The Cold War
The Cold War
After signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and German–Soviet Frontier Treaty, the Soviet
Union forced the Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—to allow it to station
Soviet troops in their countries. Finland rejected territorial demands, prompting a Soviet
invasion in November 1939. The resulting Winter War ended in March 1940 with Finnish
concessions. Britain and France, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as tantamount to its
entering the war on the side of the Germans, responded to the Soviet invasion by
supporting the USSR's expulsion from the League of Nations.
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WWI
I Soviet Union forcibly annexed Estonia, Latvia, and
In June 1940, the
Lithuania. It also seized the disputed Romanian regions of Bessarabia,
Northern Bukovina, and Hertza. But after the German Army invaded the
Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and declared war on
The Cold War
the United States in December 1941, the Soviet Union and the Allied
powers worked together to fight Germany. Britain signed a formal alliance
and the United States made an informal agreement. In wartime, the United
States supplied Britain, the Soviet Union and other Allied nations through its
Lend-Lease Program. However, Stalin remained highly suspicious, and he
believed that the British and the Americans had conspired to ensure that the
Soviets bore the brunt of the fighting against Germany. According to this
view, the Western Allies had deliberately delayed opening a second anti-
German front in order to step in at the last minute and shape the peace
settlement. Thus, Soviet perceptions of the West left a strong undercurrent
of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.
END OF WWII
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The Allies disagreed about how the European map should look, and how borders would be
drawn, following the war. Each side held dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and
maintenance of post-war security. Some scholars contend that all the Western Allies
The Cold War
Red Army took control. Soviet agents took control of the media, especially radio; they
quickly harassed and then banned all independent civic institutions, from youth groups to
schools, churches and rival political parties. Stalin also sought continued peace with
Britain and the United States, hoping to focus on internal reconstruction and economic
growth.
In the American view, Stalin seemed a potential ally in accomplishing their goals, whereas
in the British approach Stalin appeared as the greatest threat to the fulfillment of their
agenda. With the Soviets already occupying most of Central and Eastern Europe, Stalin
was at an advantage, and the two western leaders vied for his favors.
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The differences
separate deals with the Soviets. In October 1944, Churchill traveled
to Moscow and proposed the "percentages agreement" to divide
Europe into respective spheres of influence, including giving Stalin
The Cold War
and his forces were being considered to help implement Operation Unthinkable, a secret plan to
invade the Soviet Union which Winston Churchill advocated during this period.
In April 1945, President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman, who distrusted
Stalin and turned for advice to an elite group of foreign policy intellectuals. Both Churchill and Truman
opposed, among other things, the Soviets' decision to prop up the Lublin government, the Soviet-
controlled rival to the Polish government-in-exile in London, whose relations with the Soviets had
been severed.
Following the Allies' May 1945 victory, the Soviets effectively occupied Central and Eastern Europe,
while strong US and Western allied forces remained in Western Europe. In Germany and Austria,
France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States established zones of occupation and a loose
framework for parceled four-power control.
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The 1945 Allied conference in San Francisco established the multi-national United Nations (UN) for the
maintenance of world peace, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed
by the ability of individual members to exercise veto power. Accordingly, the UN was essentially converted
into an inactive forum for exchanging polemical rhetoric, and the Soviets regarded it almost exclusively as a
propaganda tribune.
The Cold War
The Soviet-style regimes that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economy, but also
adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet secret police in order to suppress
both real and potential opposition. In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the
war, and it went on to occupy the large swathe of Korean territory located north of the 38th parallel.
As part of consolidating Stalin's control over the Eastern Bloc, the People's Commissariat for Internal
Affairs (NKVD), led by Lavrentiy Beria, supervised the establishment of Soviet-style secret police systems
in the Bloc that were supposed to crush anti-communist resistance. When the slightest stirrings of
independence emerged in the Bloc, Stalin's strategy matched that of dealing with domestic pre-war rivals:
they were removed from power, put on trial, imprisoned, and in several instances, executed.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned that, given the enormous size of Soviet forces
deployed in Europe at the end of the war, and the perception that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was
unreliable, there existed a Soviet threat to Western Europe. After World War II, US officials guided
Western European leaders in establishing their own secret security force to prevent subversion in the
Western bloc, which evolved into Operation Gladio.
The Cold War
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What was The Cold War ?
The Cold War was a period of ideological and geopolitical tension between the United
States and the Soviet Union (and their respective allies), the Western Bloc and the Eastern
Bloc, after World War II which lasted for 40 years. Historians do not fully agree on the
dates, but the period is generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine (12 March
The Cold War
1947) to the 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union (26 December 1991) The term "cold" is
used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but
they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based
around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by the two powers,
following their temporary alliance and victory against Nazi Germany in 1945. US verses the
Soviet Union , Spy verses Spy, both states wanted to win the technological competition , the
Space Race.
Why was the Russian domination
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satellite The Sputnik. The Sputnik was launched on a rocket , people knew that if the Soviet
Union had the capability to launch things into space they also had the capability to launch
warheads. There’s no doubt that the Sputnik once scared the American’s to death , and they
suddenly realized that they had to pull their finger out and get on it. Russia had got the first
object in space , they got the first animal in space and they got the first human in space , and
the Americans, with their technical superiority or so they thought , felt on the back foot. US
president John . F . Kennedy decides that to beat the Soviet Union from reaching space
further was to put a man on the moon at the end of the decade “ We choose to put a man on
the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they
are hard. “ Says President Kennedy. At the peak of over 400,000 people were involved , the
program cost at the time was $25 billion. It was later on in the morning of July 16th 1969 when
Apollo 11 was finally launched into space
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Why did the two powers wanted to win the
Space race ?
During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union
The Cold War