specification

The origins of the Cold War to 1945

  • The situation in 1941

  • Capitalism and Communism and general attitudes in East and West

wartime tensions in the Grand

  • Alliance

  • conferences: tensions and difficulties at Tehran, Yalta

and Potsdam

  • the ‘liberation of Europe in the East and West’

  • relations between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt (and later

Truman and Attlee).

The development of the Cold War

1946–1955

  • ‘Iron Curtain’ speech

  • Soviet control of Eastern Europe including Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia

  • The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Aid

  • Cominform and Comecon

  • conflicts over Germany including the Berlin blockade and airlift

  • creation of West and East Germany

  • NATO

  • the Warsaw Pact

  • atomic weapons.

The Cold War 1956–1984

  • The impact of the Hungarian Rising 1956

  • the Czech Crisis 1968

  • events in Poland 1956 and 1980–1981

  • developments in Germany, including rearmament of the Federal Republic andits inclusion in NATO and the Berlin Wall

  • The arms race

  • Space Race

  • DĂ©tente

  • the SALT talks and Ostpolitik

  • Brezhnev Doctrine

  • the impact of the ‘new Cold War’ (1979–1985).

The end of the Cold War 1984–1995

  • Economic and social problems in the USSR and Eastern Europe

  • western influence

  • the pressure of the arms race

  • Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika,

  • Afghanistan,

  • events of 1989 in Eastern Europe;

  • the coup of 1991 and Russia under Yeltsin

  • reunification of Germany

  • civil war and the break-up of Yugoslavia to 1995.