to Turkey and Greece. Also fearing the rise of Communism in war-torn Western Europe, the United States inaugurated the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which helped to restore prosperity and influenced the subsequent growth of what has become the European Union.
During the cold war the general policy of the West toward the Communist states was to contain them (i.e., keep them within their current borders) with the hope that internal division, failure, or evolution might end their threat. In 1948 the Soviet Union directly challenged the West by instituting a blockade of the western sectors of Berlin, but the United States airlifted supplies into the city until the blockade was withdrawn (see Berlin airlift). The challenges in Europe influenced the United States to reverse its traditional policy of avoiding permanent alliances; in 1949 the United States and 11 other nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO; see North Atlantic Treaty Organization). The Communist bloc subsequently formed (1955) the Warsaw Treaty Organization as a counterbalance to NATO.
The Cold War Worldwide
In Asia, the Communist cause gained great impetus when the Communists under Mao Zedong gained control of mainland China in 1949. The United States continued to support Nationalist China, with its headquarters on Taiwan. President Truman, fearing the appeal of Communism to the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, created the Point Four program, which was intended to help underdeveloped areas. Strife continued, however, and in 1950 Communist forces from North Korea attacked South Korea, precipitating the Korean War. Chinese Communist troops entered the conflict in large numbers, but were checked by UN forces, especially those of the United States. The focus of the cold war in Asia soon shifted to the southeast. China supported insurgent guerrillas in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the United States, on the other side, played a leading role in the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and provided large-scale military aid, but guerrilla warfare continued.
The newly emerging nations of Asia and Africa soon became the scene of cold-war skirmishes, and the United States and the Soviet Union (and later China) competed for their allegiance, often through economic aid; however, many of these nations succeeded in remaining neutral. As the cold-war struggle continued in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa (in nations such as Congo (Kinshasa), Angola, and others), and in Latin America (where the United States supported the Alliance for Progress to counter leftist appeal), both the Soviet Union and the United States supported and maintained sometimes brutal regimes (through military, financial, and other forms of aid) in return for their allegiance.
In Europe, the East German government erected the Berlin Wall in late 1961 to check the embarrassing flow of East Germans to the West. In 1962 a tense confrontation occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union after U.S. intelligence discovered the presence of Soviet missile installations in Cuba. Direct conflict was avoided, however, when Premier Khrushchev ordered ships carrying rockets to Cuba to turn around rather than meet U.S. vessels sent to intercept them (see Cuban Missile Crisis). It was obvious from this and other confrontations that neither major power wanted to risk nuclear war.
Hopes for rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the West had been raised by a relaxation in Soviet policy after the death (1953) of Joseph Stalin. Conferences held in that period seemed more amiable, and hopes were high for a permanent ban on nuclear weapons. However, the success of the Soviet artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957, attesting to Soviet technological know-how, introduced new international competition in space exploration and missile capability. Moreover, both Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles grimly threatened “massive retaliation” for any aggression, and the Soviet Union's resumption (1961) of nuclear tests temporarily dashed disarmament hopes. While Khrushchev spoke of peaceful victory, extremists in both camps agitated for a more warlike course, even at the risk of nuclear catastrophe. China began to accuse the USSR of conciliatory policies toward the West, and by the early 1960s ideological differences between the two countries had become increasingly evident.
Detente and the End of the Cold War
During the late 1950s and early 60s both European alliance systems began to weaken somewhat; in the Western bloc, France began to explore closer relations with Eastern Europe and the possibility of withdrawing its forces from NATO. In the Soviet bloc, Romania took the lead in departing from Soviet policy. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia led to additional conflict with some of its European allies and diverted its attention from the cold war in Europe. All these factors combined to loosen the rigid pattern of international relationships and resulted in a period of detente.
In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan revived cold-war policies and rhetoric, referring to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and escalating the nuclear arms race; some have argued this stance was responsible for the eventual collapse of Soviet Communism while others attribute it to the inherent weakness of the Soviet state. From 1989 to 1991 the cold war came to an end with the opening of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communist party dictatorship in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Bibliography
See D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917–1960 (1961); J. L. Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972, repr. 2000), The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987), The United States and the End of the Cold War (1992), We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), Strategies of Containment (1982, rev. ed. 2005), and The Cold War: A New History (2005); K. W. Thompson, Cold War Theories (1981); P. Savigear, Cold War or Detente in the 1980s (1987); J. Sharnik, Inside the Cold War (1987); M. Walker, The Cold War (1994); R. E. Powaski, The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (1997); V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev (1997); J. Chen, Mao's China and the Cold War (2001); W. LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War (9th ed. 2002); A. Fursenko and T. Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War (2006).
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
