How did the Cold War actually start?
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5yr old version comin up!
A lot of countries fought in WW2. Russia goes wild and performs crazy good towards the end. The USA goes “dang that’s a powerful country with a very different ideology than ours(communism vs capitalism)”, they could potentially spread their way, to other countries. USA doesn’t likey.
US drops da bomb on japan to win WW2 while also trying to show russia that they da boss.
This follows by both the countries spying on each other while also trying to prove their Dick’s bigger. We refer to these actions and this period as the cold war!
Consolidating power locally on both sides of the world, made each side observe the strength of the other. That made theoretical military scenarios to be analyzed, measuring the military power and ideological goals. When the atomic bomb became a reality, it accelerated the tensions of the scenarios. The ideological difference was just one ingredient, military strength one more. Throw in imperial history on both sides and a cold war was inevitable. The frozen lockdown between the two sides allowed them to keep other countries in check while consolidating power.
Meanwhile, people are trying to escape communist countries. The iron wall had to be constructed to prevent this. Cubans risk everything to escape. North Koreans risk it all to escape. Etc.
Tensions between the West and the USSR were present almost since the very beginning. Shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks broke off Russia’s previous alliances, refused to pay its foreign debts, and then called for a global revolution by the working classes against capitalism. This angered and unsettled many Western governments, who responded by diplomatically isolating the Bolshevik government and supporting the counter-revolutionary White armies. During the subsequent Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks defeated the Whites and the Western intervention forces pulled out, but Bolshevik attempts to reconquer the former Russian Empire were only partially successful. Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland managed to remain independent. Poland was particularly seen as a valuable ally against the USSR by the Western governments, as they had successfully defeated the Red Army in 1920.
Around 1921, the Bolsheviks temporarily shelved their goal of causing a global revolution and re-established dipolmatic relations with the West. Some were fairly quick to do so, with Germany even agreeing to military cooperation. The USA, meanwhile, refused to recognize the USSR until 1933. This was partly the result of Stalin’s “socialism in one country” policy to strengthen communism in the USSR first before attempting expansion. However, tensions and suspicions toward the Soviets never disappeared. The Soviet government continued to support communist parties around the world and rejected their cooperation with other left-wing parties.
These policies were revised in the 1930s though, as fascist movements (most notably in Germany and Japan) gained more power and influence. Suddenly, Soviet foreign policy became more focused on containing fascism, so foreign communist parties were encouraged to form united fronts with other parties for this purpose. Western powers, while nervous about German, Italian, and Japanese expansionism, were still suspicious of Soviet intentions and reluctant to cooperate with them. The appeasement of Germany in 1938 then caused a reassessment of Soviet foreign policy, as Stalin increasingly felt that the Western powers (mainly Britain and France) weren’t interested in containing Germany. Then, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Stalin realigned the USSR with Germany to divide up Eastern Europe and avoid conflict between the two in the near future.
During the early years of WWII, the Soviets were seen by many Western governments as effectively German allies. Dividing up Poland, invading parts of Finland, and annexing the Baltic States and NE Romania allowed the USSR to expand considerably further west. Though neither Britain nor France ever declared war, they still saw the Soviets as a potential enemy. Plans were even made in 1940 to bomb Soviet Caucasian oil fields to prevent oil from being sold to Germany. This changed when Germany suddenly invaded the USSR in 1941. By now, Germany was clearly the bigger threat in the eyes of the Western powers, so the Soviets became allies out of necessity. American and British aid helped the Red Army recover from its initial defeats and eventually push back by the end of 1942.
Though they were allies, the USSR and the Western powers (mainly Britain and the USA) had many conflicting goals for the end of the war. Soviet territorial and political gains were seen as inevitable, but the Western allies hoped to limit them as much as possible. They hoped to establish friendly democratic governments across the Axis countries and their occupied lands (including re-establishing Poland). Stalin, meanwhile, hoped to secure Soviet wartime gains, set up friendly communist governments across Central and Eastern Europe, and create a buffer zone to protect the USSR from future attacks. These differences caused tensions right up until the end of the war, but were gradually settled through a series of conferences between Allied leaders (Tehran in December 1943, Moscow in 1944, Yalta in February 1945, Potsdam in July 1945).
Ultimately, it was decided to divide Europe into spheres of Soviet and Western influence. Western Europe, western and southern Germany, Italy, and Greece would remain in the Western sphere. Eastern Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary would be under the Soviet sphere. Yugoslavia and Albania would be “border” areas with split influence. Czechoslovakia and Poland were to be re-established under democratic governments of national unity (which allowed communist participation). However, the implementation of these agreements over the following years proved to be messy.
Largely due to Soviet meddling, any remaining democratic governments under its sphere of influence were soon replaced by communist ones. Meanwhile, communist parties in some countries in the Western sphere of influence were suppressed or marginalized to prevent them from coming to power. The Allies had also occupied Iran during WWII, but when pulling out in 1946, the Soviets briefly tried to establish new communist satellite states in its occupation zone instead. This caused a crisis at the newly-established United Nations, resulting in the Soviets eventually agreeing to pull out. There was also a concurrent crisis involving Turkey in 1946, where the Soviets demanded joint control over the Turkish Straits and then territorial concessions when they refused.
These crises helped to once again reignite Western fears of Soviet expansionism and communist revolutions. The ongoing Chinese and Greek civil wars, both of which involved communist uprisings, did nothing to calm those fears. Churchill famously delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946, which Stalin regarded as antagonistic toward the USSR. Many historians will say that the Cold War “officially” began on March 12, 1947, when President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine, declaring the policy of the United States to resist Soviet and communist expansion.
General Brown: So they started doing psy-research because they thought we were doing psy-research, when in fact we weren’t doing psy-research?
Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: Yes sir. But now that they *are* doing psy-research, we’re gonna have to do psy-research, sir.
[leans forward]
Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: We can’t afford to have the Russian’s leading the field in the paranormal.
Despite being allies in WW2 relations between the US and the USSR were already tense (because of both communism and Russia demanding buffer zones on their western border because of long-standing geopolitical insecurities). When the war was over and Germany was defeated the two weren’t going to be pals, but this situation was exacerbated considerably with the dropping of the atomic bombs (which were, according to articles and other I’ve seen about Truman’s diaries, dropped as much to intimidate the USSR as to defeat Japan.) From that point it’s a story as old as time, rivals vying to increase their own influence especially in Europe and to limit the others’ influence in the same areas.
Certainly some of it was ideological in nature, with the US seeking to contain the spread of communism largely because it negatively impacted the US’s ability to throw its weight around, but it was largely a result of competing geopolitical interests.
After WWII the Soviets annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and all of Belarus and Ukraine.
Poland, East Germany and a bunch of other eastern European countries were satellite states of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets wanted to push west and dominate **all of Europe**.
Britain and France didn’t like that idea. America didn’t like it either, for entirely selfish reasons.
Nobody was in the mood for another conventional war.
US said to the Soviets: invade any more of Europe and we’ll just nuke you.
Then the Soviets developed nuclear weapons and were like nuke us and we’ll nuke you back twice as hard.
Anyway, this stand-off was known as the Cold War.
A fear of communism.
The October Revolution in October 1917 was when the Russian Empire fell and the first communist nation rose.
The world was in the middle of WWI at the time, so Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were bigger concerns.
At first, we were really sure how it was gonna play out, and communism stayed pretty self contained to Russia.
Then, WWII happened and the Soviets really proved they were a powerhouse, and all of Eastern Europe fell to communism. Suddenly, communism was spreading. WWII happened, and all of these newly independent nations were forming from the former colonies of the European powers. This led to a scramble to extend the influence of the regining superpowers, being the US and USSR.
The invention of nuclear weapons and the concept of mutually assured destruction are what kept the war cold, rather than heating up into an actual war.
The closest we got to actual war would be the proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan, as well as a few near launches of nuclear warheads.
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