The First Phase: 1947-1956
| When World War II ended, the Soviet Union and the United
States were the most powerful military forces on the planet. Each state
had enormous, battle-hardened armies. The Soviets had pushed the Germans
out of their homeland toward the west in a brutal and vicious four-year
war, and the Americans (aided by the British and Free French) had meanwhile
pushed the Germans out of France toward the east. When the Nazi government
surrendered in May 1945, the map of Europe reflected the geography of the
fighting. Soviet forces occupied most
of central and eastern Europe--Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the eastern portion of
Germany. Americans and their allies occupied western
Germany, western Austria, and the bulk of western Europe. The
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Europe, 1945
Blue figures represent Allied troops. Red figures represent
Soviet troops
Map Source: www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war
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wartime anti-Nazi
alliance of Soviets and Americans was already cracking before the shooting
stopped. The Yalta protocols of February 1945 (Documenting the Modern
World, pp. 185-187) had pledged Stalin to permit political self-determination
in lands occupied by the Red Army. For his part, Churchill hated Communism
and had never trusted Stalin. Several weeks after Yalta, he shared his
feelings with U.S. President Harry Truman in this Telegram
to Truman (Document 10-1). You can also view Film
Clips (Document 10-2) of the Yalta meeting and a later conference,
in July 1945, held at the German city of Potsdam. (See this Cold
War Film Clip Web Site (Document 10-3)for more Cold War
clips. NOTE: to view these videos, you will need to have a media player,
such as Windows Media Player or Real Player, on your computer. These can
be downloaded freely.) By 1947 it was clear Stalin had betrayed the commitments
he made at Yalta, which caused Churchill to deliver his memorable "Iron
Curtain" speech (Documenting the Modern World, pp. 190-191).
As the states under Soviet occupation installed Communist regimes, to the
dismay of the U.S. and its allies, it was clear that in Europe the Cold
War had begun in earnest. Within a few years, the scope of the Cold War
became global, as the Soviets and Americans competed for power across Asia,
Africa, and Latin America as well as Europe.
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Post-War Alliances: Europe, 1947-1955
The American response to Soviet
expansion in Europe was based upon the policy called "containment."
Articulated first by American diplomat George Kennan and then by President
Harry Truman (see Documenting the Modern World, pp. 192-194,
196-198), containment meant preventing any further Soviet or communist
expansion. President Truman's 1947 address to Congress talks about the
Greek Civil War, a conflict in which American arms and money were pitted
against Soviet arms and money, each side intervening to influence a struggle
inside a third country. This was only the first of many such conflicts
around the world during the course of the Cold War. "Containment" had three
dimensions: political, economic, and military. The American military response--an
alliance that initially consisted of twelve countries-- was organized in
1949 as NATO--the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (Document 10-4). The political and
economic dimensions were addressed in The Marshall Plan, an aid
program that targeted assistance to all countries needing help to rebuild
their economic infrastructure. Known officially as the European
Recovery Act of 1948 (Document 10-5), the Marshall Plan
served two American policy purposes: it reconstructed the roads, railroads,
and factories of important trade partners in Western Europe, and it diminished
the appeal of communism by helping these war-damaged nations to raise their
living standards more quickly (see The Modern World, pp.
278-279).
| Stalin did not want American influence
affecting the communist states under his control.And when West Germany
joined NATO in 1954, the Soviet response was
the Warsaw
Pact (Document 10-6), a Soviet-dominated military alliance
formed in 1955. Similarly, the Soviets sponsored the Council of Mutual
Economic Assistance, or COMECON, an economic alliance that tied
the economies of Eastern Europe firmly to the Soviet Union. This Treaty
Map (Document 10-7) shows the division of Europe and North America
according to the two military treaties (Note: when you go to this site
click on the arrows to see additional Cold War maps.) Since the demise
of the Soviet Union in 1991, many researchers have used newly declassified
documents to re-examine the events of the Cold War. For
an interesting example of this kind of historical research, see the Parallel
History Project (Document 10-8), an online resource that compares
the histories of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. |
Explain this cartoon's point of view
about Stalin and the Marshall Plan.
Image source:
www.charleslipson.com/speechtopics/
Turning-Points-of-the-Twentieth-Century.htm
|
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Revolution in China, 1949
| In 1949, Communists under the leadership of
Mao Zedong took power in China and declared the creation of the People's
Republic (Document 10-9). Mao's leadership and struggles for power
dated to the 1920s. After China's liberation from Japanese rule and the
end of World War II in 1945, the Communists fought for four years against
Chiang Kaishek's Guomindang or Nationalist party, the political descendants
of Sun Yatsen.
The defeat of the Nationalists (they went into exile on the island of Taiwan
and established a separate Republic of China there) set the terms for the
Cold War in Asia. This Statement
by Dean Acheson (Document 10-10), the American Secretary
of State, shows the American government view of the Chinese Revolution
as a disaster, the result of Nationalist ineptitude and the Communists'
"ruthless discipline and fanatical zeal." China and the Soviet Union, the
two great communist powers, maintained an alliance through most of the
1950s, though by the 1960s the relationship had deteriorated into hostility,
as this 1967 Soviet
Newspaper Article (Document 10-11) suggests. By the next year,
in 1968, armed conflict between them broke out over territory on the northeastern
Chinese border. |
Mao Zedong
|
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War in Korea, 1950-1953
| The Korean peninsula juts out of northeastern
Asia, bordered by China to the north and by the Sea of Japan to the east.
Korea was a colonial possession of the Japanese empire from 1910 to 1945.
When Japan surrendered that year, Korea was divided into two regions, a
Soviet-occupied zone in the north, and an American-occupied zone in the
south. Following the pattern seen in Europe, two distinct countries and
societies emerged, communist and capitalist, in the two regions. War in Korea began in June 1950 when the
communist north, supported by Stalin, invaded the south. (See The Modern World,
pp. 285-286.) Within days U.S. President Truman had authorized an American
military response through the United Nations. Listen to an Audio
Clip of |
|
President Truman's July 19, 1950 radio announcement (Document
10-12). Chinese intervention on the
side of the communist north,
and a major American troop commitment, made the Korean War the first (but
not the last) significant Cold War military conflict. To learn more about
the Korean War, you can explore the pages on this site maintained by the
Harry
S. Truman Presidential Library (Document 10-13). The two photographs
below can be found on this site.
U.S. Army Battlefield First Aid Station, Korean War
Civilian refugees fleeing south, Korean War
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The Second Phase--1956-1980
The Cold War was a struggle between two competing ideologies--communist
and capitalist--that emerged in the nineteenth century and fought for dominance
in the twentieth century. Each superpower attempted, by force when necessary,
to create and to maintain allies that followed their ideological path,
and to crush any threat to their continued influence. Although each superpower
projected force all around the world, each also had a particular "sphere
of influence" which they guarded with great care. For the Soviets, this
was Eastern Europe; for the United States, it was Latin America. These
geographic realities help to explain, for example, why the Soviets built
a wall in Berlin in 1961--where capitalist West Berlin threatened communist
East Germany--and why successive American presidents have spent so much
time worrying about Fidel Castro after his communist movement seized power
in Cuba in 1959 (see The Modern World, pp. 293-295). While
each superpower projected its influence around the globe in these years
with mixed success (the U.S. in Iran, for example, and the Soviets in Egypt),
in this period and in the final Cold War period that followed in the 1980s,
Eastern Europe and Latin America were the regions in which each superpower
had the most at stake.
The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe
| The states of eastern Europe lived under the
Soviet domination Stalin established in 1946-1947. Communist regimes created
political and economic systems that closely resembled the Soviet model:
centralized planning, state control of the economy, and a repressive political
system that allowed no dissent and imprisoned or executed opponents. The
history of Soviet control in Europe was marked by periodic rebellion and
repression. East Germans in 1953, Hungarians in 1956, and Czechoslovakians
in 1968 all rose up against their governments and all faced violent repression.
In many ways, Poland was the most rebellious of the "satellite states,"
and in the end Polish opposition to communism during the 1980s led the
way toward the final demise of Soviet power (see Document 10-23,
below). |
Hungarian State Radio Headquarters in Budapest after the Soviet invasion, 1956
Image source:
athena.bl.uk/collections/easteuropean/
hungary56/hun56bibl.html
|
Resistance to Soviet rule was unintentionally strengthened
by the actions of Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin as Soviet
leader. In February 1956 Khrushchev delivered a speech to the Soviet
Communist Party in which he denounced Stalin (see Documenting the
Modern World, pp. 204-205). Khrushchev's speech inspired a modest
"thaw" in Soviet Cold War policies. But more importantly, by the summer,
rumblings of revolt were coming from Poland and Hungary. In Hungary, the
revolt turned into full-scale revolution (see The Modern World,
pp. 292-293), and prompted a full-scale Soviet invasion. Read this List
of Demands (Document 10-14) issued by Hungarian university students
in October. How do you think Hungarian communists (and their Soviet protectors)
reacted to these ideas? Twelve years later, Czechoslovakia experienced
a similar episode. The "Prague
Spring" (Document 10-15) was a political and cultural movement
to create "socialism with a human face." Again, the Soviets (since 1964
led by Leonid Brezhnev) intervened to support the Czechoslovakian
communist government by sending 250,000 armored troops into the Czech capital,
Prague. As in Hungary in 1956, a reform movement was crushed and communist
power in Eastern Europe maintained. For the Soviets, invasion was justified
by the "Brezhnev Doctrine," which held that they had the right to intervene
if communism seemed threatened in any Warsaw Pact country.
The political cartoon above was published August 27, 1968--one
week after the Soviet invasion--in a Czechoslovak humor magazine called
"Porcupine." The large figure in the middle represents Brezhnev, and the
four figures behind him are the leaders of Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany,
and Hungary, Warsaw Pact allies who all contributed troops to the invasion
of Prague.
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The United States in Latin America,
Part I
The projection of U.S. economic and military
power into Latin America began in earnest after the Spanish-American
War of 1898 (see the map on p. 143 of The Modern World).
During the Cold War the same pattern continued, now recast by Americans and
their Latin American allies as a battle to contain communism. Three episodes in
this history--in Guatemala in 1954, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and in
Chile in 1973--illustrate how the United States reacted to perceived threats in
its "sphere." In all three countries leftist, reform-minded political movements
were understood in Washington as versions of Soviet-inspired communism. In
Guatemala and Chile, elected governments were overthrown by rebels--aided by the
CIA--and were replaced by highly repressive, conservative governments friendlier
to American economic and political interests. For a good introduction to the
CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, see this
University of San Diego site on Guatemala,
1954 (Document 10-16). You can also read the original CIA documents
on Guatemala at this National
Security Archive site (Document 10-17) maintained by George
Washington University. (You can also search the CIA
Database yourself (Document 10-18.)
| In the
Dominican Republic, U.S. troops invaded Santo Domingo in 1965 to reverse a
coup supported by Dominican leftists. President Lyndon
Johnson--with one eye on Cuba and Fidel Castro--viewed the coup in the
Dominican Republic as a prelude to a communist takeover, although the official
reason for the invasion was to protect American lives and property. Not
all Americans agreed. Senator William Fulbright--who was also an early
opponent of the Vietnam War--argued strongly that President Johnson's Dominican
policy was wrong. See Fulbright
Speech (Document 10-19). |
U.S. Soldiers in the Dominican Republic, 1965
Image source:
www.rose-hulman.edu/~delacova/dominican-intervention.htm |
| Two online sources
provide somewhat different versions of the coup that overthrew Chilean
President Salvador Allende in 1973. This
Federation of American Scientists site (Document 10-20)
presents a fairly balanced view of events, while this excerpt from a book
called
Killing Hope (Document 10-21) is much more critical of U.S.
intervention. An eloquent
Elegy for Allende (Document 10-22--in Spanish) was written three
days after the event by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. See also "Death
of Victor Jara" (Documenting the Modern World, pp. 248-249),
for a graphic description of the violent results of the Chilean coup. |
The Presidential Palace in Santiago, Chile, 1973
Image source:
w1.875.telia.com/~u87515926/chile40.htm
President Allende was killed in the palace during the coup. |
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The Final Phase:
Resistance and Revolution in Eastern Europe, 1980-1989
| In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President of
the United States. A longtime self-proclaimed enemy of communism, Reagan
came to office declaring the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and immediately
began a massive expansion of American military strength. Cold War logic
dictated that the Soviets had to match American military spending, but
the Soviet economy was unable to sustain that pace of spending without
damaging an already weak consumer economy plagued by shortages and poor
quality. In part because their standard of living was declining, few Soviet
citizens had much faith in the communist ideology at the heart of Soviet
society. When he assumed power in 1985 (Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982),
Mikhail
Gorbachev was acutely aware of these problems. His policies of glasnost
and perestroika were radical attempts to save a dying system (see
pp. 300-305 of The Modern World). Gorbachev also faced severe
problems in the Eastern European states.
In Poland, a trade union and political movement called |
 |
Solidarity
(Document 10-23) had emerged in the port city of Gdansk among shipyard
workers. By 1980 Solidarity was openly challenging communist rule throughout
Poland. Polish communist loyalists, backed by Brezhnev in Moscow, cracked
down on the movement in 1981. But after 1985, Gorbachev's glasnost
policies inside the Soviet Union encouraged greater opposition to communism
throughout Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, a playwright and political
dissident named Vaclav Havel emerged as the moral leader of the
opposition. Imprisoned by the Czech regime after 1968, his many writings
on totalitarianism and dissent gained him a large following throughout
Europe and were studied especially closely by Eastern European dissidents
in the 1980s. "The
Power of the Powerless," (Document 10-24), written in 1978, was
Havel's most important political statement. In this essay he describes
how individuals living in an oppressive system can find ways to resist
that system and "live in truth." In 1989, the "Year
of Miracles" (Document 10-25), the momentum of reform reached a
critical mass. Before the year was out, a series of largely peaceful revolutions
ended communist rule in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
and Bulgaria. Only Romania, ruled by the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu,
suffered significant violence. On November 9, the Berlin
Wall (Document 10-26), the most powerful symbol of the Cold War
in Europe, was literally knocked to the ground (see the photograph below).
Two years later, in 1991, communism in Russia went the same way, dumped
into "the ashheap of history." Although Mikhail Gorbachev is rightly remembered
as the political leader whose actions ended the Cold War in Europe (see,
for example, his 1988 speech to the United Nations in Documenting
the Modern World), others also played critical roles. One of the
most heroic was the Russian nuclear physicist and political dissident Andrei
Sakharov (Document 10-27), whose clear thinking and great courage
made him a truly giant moral figure in the late history of the Soviet Union.
The End of the Berlin Wall, 1989
Image source: college.hmco.com/history/west/mosaic/chapter16/image234.html
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The United States and Latin America,
Part II
| For Latin America (and especially for the
Central American region south of Mexico and north of Colombia), the election
of Ronald Reagan and more aggressive U.S. Cold War policies meant that
the 1980s were a bloody decade. President Reagan reversed the emphasis
of his predecessor,
Jimmy Carter (1976-1980), who had made support for human rights a
centerpiece of foreign policy. For Reagan, only the Cold War fight against
communism mattered when it came to formulating foreign policy. Throughout
Central America, the 1980s saw civil conflict between left and
right wing political groups. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, brutal civil wars
took thousands of lives, while smaller conflicts spilled into Honduras and
Guatemala. The United States government was deeply involved in these wars, which
were the "last act" of the Cold War on the American continent. |
 |
As in the earlier stages of the Cold War, and despite
President Carter's short-lived efforts to modify it, U.S. policy in Central
America during the 1980s was based upon supporting the status-quo arrangements--alliances
of military and business interests with powerful friends in Washington--that
historically had dominated these lands. The Reagan administration considered
any political movement that challenged these interests in any way to be
communist, and therefore to be tools of the Soviet Union. In Nicaragua,
the leftist Sandinista movement overthrew a corrupt and oppressive
regime ruled by Anastasio Somoza, a longtime U.S. ally, in 1979. In El
Salvador, an armed rebellion inspired both by Sandinista success and by
the Catholic "liberation theology" movement threatened the existing regime.
To understand the origins of this movement, see "On
the Development of Peoples" (Document 10-28), a 1967 statement
(or "encyclical") by Pope Paul VI. The 1980 murder of Salvadoran Archbishop
Oscar Romero (Document 10-29), the most prominent Central American
spokesman for "liberation theology", was a key event. Reagan's government
responded to the upheaval in Central America with billions in money and
weapons and logistical support aimed at overthrowing the Sandinista regime
and beating back the Salvadoran revolutionaries. This 1985
Reagan Speech (Document 10-30) clearly articulates the ideological
basis of his policies. Much less clear at the time were the methods used
to carry out those policies. The most notorious became known as the Iran-Contra
Scandal (Document 10-31), a scheme carried out by a U.S. Marine colonel
and national security functionary named Oliver North, who illegally sold
weapons to Iran (in 1985, like today, a mortal American enemy) and secretly funnelled Iranian money to the Nicaraguan "Contras," the U.S.-backed insurgency
fighting the Sandinistas. Thanks to Declassified
Documents and Investigative Journalism (Document 10-32), we now
know that the Reagan administration pursued its "freedom-fighting" policies
in Central America with the help of dictators and drug traffickers such
as Panama's Manuel Noriega, who was later removed from power by
an American invasion in 1989 when Cold War conflicts had diminished and he was
no longer useful to American policy. As the Cold War wound to an end after 1989,
Latin American conflicts in general--like civil conflicts in Africa and
Asia--attracted much less attention in Washington. With supremacy over
a collapsing Soviet Union no longer at stake, most Americans and their
elected leaders essentially lost interest in the rest of the world. That disinterest
lasted throughout most of the 1990s, until Americans were shocked into
a new recognition of global interactions again on September 11, 2001.
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