4
A Level Paper 3 The Cold War M. Nichols SCIE 2010
THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR
(1945-50)
Definition: Martyn Walker calls it the “civil war of the human race” about the balance of global power, with an ideological element. It was the indirect conflict between the USA and USSR that went on from 1945-1991. And it was expressed in everything from an arms and space race to chess tournaments - and even ice hockey matches.
The Long-Term Reasons
Many regard the Cold War as having roots going back decades before the end of WWII in 1945.
Both sides did things that made the other mistrust them from the period 1917-1945.
Ideological Differences
The Cold War has often been seen as an ideological struggle between two mutually incompatible systems: capitalism and communism. Though this is a vast over-simplification, ideology did play a role. Ambrose and Brinkley certainly see its significance: “ideology cannot be ignored. Men like Truman, Harriman and Kennan were appalled by Russian brutality and Communist denial of the basic Western freedoms”.
USA/ USSR
Leadership
Election System
Economy
Freedoms
4
A Level Paper 3 The Cold War M. Nichols SCIE 2010
Note-Taking Exercise On ‘The Cold War – Beyond Ideology’ By Gregory Slysz
Read the article and makes notes on the following longer-term reasons for the Cold War. Remember you must summarise as clearly and concisely as possible the arguments employed by the various historians mentioned.
1. What is Slysz’s basic argument?
______
2. What is John Gaddis’ view on when the Cold War began?
______
3. Give two actions by Stalin that suggest he was a ‘tricky customer’
______
4. What does John Lukacs basically say about Stalin’s attitude towards ideology?
______
5. What do Donaldson and Nogee argue was Stalin’s approach?
______
6. What is Richard Pipes’ argument about Stalin?
______
7. What did Suvorov and Weeks controversially argue about Stalin’s foreign policy?
______
8. What does Martin van Creveld suggest Stalin was always planning to do?
______
9. What ‘glue’ disappeared to make the Wartime ‘Grand Alliance’ collapse?
______
10. What arguments are there that ideology did not always play a major role, in Cold War actions and alliances?
______
11. What six reasons does Slysz ultimately give for the Cold War coming about?
______
______
______
4
A Level Paper 3 The Cold War M. Nichols SCIE 2010
The Wartime Conferences – Yalta & Potsdam, 1945
During 1941, the US president, Franklin D. ______and the British Prime Minister, Winston ______, met on a battleship in the middle of the Atlantic and decided what type of world they were fighting for. This was known as the Atlantic Charter. However, their democratic, free-trade views and hopes for the future were not something likely to be held in common by the dictatorship that was the ______.
In 1943, at the Teheran conference, the leader of the USSR, Josef ______demanded that the British and ______open a second front in Western Europe to help ease the Soviet burden. He was very suspicious about the western allies who had always been anti-______.
Yalta - 'The Big Three'Yalta
In ______1945, at Yalta, the Big Three allied leaders:______, ______and ______met to discuss what to do with ______after the war was won. At this stage Hitler was still alive and the war was still to be won, and so relations were still amicable, though the Soviets did want to be ______with Germany than GB and the USA.
It was decided that:
· Germany would be divided into _____ zones. Each one would be occupied by one of the Allies: Britain, the USA, ______, and the USSR. The USSR was not happy about this but Britain and Churchill wanted ______to have a zone as well in order to balance out the Soviet and American dominance of Europe;
· The capital of Germany, ______would also be divided into ______sectors;
· Germany would be forced to pay ______, half of which would go to the USSR; and Germany would give land to Poland along the ______-______river line;
· Countries that had been occupied by Germany, including Poland would be free to ______governments of their choice;
· The USSR would declare war on ______three months after the end of the war against Germany;
· The ______, an organisation to discuss and settle world problems, would be set up to replace the discredited ______.
Potsdam
Held in______/_____1945, this conference confirmed the decisions made at Yalta in a number of areas.
· Germany was divided into ______zones, each occupied by one of the four Allies - Britain, ______, the USA, and the USSR;
· The capital ______was also divided into ______sectors, even though it was inside the ______zone; this would lead to enormous problems in the future!
· Germany would be run by a military ______and disarmed;
· Nazi leaders would be put on trial for war crimes at the German city of______;
· A policy of ______would take place in Germany to get rid of its fascist influences;
But there were disagreements and changes since Yalta and this made Potsdam far more tense:
· The war in ______was over and so the allies no longer needed each other so much;
· There was a new British prime minister, Clement______who was not used to dealing with Stalin;
· The new US President Harry ______was far more distrustful of the Soviets ______(and had announced that he was going to 'get tough with the Russians.'). He tried to insist on ______elections in the ______European countries that had been occupied by the USSR at the end of the war. The ______had continued to occupy the countries they had ‘liberated’ and refused to leave. The meeting broke up without agreement being reached on this issue;
· Stalin started going back on his promises at Yalta about allowing ____elections and he tried to grab more reparations and territory in eastern Europe (he demanded more reparations from the western sectors of Germany, for example);
· The Americans had just exploded an ______bomb and refused to share its secrets with the Soviets; the US president only told the British about it and not Stalin;
· When the Soviets did eventually attack ______in the Far East they did so to grab territory from ______and ______not to help the British and Americans;
These differences led to:
· A build-up of distrust and ______between the USA and the USSR, and even more distrust between Britain and the USSR; a British diplomat later accused Stalin of “grabbing” territory and breaking his promises made at ______;
· The breakdown of the alliance that had existed between the allies during the Second World War = the beginning of the ______.
Yalta and Potsdam really saw the start of the Cold War. Agreements over Poland were meaningless if both sides had different concepts of the term “democracy”. Plus Poland had been a corridor for invasion of Russia throughout its history (by the Swedes, Poles, French and Germans). This was something Stalin stressed and the West seemed, at best, indifferent to. France’s inclusion as one of the occupying powers as been regarded as insulting by Stalin, given how quickly France had folded and even collaborated with the Nazis.
The conferences helped to destroy American illusions and naivety. Averill Harriman, the US ambassador in Moscow, warned Truman of a new ‘barbarian (Soviet) invasion of Europe’. The US, literally, ‘losing’ a Soviet request for $6 billion loan deepened the mistrust. When it came to money though, the US was also not above back-stabbing the British! The A-Bomb not only damaged Soviet-US relations, but also Anglo-American ones, as Washington refused to share its secrets with their closest ally. The Bomb also meant the USSR’s help was not needed against Japan and allowed them to exclude the Soviets from Tokyo and the occupation of Japan itself.
George F. Kennan, author of containment
Truman – Cold War originator?
However, Walker points out Truman had not completely abandoned FDR’s traditions of trust. He:
l De-mobilized the US army at a rate of 15 000 men a day; so a army that had been 8 million strong in 1945, was by 1948 only 550 000 in number; the Soviet Red Army also shrank dramatically, but was still 3m strong by 1948;
l He was also prepared to share some atomic secrets (though not on how to manufacture a weapon) and set up the first international atomic agency, in 1946; this meant atom bombs outside the US were under the new Atomic Energy Commission’s control;
But the fact remains that Truman was the first Cold War president.
l He sacked his conciliatory Vice President Henry Wallace;
l To Ambrose and Brinkley Truman saw the USSR as a “barbaric nation bent on world conquest”;
l His military drew up a strategic plan to nuke twenty Soviet targets, of which Walker says:
“The importance of the ‘Strategic vulnerability’ paper should not be overrated, but the fact remains that just ten weeks after the end of WWII, US military planners were contemplating the targets of World War Three”.
The liberal, left-leaning Walker though still believes that neither Stalin nor Truman is to blame for the Cold War. He seems to want to put it down to the consequence of events and circumstances, and “2 mutually uncomprehending camps”. He even implies that had FDR lived (and circumstances been different) there might have been no Cold War in the first place.
Early US-Soviet responsibility for the Cold War 1945-6
Truman’s Actions / Stalin’s ActionsThe Iron Curtain Speech
Winston Churchill made a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March, 1946 claiming that Stalin was controlling and imprisoning all the old capitals of central and eastern Europe behind a communist ‘iron curtain’. He went on to talk also of an ideological threat. He was, in effect, speaking the language of US officialdom.
This highly dramatic speech, from a great orator, had a profound effect in the US. Initially, it was criticized by liberals as un-necessarily antagonistic. Truman, who had read the speech beforehand and fully approved of it, denied that he knew what was in it! However, Churchill had not been the first to bring the State Department’s attention to the Soviet threat. As early as 1944, Averill Harriman and George F. Kennan, US diplomats in Moscow, had pointed out the need for a policy of containment, and the threat the USSR posed.
In many ways Churchill’s speech was just a British echo of George F. Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946, which had warned in explicit terms about Stalin and his intentions, and was, according to Walker an invitation to a life and death struggle between East and West. As early as January, 1946, Truman had written he was “tired of babying the Soviets”. So, in many ways, official American reaction to Churchill’s speech was disingenuous.
Stalin, of course, saw it all very differently. He pointed out that ‘spheres of influence’ had been agreed upon at conferences in 1944 and 1945. The USSR would watch over Eastern Europe; GB could have Greece and the Mediterranean. The Balkans would be shared. He also pointed out that Prague (the capital of Czechoslovakia) far from being in Soviet hands had an independent government. The Red Army had also liberated these nations from the Nazis, dying in their millions doing so. He accused Churchill of Nazi-like tendencies and a racist, Anglo-Saxon bias. He re-iterated the argument that the Soviets were merely seeking security, a buffer zone of friendly states.
Churchill and Truman could point out that Stalin was going back on his promises at Yalta of establishing free and fair elections in the liberated countries. But to Stalin ‘democracy’ meant something completely different to the West’s definitions.
The Soviets though had effectively taken over Poland, Bulgaria and Romania by the end of 1946. By 1947 they would have Hungary. By 1948, Czechoslovakia had fallen (its leader, Jan Masaryk, quite literally – out of a window). In 1949, they created the GDR. They were putting pressure on Turkey to allow passage through the Dardanelles Straits, and in 1946 were occupying Northern Iran.
An essentially bankrupt GB could not continue to support Greece and Turkey’s struggle against communism and the Americans stepped in to help.
The Iron Curtain Speech Crossword
1. / 3.8.
5. / 6.
4.
2.
9.
7.
Across
1. “From……..in the Baltic [7]
2. The US president …… liked what Churchill said in the Iron Curtain…. [6]
4. …………..[6]
5. Czech capital not under Soviet control until 1948 [6]
7. Country not really behind the Soviet iron curtain either [10]
9. US worried this Black Sea country might go Communist [6]
Down
1. The Iron Curtain speech was made in nineteen forty-______? [3]
3. to …… in the Adriatic…” [7]
4. The Soviet leader….. was furious with Churchill’s speech[6]
6. Soviet occupying force [7]
8. One of the countries definitely behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ ![8]
9. Anti-Soviet but still communist leader of 7 across [4]
Churchill at Fulton–preaching to the converted?