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The Origins of the Cold War
Overview
Although the alliance between the United States and
the Soviet Union had brought victory in World War II,
wartime cooperation meant glossing over many
serious differences between the two. Since the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Soviet leaders had
been claiming that communism and capitalism could
never peacefully coexist. Beginning in the 1930s Josef
Stalin had tried to reach some sort of understanding
with the West, but only because he viewed Nazi
Germany as the greater threat. Indeed, after
concluding that the West was not interested in
working with him, he made his own agreement with
Hitler in 1939. That agreement, of course, was
quickly forgotten after the German invasion of the
Soviet Union two years later.
After the United States entered the war in December
1941 the administration began encouraging
Americans to view the Soviet Union not as a threat,
but rather as a partner both for victory over the Axis
and for maintaining peace in the postwar world. In
newspaper and magazine articles, speeches and
Hollywood films, Americans were told again and
again that although the Russian people had a
different economic system, they were equally
committed to democratic values and to a peaceful,
stable world order.
Containment assumed many different forms. Under
the Truman Doctrine the president pledged to defend
"free peoples" everywhere through economic and
military aid. The Marshall Plan provided billions of
dollars for economic recovery to Western Europe,
lest misery in France, Germany, and Italy lead to
communist electoral victories in those countries. The
North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a formal
military alliance, and a clear message to Moscow—
the United States would fight to defend Western
Europe. Ultimately it would lead to actual war in
Korea.
Containment was not without its critics, and among
the most perceptive was journalist Walter Lippman.
Lippman believed that the result would be an
ongoing "cold war" that might never involve actual
combat, but would continue to drain American
resources as the United States was committed to
resist communism everywhere it might appear. And
indeed, "Cold War" is exactly the term that has come
to define the entire period from 1945 to 1989. In this
curriculum unit students will learn how the Cold War
began, from the agreements reached at Yalta and
Potsdam in 1945 through the formation of NATO in
1949.
Source: http://edsitement.neh.gov/curriculumunit/origins-cold-war-1945-1949#sect-theunit
This message, hammered home from 1942 to 1945,
meant that after the war Americans would be in for a
rude shock. Agreements regarding the postwar world
were reached at Yalta and Potsdam, but the Soviets
wasted no time in violating them. After driving
German forces out of Eastern Europe they set about
creating communist puppet states throughout the
region, apparently ignoring their promises to allow
democratic elections there. Having just won a world
war, they seemed intent on setting the stage for
another.
To the new administration of Harry Truman, this
behavior was reminiscent of Hitler's in the 1930s.
Like many of the statesmen of his age, he believed
that the proper means of responding to an
international bully was a credible threat of force;
"appeasement" was a dirty word, as it would only
lead to new demands. Thus Truman decided on a
strategy known as "containment," in which the
Soviets would be prevented—militarily if
necessary—from using force to export their ideology
abroad. Containment would, in fact, remain the
cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for the next fifty
years.
The Early Cold War: The Iron Curtain
How Did the Relationship Between the United States
and the Soviet Union Change After the War?
negotiation seemed useless. Kennan's policy became
known as containment. Containing communism meant
preventing it from spreading to other countries.
Later in 1946, the gap between the West and the Soviet
Union was made clear to Americans. In Fulton, Missouri,
former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a
speech that summarized the division of Europe. He said,
"[A]n iron curtain has descended upon the continent." This
was not a term coined by Churchill. It had been used since
the 1920s to describe the closed society of the Soviet
Union. But many Americans in 1946 still thought of the
Soviet Union as an ally against the Nazis. Churchill's speech
focused on the differences between the powers and set an
ominous tone for the future.
A Soviet propaganda poster from 1949 shows Uncle Sam trying to lure
workers with aid while hiding a rifle contained within treaty documents.
The Russian at the bottom of the poster has a quote by Stalin: "The
peoples of the world do not want a repeat of the disasters of war."
Public Domain
When the Big Three had met for the Potsdam Conference
in 1945, Truman had wanted to ensure democratic
elections and self-determination for the countries
recovered from Germany. Stalin, who had agreed to free
elections at the earlier Yalta Conference, had already
broken his promise in Poland and other parts of Eastern
Europe.
The Soviets had different goals. They wanted to rebuild
Eastern Europe using their own raw materials and
manpower. They wanted to prevent the spread of
democracy and promote the spread of communism. They
also wanted to keep Germany divided and weak.
Eventually, the leaders agreed to divide Germany and
Austria into four occupation zones, an idea that had been
introduced at the Yalta Conference. They also established
controls on industries that could produce materials used
to wage war.
After the war ended, the Soviets continued to disregard
their pledge to allow free elections in Eastern Europe. By
1946, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, and Hungary had become
satellite nations of the Soviet Union. In a 1946 speech,
Stalin blamed capitalism for causing World War II,
declared communism and capitalism were incompatible,
and announced another war was sure to come.
The term "iron curtain" described the separation between
democratic and communist governments in Europe.
The growth of Soviet influence and its threatening rhetoric
worried leaders in the West. A new policy toward the
Soviet Union began to emerge. George F. Kennan was a
Soviet expert stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
On February 22, 1946, Kennan sent an 8,000-word
telegram to Washington. He detailed Russia's history of
aggression and expansion. His conclusion was that the
Soviets would continue to try to expand. Only strong
countermeasures could discourage them; diplomacy and
The term "iron curtain" described the separation between democratic
and communist governments in Europe.
Historians mark 1946 as the beginning of the Cold War.
That term was first used by presidential advisor Bernard
Baruch to describe the tensions between the Soviet Union
and the West. It referred to a state of tension between two
powers that fell short of actual warfare, but one in which
the powers tried to defeat one another. In 1949, the Soviet
Union successfully tested an atomic bomb. Now the two
opposing sides in the Cold War both had weapons of mass
destruction. During the Cold War, the United States and the
Soviet Union engaged in a nuclear arms race in which both
sides used government finances to build a stockpile of
nuclear weapons.
How Was the Cold War Fought with Ideas?
The contradictory goals of the United States and Soviet
Union led to a new kind of war. During the Cold War, the
ideologies and rhetoric, as well as the economic and
political systems, competed against each other. It was a
war of ideas, fought with words.
The rift between the United States and the Soviet Union
had grown immensely after World War II. In 1939, the
Soviet Union had signed a treaty of non-aggression with
Hitler. Stalin turned to the Allies only after Germany
invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin felt the Allies should have
worked quickly to create a Western front in Europe. This
would have led to fewer lives lost in the Soviet Union.
Instead the Allies waited until 1944 to invade France.
Millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians died between 1941
and 1944. The Soviets were also suspicious of the United
States for developing the atomic bomb in secrecy.
However, the greatest causes of tension between the
United States and Soviet Union were their opposing
systems of government and economics. The United States
was a democracy in which people elect their leaders. The
Soviets embraced a totalitarian government with no free
elections. The American economy was largely based on
free-market principles with some government oversight.
The Soviet economy was controlled entirely by the
government. The interactive on this screen compares the
two systems.
What Did the United States Do to Prevent the Spread of
Communism?
In the years before and after World War I, the United
States had pursued a policy of isolationism. After World
War II, it was evident that Americans had an unavoidable
responsibility to help keep international order. From the
U.S. point of view, that meant helping any people who
sought democratic government.
President Harry S. Truman gave a voice to America's new
role in 1947. He promised the United States would give
political, military, and economic support to all democratic
nations threatened by authoritarian powers. This notion
became known as the Truman Doctrine. Truman believed
this aid was necessary to keep the region politically stable.
He also believed it was the duty of the United States to
assist "free peoples" in their fight against "totalitarian
regimes." In doing so, Truman committed the United States
to assisting democratic nations anywhere in the world,
whenever it was found to serve the interests of the United
States.
The winter of 1946–1947 was especially harsh for
Europeans. Freezing temperatures, snowstorms, and
infrastructure collapses made life even more miserable.
Across Europe, Communists used the crisis to claim
capitalism was incapable of providing a decent quality of
life for ordinary people. In the United States, helping
Europe seemed the best way to preserve their democratic
governments.
Secretary of State George Marshall proposed the American
response to this crisis. The Marshall Plan called for billions
of dollars of grants and aid to assist Europe's economic
recovery. It allowed each country to devise a plan that the
United States would support. The Soviet Union was invited
to join but declined. Ultimately, sixteen nations
participated in the plan. They received money, raw
materials, and manufactured goods to boost their
economies.
The aid provided by the Marshall Plan allowed Europe to
get back on its economic feet. It revived employment and
economic output across the continent. The London
Economist called the plan "the most ... generous thing that
any country has ever done for others," but the motives of
the United States were not entirely altruistic. The Marshall
Plan made grateful allies out of the aid recipients. It also
prevented the spread of communism to countries on the
brink of economic collapse. America had saved Western
Europe from becoming communist.
The Marshall Plan faced a stern test in 1948 in one of the
first confrontations of the Cold War. After World War II,
Germany was divided into zones of occupation. In 1948,
the United States, France, and Britain combined their
zones into one nation. Berlin, the German capital, was in
the zone controlled by the Soviet Union. In June 1948,
Stalin closed off all road and rail access into West Berlin.
Over two million residents of that part of the city faced
immediate shortages of food, fuel, clothing, medicine, and
other necessities.
The United States and Great Britain responded quickly.
They used airplanes to fly supplies into West Berlin. They
used C-54 aircraft that could each haul 10 tons of supplies.
The Berlin Airlift delivered around 5,000 tons of supplies a
day. Over 327 days, planes made 277,000 flights, bringing
much-needed supplies to the isolated city. The interactive
photostory below explains the Berlin Airlift.
By May 1949, Stalin realized the blockade was ineffective.
Shortly after, West Germany became the Federal Republic
of Germany with a new capital in Bonn. The Soviets turned
East Germany into the German Democratic Republic.
What Were the Major Alliances of the Cold War Era?
Tensions between Western democracies and the Soviet
Union increased throughout the 1940s and into a new
decade. Both sides in the Cold War began to compile
weapons for possible conflict. During this race to
militarize, nuclear weapon technology spread to the Soviet
Union in 1949 and later to Western powers. Soon the idea
that opposing nuclear powers could obliterate the other in
a nuclear war became known as "mutually assured
destruction." Fear of "MAD" kept the nuclear weapons
from being used.
In response to the threat of Soviet expansion and nuclear
weaponry, the United States, Canada, and several Western
European nations joined in a collective security agreement.
The organization, formed in 1949, was called the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It was the first time
that the United States had entered into an alliance with
other countries during a time of peace. The agreement was
a clear illustration of the new U.S. policy of containment.
For the entire 20th century, the United States had avoided
the "entangling alliances" George Washington had once
warned about. Now, the United States entered into an
agreement that required it to defend an attack against any
of its members. The participating nations chose Dwight D.
Eisenhower as the first head of the NATO forces.
The Soviet Union responded a few years later. It created
the Warsaw Pact with its Eastern European satellite
nations. NATO and the Warsaw Pact demonstrate the
sharp political division that existed between the East and
the West in the post-war world.
Cold War Vocabulary
Define the following:
1.
arms race
2.
Berlin Airlift
3.
Cold War
4.
collective security
5.
domino theory
6.
containment
7.
iron curtain
8.
Marshall Plan
9.
NATO
10.
satellite nation
11.
Truman Doctrine
12.
Warsaw Pact