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Cold War History
During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis
powers. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. Americans had long been wary
of Soviet communism and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical, blood-thirsty rule of
his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR
as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which
resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. After the war ended, these grievances ripened into an
overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity. Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled
many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what
they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to
international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold
War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.
The Cold War: Containment
By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet
threat was a strategy called “containment.” In 1946, in his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George
Kennan (1904-2005) explained this policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed
fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between
parties that disagree]”; as a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant
containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” President Harry Truman (1884-1972) agreed. “It must be
the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape American
foreign policy for the next four decades.
The Cold War: The Atomic Age
The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United
States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s
recommendation that the country use military force to “contain” communist expansionism anywhere it
seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.
In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had
ended World War II. Thus began a deadly “arms race.” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their
own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive
atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.
As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in
the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile
fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of
Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the
atmosphere.
The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well.
People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public
places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of
nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in
Americans’ everyday lives.
Alliances during Cold War
1. What does this map tell us? ______________________________________________________________________
2. What is the Marshall Plan? ________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
3. What is this map showing us? _____________________________
__________________________________________________________________
4. Why is this map important? ______________________________
_________________________________________________________________
Countries receiving Marshall Plan Aid
Fall of the Soviet Union
Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new
approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested,
why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the
United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to
establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”–
”relaxation”–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982)
signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear
missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.
Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like
many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened
freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist
governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the
developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.
Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In
response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail
Gorbachev (1931-) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s relationship to
the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and “perestroika,” or economic reform. Soviet
influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its
government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol
of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the
Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991,
the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.---------------------------------------------On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. A few days
earlier, representatives from 11 Soviet republics (Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) met in the
Kazakh city of Alma-Ata and announced that they would no longer be part of the Soviet Union. Instead,
they declared they would establish a Commonwealth of Independent States. Because the three Baltic
republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) had already declared their independence from the USSR, only one
of its 15 republics, Georgia, remained. The once-mighty Soviet Union had fallen, largely due to the great
number of radical reforms that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years
as the leader of the USSR. However, Gorbachev was disappointed in the dissolution of his nation and
resigned from his job on December 25. It was a peaceful end to a long, terrifying and sometimes bloody
epoch in world history.
The Origins and Evolution of the Soviet State
The Soviet state was born in 1917. That year, the revolutionary Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar and
established a socialist state in the territory that had once belonged to the Russian empire. In 1922, Russia
proper joined its far-flung republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The first leader of this
Soviet state was the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.
The Soviet Union was supposed to be “a society of true democracy,” but in many ways it was no less
repressive than the czarist autocracy that preceded it. It was ruled by a single party–the Communist Party–
that demanded the allegiance of every Russian citizen. After 1924, when the dictator Joseph Stalin came to
power, the state exercised totalitarian control over the economy, administering all industrial activity and
establishing collective farms. It also controlled every aspect of political and social life. People who argued
against Stalin’s policies were arrested and sent to labor camps or executed.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders denounced his brutal policies but maintained the Community
Party’s power. They focused in particular on the Cold War with Western powers, engaging in a costly and
destructive “arms race” with the United States while exercising military force to suppress anticommunism
and extend its hegemony in Eastern Europe.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika
In March 1985, a longtime Communist Party politician named Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the leadership
of the USSR He inherited a stagnant economy and a political structure that made reform all but
impossible.Gorbachev introduced two sets of policies that he hoped would help the USSR become a more
prosperous, productive nation. The first of these was known as glasnost, or political openness. Glasnost
eliminated traces of Stalinist repression, like the banning of books and the omnipresent secret police, and
gave new freedoms to Soviet citizens. Political prisoners were released. Newspapers could print criticisms
of the government. For the first time, parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.
The second set of reforms was known as perestroika, or economic restructuring. The best way to revive the
Soviet economy, Gorbachev thought, was to loosen the government’s grip on it. He believed that private
initiative would lead to innovation, so individuals and cooperatives were allowed to own businesses for the
first time since the 1920s. Workers were given the right to strike for better wages and conditions.
Gorbachev also encouraged foreign investment in Soviet enterprises.
However, these reforms were slow to bear fruit. Perestroika had torpedoed the “command economy” that
had kept the Soviet state afloat, but the market economy took time to mature. (In his farewell address,
Gorbachev summed up the problem: “The old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin
working.”) Rationing, shortages and endless queuing for scarce goods seemed to be the only results of
Gorbachev’s policies. As a result, people grew more and more frustrated with his government.
The Revolutions of 1989 and the Fall of the Soviet Union
Gorbachev believed that a better Soviet economy depended on better relationships with the rest of the
world, especially the United States. Even as President Reagan called the USSR the “Evil Empire” and
launched a massive military buildup, Gorbachev vowed to bow out of the arms race. He announced that he
would withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan, where they had been fighting a war since 1979, and he
reduced the Soviet military presence in the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe.This policy of
nonintervention had important consequences for the Soviet Union–but first, it caused the Eastern European
alliances to, as Gorbachev put it, “crumble like a dry saltine cracker in just a few months.” The first
revolution of 1989 took place in Poland, where the non-Communist trade unionists in the Solidarity
movement bargained with the Communist government for freer elections in which they enjoyed great
success. This, in turn, sparked peaceful revolutions across Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell in
November; that same month, the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia overthrew that country’s
Communist government. (In December, however, violence reigned: A firing squad executed Romania’s
Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, and his wife.)
This atmosphere of possibility soon enveloped the Soviet Union itself. Frustration with the bad economy
combined with Gorbachev’s hands-off approach to Soviet satellites to inspire a series of independence
movements in the republics on the USSR’s fringes. One by one, the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania and
Latvia) declared their independence from Moscow. Then, in early December, the Republic of Belarus, the
Russian Federation and Ukraine broke away from the USSR and created the Commonwealth of
Independent States. Weeks later, they were followed by eight of the nine remaining republics. (Georgia
joined two years later.) At last, the mighty Soviet Union had fallen.