Download Main Causes of the Cold War

Main Causes of the Cold War
The Russian Revolution
When Lenin and his Bolshevik party seized power in
Russia in 1917 the United States and its allies made
half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts to strangle
the new Bolshevik regime in its infancy two years
after the October Revolution and American troops
intervened briefly on the side of anti-Bolshevik forces
in the Russian civil war. In January 1920 6,000
suspected communists in the United States were
arrested and imprisoned.
Manhattan Project
In 1941 American scientists had begun work on the
development of an atomic bomb in a program called
the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt decided to share
some information about the project with Britain and
Canada but not to tell the Soviet Union about it.
This decision hardly showed a high level of trust in
one of Americas allies.
Yalta/ Potsdam
 Agreements about Germany. Shared post-war objectives of USA and
USSR on Germany.
A)Limiting the power of Germany.
B)German disarmament and demilitarization.
C)Germany divided among the victors into four zones of occupations.
D)Each occupying power would be entitled to take reparations from its
own zone. These reparations were intended as compensation for
human, material and financial losses incurred in the war against
Germany and were to take the form of industrial output and
equipment.
E)The Russians were granted additional reparations from the three
western zones in exchange for food and raw material s from the
Soviet zone because the extent of Soviet war losses was recognized in
the Potsdam agreement.
F) The occupying powers agreed to treat the four zones of occupation
as a single economic area. In other words goods were supposed to
move freely between the four zones.
Yalta/ Potsdam
 Disagreements or differences over the Yalta and Potsdam agreements about
Germany.
A) German coal output was an important area of disagreement. The Russians wanted
coal from the western zones as reparations, but the Americans wanted to use
German coal to assist in the economic reconstruction of western Europe.
B) The Russians were treating their zone as a self-contained economic entity which
existed exclusively for their economic benefit. Some reparations from the British
and American zones had been delivered to the Russians, but the Soviet Union was
not supplying food and basic commodities in return. The Americans insisted that
they would not send more reparations until the Russians exported essential items
from their zone. In turn, the Russians argued that they would not release goods
from their zone until they received a satisfactory level of reparations.
C) Access to the coal and steel output of the Ruhr valley, west Germany’s industrial
heartland, was a further cause of conflict. The Russians demanded four-power
international control over the Ruhr, which lay inside the British zone of occupation.
Both the British and the Americans refused Soviet demands for international
trusteeship of the Ruhr.
D) The United States and the Soviet Union read different meanings into the Potsdam
agreements on Germany. The difficulty in implementing and interpreting
agreements was a significant cause of the Cold War.
Marshall Plan
1. The real function of the Marshall Plan was the containment of
communism. Washington’s reading of the situation in western
Europe was pessimistic. Americans saw a continent in the grip of
economic recession. A scenario of continuing economic crisis,
growing support for European communist parties and closer
alignment with Moscow alarmed the United States. The Soviet
Union would then control western Europe. The domination of
continental Europe by a hostile totalitarian state organized around a
communist ideology would threaten the national security of the
United States. To prevent that a large-scale transfusion of dollars to
western Europe was necessary.
2. The Russians produced its own version of the Marshall Plan (the
Molotov Plan), which was an attempt to bind the countries of
eastern Europe into a single economic area. The division of Europe
into two separate economic blocs was imminent.
The Truman Doctrine
 To promote democracy around the
world and fight the spread of oppressive
regimes in which a minority controls
the majority.
 “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the
United States is the creation of conditions in which we and
other nations will be able to work out a way of life free
from coercion.”