THE REFERENCES MENU

Jovana Leonela Meriño Castro

UTT  Rodrigo Zapien
 INDICE
Cold War............................................................................1
Origin of the term.............................................................2
Background........................................................................3
World War II and the Post-War Period (1939-1947)........3
The Iron Curtain...............................................................4
From Containment Theory to the Korean War (1947-1953)
...........................................................................................4
Europe.............................................................................5
The Marshall Plan..........................................................5
The Berlin Blockade...........................................................5
Cold War
Map of the Cold War world in 1980, in shades of red the allies of the Soviet Union and
other communist countries, and in shades of blue the United States and its capitalist
allies; the red dots signify communist guerrillas and the blue dots anti-communist
guerrillas.
The Cold War was a political, economic, social, ideological, military and informational
confrontation initiated after the end of World War II between the Western bloc (Western-
capitalist) led by the United States, and the Eastern bloc (Eastern-communist) led by
the Soviet Union.
The first phase of the Cold War began immediately after the end of World War II in
1945. The United States created the NATO military alliance in 1949 with the aim of
curbing Soviet influence in Europe. The Soviet Union responded to the creation of this
alliance by establishing the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Major crises of this phase included
the Berlin blockade of 1948-49, the second phase of the Chinese civil war (1946-1949),
the Korean War (1950-1953), the Suez crisis of 1956, the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The USSR and the United States began to compete for
influence in Latin America, the Middle East and the newly decolonized states of Africa
and Asia, where communism was very strong and where confrontations such as the
Malayan Emergency or the Indochina war took place.
After the Cuban missile crisis, a new phase began that saw the Sino-Soviet (i.e. China-
Soviet Union) rift complicate relations within the communist sphere, while France, an
ally of the United States, began to demand greater autonomy of action and even left
NATO.12 The USSR invaded Czechoslovakia to repress the Prague Spring of 1968,
while the United States experienced internal turmoil in the civil rights movement and
opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1960s and 1970s, an international peace
movement took root among citizens around the world. There were movements against
nuclear weapons testing and for nuclear disarmament, with large anti-war protests. In
the 1970s, both sides began to make concessions for peace and security, ushering in a
period of détente that saw strategic arms limitation talks and the United States' opening
relations with the People's Republic of China as a strategic counterweight to the USSR.
The stability phase collapsed at the end of the decade with the outbreak of the Afghan-
Soviet war in 1979. The 1980s was another period of heightened tension. The United
States increased diplomatic, military and economic pressures on the Soviet Union at a
time when it was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms known as Glasnost (1985) and
Perestroika (1987) and ended Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Pressures for national
sovereignty strengthened in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to support their
governments militarily any longer in the so-called Sinatra Doctrine. The result in 1989
was a wave of revolutions that (with the exception of Romania) peacefully overthrew all
communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe. The Communist Party of the 1

1
Jovana Leonela UTT
02/03/2021
.
Soviet Union itself lost control of the territory and was banned after a failed coup
attempt in August 1991 against the anti-communist government of Boris Yeltsin. 2
Origin of the term
At the end of World War II, English writer George Orwell used "cold war" as a general
term in his essay You and the Atomic Bomb, published on 19 October 1945 in the
British newspaper Tribune. In a world threatened by nuclear war, Orwell referred to
James Burnham's predictions of a polarized world and wrote:
Looking at the world as a whole, however, for many decades now the drift has been not
towards anarchy, but towards the re-establishment of slavery [...] James Burnham's
theory has been widely discussed, but few have stopped to weigh its ideological
implications, that is, the kind of worldview, the kind of beliefs and the social structure
that is likely to prevail in an unconquerable state in a constant "cold war" situation with
its neighbors.3
Orwell himself wrote in The Observer of March 10, 1946 that "after the Moscow
conference last December, Russia began to wage cold war against the United Kingdom
and the British Empire. "4
The first use of the term to specifically describe the geopolitical confrontation between
the Soviet Union and the postwar United States was in a speech by Bernard Baruch, a
financier and influential U.S. presidential advisor, on April 16, 1947.5 In the speech
Baruch said, "Let us not delude ourselves: we are engaged in a cold war." The term
was popularized by columnist Walter Lippmann with his book The Cold War.6 When
asked in 1947 about the source of the expression, Lippmann traced it back to la guerre
froide, a French term from the 1930s.7

Background

American troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the U.S. intervention in the
Russian Civil War.
There is some disagreement as to exactly when the Cold War began. While most
historians argue that it began immediately after the end of World War II, others claim
that the beginnings of the Cold War date back to the end of World War I, in the tensions
that arose between the Russian Empire on the one hand, and the British Empire and
the United States on the other.8 The ideological clash between communism and
capitalism began in 1917, after the triumph of the Russian Revolution, from which
Russia emerged as the first socialist country. This was one of the first events that
caused considerable erosions in U.S.-Russian relations.8
Some events prior to the end of World War I fostered suspicions and misgivings
between Soviets and Americans: the Bolshevik idea in which capitalism was to be
2
Jovana Leonela UTT
02/03/2021
overthrown by force to be replaced by a communist system,9 the Russian withdrawal
from World War I after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Second Reich,
the American intervention in support of the White Movement during the Russian civil
war, and the American refusal to diplomatically recognize the Soviet Union until 1933.
10 Alongside these various events during the interwar period, suspicions were
heightened: the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo and the German-Soviet Non-
Aggression Pact are two notable examples.11

World War II and the Post-War Period (1939-1947)

During the final stages of World War II, the Soviets begin to suspect that the British and
Americans, who had opted to leave the bulk of the war effort to the Russians, would
forge a union against the Soviets (Operation Unthinkable) once the war was decided in
favor of the Allies, in order to force the Soviet Union to sign a peace treaty
advantageous to Western interests. These suspicions undermined Allied relations
during the final phase of the war.12
The Allies disagreed on how European borders should be drawn after the war.13 The
American model of stability was based on the establishment of American-like (capitalist)
governments and economic markets, and the belief that the countries thus governed
would look to international organizations, such as the newly created UN, to settle their
differences.14
However, the Soviets believed that stability would have to be based on the integrity of
the Soviet Union's own borders.15 This reasoning stems from the historical experience
of the Russians, who had been overrun from the West for the past one hundred and fifty
years.16 The unprecedented damage inflicted on the Soviet Union during the Nazi
invasion (some twenty-seven million dead and widespread and almost total destruction
of the invaded territory17) compelled Soviet leaders to ensure that the new European
order would make possible the long-term existence of the Soviet regime, and that this
goal could only be achieved by the elimination of any Soviet government.
The Iron Curtain
In February 1946, George Kennan wrote from Moscow the so-called Long Telegram,
supporting a policy of inflexibility with the Soviets, which was to become one of the
basic theories of the Americans for the remainder of the Cold War.24 In September of
the same year, the Soviets responded with another telegram signed by Nikolai
Vasilyevich Novikov, though written jointly with Vyacheslav Molotov; this telegram
argued that the United States was using its monopoly in the capitalist world to develop a
military capability that would create the conditions for the attainment of world supremacy
through a new war.3
Weeks after the receipt of the "Long Telegram," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech at a Missouri university.26 The speech sought
4

3
Jovana Leonela
03/02/2021
4
Jovana Leonela UTT
From Containment Theory to the Korean War (1947-1953)

By 1947, advisors to U.S. President Harry S. Truman urged him to take action to
counter the growing influence of the Soviet Union, citing Stalin's efforts to destabilize the
United States and whip up rivalries among capitalist countries in order to provoke a new
war.28
In Asia, the Chinese Communist army had occupied Manchuria during the last month of
World War II and was preparing to invade the Korean peninsula beyond the 38th
parallel.29 Eventually, Mao Zedong's Communist army, although unreceptive to little
Soviet aid, succeeded in defeating the pro-Western Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang)
army, supported by the United States.30

Europe
From the late 1940s, the Soviet Union succeeded in establishing puppet governments in
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and East Germany, which
enabled it to maintain a strong military presence in these countries.31 In February 1947,
the British government announced that it could no longer fund the Greek military regime
against communist insurgents in the context of the Greek Civil War. The U.S.
government first implemented the Theory of Containment,32 which was intended to
curb communist expansion, especially in Europe. Truman framed this theory within the
Truman Doctrine, made known through a speech by the president in which the conflict
between capitalists and communists was defined as a struggle between "free peoples"
and "totalitarian regimes. "32

The Marshall Plan

In the United States, the idea spread that the balance of power in Europe would not be
achieved only by the military defense of the territory, but that political and economic
problems also needed to be tackled to prevent the fall of Western Europe into
communist hands.31 On the basis of these ideas, the Truman Doctrine would be
complemented in June 1947 with the creation of the Marshall Plan, an economic aid
plan aimed at reconstructing the political-economic systems of European countries and,
by strengthening capitalist economic structures and developing parliamentary
democracies, curbing the possible access to power of communist parties in Western
European democracies (as in France and Italy). The Marshall Plan also constituted the
remodeling of numerous European cities that had been destroyed by the Second World
War.33
Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a U.S. tactic to weaken Soviet control over Eastern
Europe. He believed that the economic integration of the two blocs would allow the
countries under Soviet orbit to escape Moscow's control, and that the Plan was merely a
02/03/2021
way for the US to "buy" European countries.34 Therefore, Stalin prohibited Eastern
European countries from participating in the Marshall Plan. As a stopgap, Moscow
created a series of subsidies and trade channels known first as the Molotov Plan, which
would shortly thereafter be developed within COMECON.10 Stalin was also very critical
of the Marshall Plan because he feared that such aid would lead to the rearmament of
Germany, which was one of his greatest concerns about Germany's future after the war.

The Berlin Blockade

Main article: Blockade of Berlin
In 1948, in retaliation for U.S. efforts to rebuild the German economy, Stalin, who feared
that the population of the Soviet Sector of Germany would turn in favor of the capitalist
Bloc, closed the land routes into West Berlin, making it impossible for materials and
other supplies to reach the city.35 This event, known as the Berlin Blockade,
precipitated one of the major crises of the early Cold War.
The airlift organized by the United States and the United Kingdom, intended to provide
supplies to the blockaded western sector of the city, exceeded all expectations,
upsetting the Soviet assumption that the western sector would surrender to the eastern
sector for lack of supplies. Eventually the blockade was lifted peacefully. Both sides
used this blockade for propaganda purposes: the Soviets to denounce the alleged
rearmament of Germany favored by the United States, and the Americans to exploit
their image as benefactors. The best example of this was the so-called Operation Little
Vittles, where planes countering the Berlin blockade dropped candy among Berlin
children.
In July, President Truman rescinded the Morgenthau Plan, a series of proposals agreed
with the Soviets after the end of the war, which imposed severe conditions on German
reconstruction (including the creation of a new Soviet Union).
56

5
Jovana Leonela
02/03/2021
6