A History of the Cold War

Russia and the West had harboured mutual suspicions of one another since before the Bolshevik revolution. Russia had aggressively sought territory from European states during the long demise of the Ottoman Empire. In the mid-twentieth century the anti-Russian role that in the past been had played by Britain, France and Austria was now adopted by the US. The seeds were sown during the inter-war years - Western intervention in the Russian civil war and the view that had been adopted by many in the West that Nazism would be a bulwark against Bolshevism increased Stalin's hostility to the Western democracies. What cemented this resentment was the fact that the West had dithered for so long to open a second front, leaving the Russians to face the full brunt of the Reich's armies, indeed many considered it to be intentionally done in order that the Germany and Russia would destroy one another. In turn the West were deeply suspicious of Russia's belligerent expansive policies and Stalin's treatment of Poland caused this divide to open even further. Poor old Poland, if you look at a map of Europe over the past centuries you will see that it has moved about quite a lot, parts have been chopped off and parts have been added on. In the post World War II talks, Stalin insisted that Eastern Poland, seized as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 should remain Russian territory, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed and compensated Poland with former German territories in the West. But Stalin also wanted the type of government that he chose to be in power in Poland, hence his refusal to help the Poles who rose in the Warsaw Rising in 1944. In January 1945 Stalin recognised the Communist dominated Lublin committee as the government of Poland as opposed to the elected body. Later that year at the Yalta conference it was agreed that the Lublin committee would be expanded to include non-communists in a Provisional Government. However, by mid-1945 all key posts were held by Communists and in a dubious election in 1947, the Communists won an overwhelming majority.

This process was repeated in other Eastern European countries and as the Red Army liberated Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary communist governments were installed. Of course another bone of contention was what to do with Germany, the Allies could not agree over this issue, showing a tremendous lack of trust in one another. They divided up Germany so that East became moulded in the image of Russia while the West followed the West. Churchill was to define the climate of time and indeed the guts of the century when he famously declared ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent'. No direct confrontation had yet occurred but that was all to change in Greece. During the occupation of Greece in the Second World War the communist resistance movement (EAM) trained a guerrilla army (ELAS) with the intention of achieving a communist revolution similar to Tito's in Yugoslavia. After British forces liberated Athens in October 1944 the ELAS and the nationalist forces clashed, a truce was called in February 1945 which left some two-thirds of the country in the hands of the communists. However, the communists fared badly at the subsequent elections in March 1946, Stalin intervened supporting a Communist rising which resulted in a renewal of the civil war. Britain could no longer support the non-communist Greek government, they pleaded to the American administration for support, who at the behest of Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson formulated the Truman Doctrine. It was not specifically related to Greece, it was so much more than that, it illustrated that the US was finally abandoning its isolation replacing Britain as the strong power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

The Truman Doctrine was not confined just to Europe, indeed American involvement in South-East Asia stemmed from the Doctrine. A consequence of it was the Marshall Plan which was enunciated by General George C Marshall, US Secretary of State with a view to stopping shortages of food, fuel and raw materials which he believed would make Europe an easy prey for communism. Although Eastern bloc countries were invited to partake in the Plan, it was only the Western European states that accepted, enthusiastically creating the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) to help in the administration of the Plan. It proved to be a major success, with industrial production rising by twenty-five per cent in two years. Despite the evident benefits of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Czechoslovakia, the only Eastern European country to have retained a democratic government, joined the Soviet Bloc in 1948. The Czechs were still disgusted with the West since the Munich sell-out of them in 1938, preferring to side with the Russians who had liberated them in 1945. However, the majority of the government was non-communist but the communists originally worked well in the system, initiating a programme of land reform and nationalisation of major industry thus making them popular with the masses. However, the communists began purging the police force of non-communists and taking over positions of power and the non-communist foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found dead in suspicious circumstances. Eventually, the communists launched a coup d'etat, seizing power and probing a long red finger into the heart of the Western democracies.

America swore that it was as far as communism would get, the Russians had other ideas, the scene was set for a show-down which was to be acted out in Berlin. By 1947, the Western powers had merged their zones of occupation, ended denazification, released prisoners of war, began a programme of central German government and relaxed economic restrictions on German economies. These reforms angered Stalin who viewed it as weak and granting an opportunity for the Nazis to rise again. The issue of currency reform was in many ways the straw that broke the camel's back. The Allies had decided to introduce a new currency to end black trading and instigate an economic revival - it worked - production rose by fifty per cent in six months. The Russians responded by introducing a new currency in their zone, thus further widening the division. Subsequently, they blockaded Berlin on 24 June 1945. The Allies organised a massive air-lift to get supplies to their beleaguered zones in Berlin. Stalin realising he had failed agreed to reopen road and rail links in May 1949. However, the Cold War was to spread far from the European arena. Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, following the Second World War, the Americans and the Soviets agreed that they should occupy Korea. The demarcation line between the Communist North, under Kim Il Sung an the South under the right-wing President Syngman Rhee was the thirty-eight parallel. Both leaders desired to see the country united under their respective systems.

On 25 June 1950, the North launched a surprise attack that swiftly saw the capture of Seoul, overrunning nearly all of the South with the exception of the important port of Pusan. The UN found their hands were tied because of the Russian boycott so the vast majority of troops rallied to defend the South were American. The American offensive was highly successful, regaining all territory by October 1950. They pushed on invading the North causing the Chinese to enter the war who succeeding in rolling the American forces all the way back into the South and capturing Seoul. The war now settled into a battle of attrition, peace talks began in 1951, an agreement reached in 1953 settled on the 38th parallel dividing North and South and thus returning everything very much to the way it was before the war. To achieve this over four million Korean citizens had perished. Similarly, at the 1954 Geneva Conference Vietnam was divided along the 17th degree of latitude with the North been under the control of the communist Ho Chi Minh government. It was seen universally as a breakthrough and a series of conferences were held throughout the rest of the fifties which led to something of a thaw in the Cold War. However it was far from a total melting as the Russian invasion of Hungary and the invasion of Suez by Britain and France attested to. The thaw completely ended in May 1960 when a US spy plane was shot down over Russia, the crisis escalated into the Russian premier's demand that the Allies completely withdraw from Berlin, which the Allies regarded as an attempt to incorporate the entire city into East Germany. Indeed, the situation in Berlin had become worrying for the communists as tens of thousands of people arrived in reception centres in the West during 1960.

This had the effect of disgracing the supposedly socialist showpiece of East Berlin and clearing it of vast numbers of skilled personnel. Reacting to this, the East German army closed all crossings from East Berlin to the West on 13 August 1961 and in subsequent weeks erected the now infamous Berlin wall. Paradoxically, the Wall contributed to a peaceful co-existence as it removed Berlin from being one of the most dangerous issues in the Cold War, the conflict once again moved to different arenas, one of which was Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro's communist forces overthrew the dictatorship of Batista. In an attempt to kick-start the economy, many American owned industries were nationalised, a move which seriously aggravated the US. They refused to purchase Cuba's main export, sugar which was in turn bought by Russia, bringing Castro closer to Moscow resulting in Russia building missile sites in Cuba which could threaten American cities. On 16 October, American spy planes procured aerial photographs showing ballistic missiles with atomic warheads which were on their way to Cuba. US President Kennedy ordered a blockade to prevent the ships arriving reaching Cuba, after a tentative stand-off where the whole world was held in the balance, the Russians eventually withdrew, the world had come to the brink of nuclear war. Throughout the sixties the Cold War was marked by the Soviet Union and the US doing their utmost to retain their respective spheres of influence. In 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson landed troops on the Dominican Republic with a view to preventing what the US administration styled as another Cuban revolution. In 1968, the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring of Czechoslovakia. Again in 1965, Johnson sent troops to South Vietnam to bolster the faltering anti-communist government becoming embroiled in the region for a decade. From the seventies there was an easing of tensions, a détente between the two old foes. The rise of China, Japan and Western Europe and the rise of African nationalism coupled with the disunity of the communist alliance augured a new international politic.