NSC History

The Cold War was a long rivalry between the United States of America (USA) and the Soviet Union (USSR) that began as the Second World War ended and lasted until 1989–1991. It was cold because the two superpowers never fought each other directly; they competed through propaganda, economic aid, spying, an arms race and support for opposing sides in wars elsewhere. To understand why it developed, it helps to see what held the two powers together during the war and what pulled them apart once Germany and Japan were beaten.

An alliance of necessity

The USA, Britain and the USSR were allies from 1941 to 1945, but they had little in common beyond the need to defeat Nazi Germany. The USSR was a one-party communist state with a planned economy owned by the state, and its leaders believed capitalism would eventually be replaced by communism worldwide. The USA was a liberal democracy with a capitalist economy based on private ownership and free enterprise. Each side distrusted the other's system, and the distrust pre-dated the war: Western governments had intervened against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war after 1917, and Stalin's agreement with Hitler in 1939 (the Nazi–Soviet Pact) had left the Soviet leadership with little reason to rely on Western goodwill.

During the war several things added to the suspicion. Stalin pressed repeatedly for the Western allies to open a second front in Europe, and the Soviet Union carried the heaviest burden of the fighting against Germany until the Normandy landings in June 1944; he resented the delay. The United States developed the atomic bomb without telling the USSR in any detail, and used it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Soviet leaders read this as a warning, and many historians think it made them more determined to build their own bomb, which they tested in 1949.

Yalta, February 1945

The leaders of the three allies, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, met at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945, when Germany's defeat was certain. They agreed that:

• Germany would be disarmed and divided into zones of occupation controlled by the USA, Britain and the USSR, with a zone for France as well, and Berlin, which lay deep inside the Soviet zone, would also be divided into four sectors;
• the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan after Germany's surrender;
• the liberated countries of Europe would hold free elections, and a Polish government would be formed that included Poles from outside the communist group;
• a new international organisation, the United Nations, would be established.

The agreements were vague on how free elections would be supervised, and each side was later to accuse the other of breaking the spirit of Yalta. Stalin saw Eastern Europe as a buffer against another invasion from the west, since Russia had been invaded through those lands in 1914 and 1941. The Western leaders accepted that the Red Army, which was already in Poland, Romania and Hungary, would be hard to remove, but they expected free elections.

Potsdam, July to August 1945

By the time the leaders met again at Potsdam, near Berlin, the situation had changed. Roosevelt had died in April 1945 and was replaced by Harry S. Truman, who was more suspicious of Stalin and less willing to compromise. Churchill was replaced during the conference by Clement Attlee after the British general election. The Soviet army controlled most of Eastern Europe, and the USA now had a working atomic bomb, which Truman mentioned to Stalin only in passing.

The conference confirmed the division of Germany into occupation zones, and agreed that Germany should be demilitarised, that Nazi leaders should be tried, and that reparations would be taken: the Soviet Union could take much of its share from its own zone and a part from the western zones. The Soviet Union wanted heavy reparations from the whole of Germany because it had suffered enormous destruction and loss of life; the Western powers feared that crushing Germany again would cause the instability that had helped Hitler rise after 1919. Disagreement over Poland's western border and over the governments being set up in Eastern Europe was left unresolved.

Soviet moves in Eastern Europe, 1945 to 1947

After Potsdam, Soviet-backed communist parties took control of the governments of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The elections held in some of these states were manipulated, and opponents were intimidated or arrested. Churchill described the result in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, saying that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The phrase became a shorthand for the division of the continent. Stalin condemned the speech as a call for war.

Western leaders also pointed to pressure on Iran, where Soviet troops stayed on after the war and withdrew in 1946 under diplomatic pressure, and to Soviet demands on Turkey. In Greece a civil war between the royal government and communist guerrillas was under way, and Britain, which had been supporting the government, told the United States in early 1947 that it could no longer afford to do so. That request led directly to the Truman Doctrine.

The Long Telegram and American thinking

In February 1946 George Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow, sent a long cable to Washington arguing that the Soviet leadership saw the outside world as hostile, that it would expand where it met weakness, and that it would respond only to firm resistance. The analysis shaped American policy and was developed further in an article published in 1947 that gave the policy its name: containment, the idea that Soviet influence should be held within its existing boundaries rather than rolled back.

The Soviet view was different. In 1946 Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, reported that the USA was seeking world domination. Soviet leaders concluded that American policy was shaped by a capitalist system that needed foreign markets and that American economic strength could be turned against them.

Ideology, security and economy

Several kinds of cause run together in the origins of the Cold War, and historians weigh them differently.

• Ideology: communism and capitalism offered rival ways of organising society, and each claimed to be the model for the postwar world.
• Security: the USSR wanted friendly states on its western border, while the USA and Britain wanted a stable Europe that was open to trade and not dominated by one power.
• Economics: the USA, which had become the world's strongest economy, wanted open markets; the USSR, devastated by war, wanted reparations and control of the resources of its neighbours.
• Personalities and misreading: Truman's tougher approach and Stalin's habit of suspicion both reduced the chance of compromise, and each side often read defensive moves as aggressive ones.

The debate about which of these mattered most, and who bears the greater blame, is set out in the note on who was to blame for the Cold War.