History 2710    MacKay    2005

Week 12 The Cold War, 1946-1991

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

 The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was founded in 1922 with four republics. By its dissolution in 1991, it was a confederation of 15 republics. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (SFSR) was by far the largest of the union republics, spanning two continents. Other republics--called Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs)--were located in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltics. The 15 union republics are now independent countries. (Source: http://encarta.msn.com/media_461540279/Union_of_Soviet_Socialist_Republics.html)

The cold war began with mistrust between the Soviet Union and the western democracies as early as the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union felt it had good cause to mistrust the West. 

• In 1919 the former World War I allies of Britain, France and the United States joined the "White Russians" to fight off the Bolsheviks following the revolution.  (For more information see The American Invasion of Russia). Although this intervention failed and the Red Army of the Bolsheviks secured the power of the new Soviet state, the young USSR government never quite trusted the western democracies after that.
• The western democracies did not invite the Soviet Union to participate in the World War I peace talks or the League of Nations.
• The west did not aid the Republicans fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
• The west did not invite the Soviets to the Munich Conference which decided the fate of Czechoslovakia in the years leading up to World War II, even though the Soviet Union had a security pact with Czechoslovakia.

The West, for its part, never trusted the Soviet Union:

• The avowed purpose of the International Communist Party to secure world wide communist revolution. There was a great fear of socialism in Europe and America.
• The Soviets negotiated an agreement with Hitler and annexed eastern Poland.
• By the end of the war Britain and the United States distrusted the Soviet motives in eastern Europe.

This mutual distrust was barely suppressed during World War II when for practical reasons (the common enemy of Hitler's Germany) the western allies and the Soviet Union became uneasy allies. 

Stalin believed that the western allies were dragging their feet in opening up the "second front" in Europe, so necessary to take the pressure off the struggling Soviet forces in the east.

Stalin was open about wanting "friendly governments" in Eastern Europe to protect his country's western frontier from another invasion like the invasion by Germany.

(Source: The Cold War Museum: http://www.historywiz.com/coldwarexhibit.htm)

Chronology
1946    Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech
1947    Truman Doctrine
1948    Marshall Plan; Berlin airlift
1949    NATO;; first USSSR atomic bomb; Communist victory in China
1950    Joseph McCarthy's first charges; outbreak of Korean War 
1953    Armistice in Korea
1954    Vietnamese victory over French in Dien Bien Phu; McCarthy hearings
1947: The Truman Doctrine. 
1949: NATO Treaty signed. 
1949: Communists take power in China; Nationalists retreat to Taiwan 
1950: Korean War begins. 
1953: Armistice ends fighting in the Korean War. 
1955: Warsaw Pact is formed 
1961: Bay of Pigs invasion. 

 Toward Peaceful Coexistence

1962: Cuban Missile Crisis. 
1964: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. 
1965: President Johnson begins escalation of US role in Vietnamese Civil War. 
1972: US withdraws from Vietnam. 
1972: SALT Treaty signed 
1972: Nixon visits China 
1979: The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan 
1985: Gorbachev begins policy of "Perestroika" 
1989: The Fall of the Berlin Wall; The Cold War ends. 
1989: Tiananmen Square Massacre in China 

Readings: Major Problems: Chpt. 10: documents: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10; essay: Gaddis

CNN has posted a series of interactive maps chronicling the Cold War.

A 1993 essay by Susan Eisenhower "The Cold War Legacy" for the science magazine Omni.

Recommended Readings: Don't Know: 399-421

Reading Response #8: What are some of the consequences of "peace through mutual terror"? What is the industrial-military complex that Eisenhower warned about?

Project 7: One of the dynamics of the Cold War was McCarthyism. Consider this article comparing McCarthyism to our current suspension of due process of law as part of the war on terrorism. What do you think of his argument?