Cold War: Rivalry Mistrust & Accord

The Soviet Union, Britain and the USA were stalwart allies in 1941 BUT

the ailliance was held together by a common enemy and fissures in this alliance began as early as 1942 (no clear agreement on what the post-war world would look like).

What happened in 1939?

• Nazi-Soviet Pact

• German invasion of Poland

• British declartion of war on Germany

What happened in 1940?

• Chruchill becomes the Prime Minister

• Fall of France

What happened in 1941?

• Lend-Lease Act

• Axis army initiation of Operation Barbarossa against the USSR

• Japanese bomb US naval base at Pearl Harbor

• USA declares war on Japan

• German and Italian declarations of war against the USA

What happened in 1942?

• Battle of Midway

What happened in 1943?

• Soviet victory in Battle of Shanghai

• Italian surrender and Mussolini deposed

• Cairo conference

• Teheran conference

What happened in 1944?

• D-Day

• Percentages Agreement

What happened in 1945?

• Yalta conference

• German and Japanese surrender

• USA detonation of atom bomb (Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

• Potsdam conference

What happened in 1946?

• Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’

• Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech

What happened in 1947?

• Truman Doctrine

• Marshall Plan

What happened in 1948?

• Czechoslovak coup

• Berlin Blockade an Berlin Airlift

What happened in 1949?

• Creation of NATO

• Creation of FRG and CDR

• Soviet detonation of atom bomb

• Communist victory in Chinese Civil War

Why was the Grand Alliance formed?

• The attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 rallied the powers, and Pearl Harbor in December 1941 accelerated agreements

• Not a binding agreement but a statement that the common goal was to first defeat Germany, then Japan, and Italy was unimportant

• American and British governments had to launch propaganda to improve public opinion on the Soviets (excluding the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Stalin was Uncle Joe)

What were the fissures in the Grand Alliance?

• Roosevelt delayed the second front in western Europe in 1942, even though the Soviets responded with an inexhaustible source of manpower to stop Hitler

• USA and Britain defeated the Axis in North Africa in 1943 and began attacking Italy in July, but this was not enough for Stalin

• Stalin wanted to pressure Germany and wouldn’t involve himself in Asia until the second front was opened

• Atlantic Charter (August 1941): employ full military and economic resources and cooperate with the Allies (no separate peace deal and unconditional German surrender)

Change and how it contributed to the breakdown of the Grand Alliance

• Roosevelt and Churchill were good friends, and in Casablanca, January 1943, they wanted unconditional surrenders to destroy ideologies based on the “conquest and subjugation of other people”

• Tehran, autumn 1943: ideological clashes and Churchill’s pragmatic Percentages Agreement contradicted Roosevelt’s idealism

• Due to substantial losses, the USSR wanted sympathetic regimes and Poland (Tehran)

• Limited room for compromise as Churchill and Stalin didn’t understand US anti-imperialism and Churchill and Roosevelt opposed USSR expansion

How did Wilsonian ideas and the 1943 Cairo Conference contribute to the breakdown of the Grand Alliance?

Wilsonian ideology of self-determination, collective security and free trade contradicted Stalin’s expansionism and Churchill’s protection of the British Empire. Made China into one of the ‘four policemen’, which alienated Stalin and threatened British colonies.

How is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” (1946) an ideological catalyst for the Cold War?

Soviet hostility was not a reaction to Western actions but was rooted in internal "neurotic" insecurities and Marxist-Leninist dogma, only responsive to the “logic of force.” Kennan provided the Truman administration with the ideological ammunition to pivot toward the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

How did the implementation of the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshall Plan (1948) serve to institutionalize the Cold War and finalize the breakdown of the Grand Alliance?

The Truman Doctrine universalized ideological conflicts in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) into a global zero-sum crusade against communism. The Marshall Plan leveraged $13 billion to integrate Western Europe into capitalism.

To what extent did the creation of the CIA (1947) and the adoption of NSC-68 (1950) signal a shift from "passive containment" to "globalized interventionism"?

The establishment of the CIA introduced "plausible deniability" as a core instrument of foreign policy. By funding media, influencing elections (Italy/France), and orchestrating coups (Iran/Guatemala). NSC-68 provided the justification for a massive, permanent increase in defence spending.

The Russian Revolution of 1917

Lenin’s abrupt exit from World War I via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk angered Western Allies. USA, British, and French troops intervened in the Russian Civil War to try to defeat the Red Army, creating lasting Soviet resentment.

Yalta, February 1945

• Split Germany into 4 military occupation zones for the USA, Britain, France, and the USSR

• Agreed to reorganize the Polish government and promised free democratic elections, though the Soviets later broke this pledge

• Started discussion on veto powers for the Security Council

Anglo-Soviet Percentage Agreement (October 1944)

A secret, informal arrangement between Churchill and Stalin. It allotted percentage-based spheres of influence in Eastern and Southeastern Europe to the Western Allies and the USSR.

Romania: 90% Soviet / 10% Western Allies

Greece: 90% British (with U.S. agreement) / 10% Soviet

Potsdam July–August 1945

• USSR was permitted to extract reparations primarily from its own Eastern zone

• Shifted Poland’s borders westward to the Oder-Neisse line, solidifying Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe

• Truman subtly disclosed the successful test of the atomic bomb to Stalin (but he already knew), bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki was not disclosed to Stalin, perhaps to prevent Russians trying to argue for parts of Japan

The conferences as whole achieved what?

Signaled efforts to keep the wartime alliance to stabilize the world and not just Europe. The UN is the biggest example of the 3 powers wanting other countries to participate.

Stalin’s concern about post-war Poland and what were the reasons behind this?

1. Flat topography and invaded via Poland 3x in 130 years (1812, 1914, 1941).

2. 
   

How did the Soviet Union use Czechoslovakia to consolidate its power over Eastern Europe?

• Local communists seized absolute power in Prague in February 1948 under pressure from Moscow and the threat of Soviet intervention

• Manufacturing base was redirected to supply up to 85% of Eastern Bloc military equipment

• Jan Masaryk, the only remaining pro-Western member of cabinet, whose fatal fall from a Foreign Ministry window has long been investigated as a Soviet-backed assassination

How did Stalin gain a foothold in Hungary after WW2?

• The Jan 20, 1945 Moscow Alliance created the Allied Control Commission headed by the USSR

• $300m in reparations and 400 ‘German’ factories to the USSR

• Created the Supreme Economic Council in late 1945 to bypass parliament and have a central command economy

How did Stalin justify the extraction and subjugation of Hungary?

• A victorious country demands to assert its rights because the vanquished country started the war against it (1941 invasion of the Soviet Union)

• Prevent Eastern Europe from being a staging ground for hostile actions

• Liberation from fascist rule under Nazi occupation in March 1944

Effects of Stalin’s policy in Hungary

• Article 11

Marxist theory of states

Progression from primitive communism to communism can skip stages because of continuous revolution and aid from other countries.

How did George Orwell see the Cold War?

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he predicted that there is ‘a peace that is no peace’ where the US and USSR would be ‘unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war’