The
Cold
War

1945 · 1991 · A FORTY-SIX-YEAR STAND-OFF

Contents

Yalta & Potsdam

At the Livadia Palace in Yalta in February 1945, with the Red Army already at the Oder, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed in principle to a divided Germany, free elections in liberated Europe, and Soviet entry into the Pacific war. Five months later at Potsdam — Roosevelt dead, Churchill voted out mid-conference, and Truman newly armed with the Trinity test — the same allies were already maneuvering for advantage. The Cold War did not begin on a particular date; it crystallised out of the war's last six months.

Stalin's stated war aim — a buffer of pliant states on the Soviet western frontier — was incompatible with the Atlantic Charter's promise of self-determination. Both sides went home convinced the other had bent the agreement. By March 1946, when Churchill spoke at Fulton, Missouri of an "iron curtain" descending across the continent from Stettin to Trieste, the diagnosis was already familiar to anyone in the State Department who had read George Kennan's "Long Telegram" the previous month.

The Iron Curtain

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."— Winston Churchill, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946

By 1948 every country in eastern Europe had a communist government installed by election fraud or coup, including the unhappy fate of democratic Czechoslovakia in February 1948. The Truman Doctrine (March 1947) committed the United States to support free peoples resisting subjugation; the Marshall Plan (June 1947) offered $13 billion in reconstruction aid, conspicuously refused by Stalin on behalf of his satellites. The COMECON answer (1949) bound the eastern economies into a single Soviet-led trading bloc.

Berlin · NATO · The Bomb

Korea — The First Hot War

On 25 June 1950, Kim Il-sung's Korean People's Army — equipped and approved by Stalin — crossed the 38th parallel. Within weeks the South was reduced to the Pusan Perimeter. MacArthur's audacious Inchon landing (15 September) reversed the war and pushed the front to the Yalu, at which point 300,000 Chinese "People's Volunteers" entered the war and pushed it back. The line stabilised near the original parallel; an armistice was signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953. No peace treaty has ever been signed.

Korean War deaths: approximately 3 million, including 2 million Korean civilians. The Korean Peninsula remains divided. The war established the pattern for every subsequent Cold War conflict: superpower proxies, devastating local cost, no resolution.

Stalin Dies · The Thaw

Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953, possibly of poisoning, possibly of the brain hemorrhage his doctors had been afraid to confirm. After a brief power struggle, Nikita Khrushchev emerged as First Secretary. At the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, in a four-hour "secret speech" leaked within weeks, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's "cult of personality," the show trials, the deportations, and the wartime errors. Inside the bloc the speech was read as license; in Hungary it became, that October, an uprising.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 lasted twelve days. Imre Nagy declared neutrality; Soviet armour rolled into Budapest on 4 November and crushed the revolt at a cost of 2,500 Hungarian dead and 200,000 refugees. Nagy was hanged in 1958. The same week the United States, distracted by the Suez Crisis (in which Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt), did nothing. The lesson, learned twice, was that the Cold War's spheres were not negotiable.

The Space Race

Thirteen Days

On 14 October 1962 a U-2 reconnaissance flight photographed Soviet medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction in Cuba. For thirteen days the world stood, by every credible reconstruction, closer to nuclear war than at any other moment of the Cold War. Kennedy's Executive Committee debated air strikes (favoured by the Joint Chiefs) versus naval blockade (Robert McNamara). The blockade — diplomatically a "quarantine" — was announced on 22 October. Soviet ships turned back from the line on 24 October.

The settlement on 28 October: Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret undertaking to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey. A Washington–Moscow hotline was established the following year. Both leaders had been forced to recognise that the operational logic of nuclear weapons left no margin for misunderstanding. Khrushchev was deposed in 1964; Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.

Vietnam

The American war in Vietnam was a continuation of the French colonial war that had ended at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords had divided the country pending elections; the South's Diem regime, with American backing, refused to hold them. American advisors arrived in 1955; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) authorised escalation; by 1969 there were 543,000 American troops in country.

The Tet Offensive of January 1968 was a tactical defeat for the North Vietnamese — and a strategic catastrophe for American public opinion. The war devastated Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (the bombing of Cambodia, 1969–73, helped enable the Khmer Rouge takeover). The American withdrawal in 1973 and the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975 ended what was, by every measure except containment, an American defeat. Vietnamese deaths: at least 1.5 million. American: 58,220.

Détente

Détente — Brandt's Ostpolitik with East Germany, Nixon and Kissinger's opening to China (February 1972) and arms talks with Moscow — produced the SALT I treaty (1972), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), and the Helsinki Final Act (August 1975). Helsinki ratified Europe's postwar borders in exchange for a basket of human-rights commitments that the Soviet bloc had not expected to be enforced — Charter 77 and Solidarity later proved them wrong.

Détente unraveled with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and Reagan's election in 1980. The "Second Cold War" of 1979–85 included the Pershing II and SS-20 missile deployments in Europe, the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics, and the shoot-down of Korean Air 007 in 1983. NATO's Able Archer 83 exercise was misread in Moscow as a possible first-strike preparation; Stanislav Petrov, on duty 26 September 1983 at a Soviet early-warning station, declined to report what turned out to be a false missile alert. The world owes him several decades.

Two Systems, in Numbers

Soviet GDP was always estimated rather than reported. By the 1980s the gap was widening. Personal-computer ownership, mass car ownership, supermarket variety, and quality of housing diverged decisively. The political consequence of consumer disappointment, much more than ideology, eventually broke the bloc.

Solidarity · Charter · Sakharov

From within the Soviet bloc, dissent was always present and almost always punished. Boris Pasternak refused the 1958 Nobel under pressure; Joseph Brodsky was tried for "social parasitism" in 1964; Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Paris in 1973 and got him expelled in 1974. Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, became the bloc's most prominent dissenter and was internally exiled to Gorky in 1980. Charter 77, born after the trial of the rock band the Plastic People of the Universe, gathered Czechoslovak intellectuals around Václav Havel.

The decisive movement was Polish. Solidarity, founded at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980, became — at ten million members — the only legal independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc. Martial law (December 1981) drove it underground. The election of John Paul II in 1978 had electrified Polish Catholicism. By 1989 the regime was negotiating with the people it had jailed.

Gorbachev

"GLASNOST. PERESTROIKA. NEW THINKING."— Mikhail Gorbachev, after 1985

Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary on 11 March 1985, the youngest member of the Politburo at 54 and the only one with a university degree in law. His twin programmes — glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") — were intended to save Soviet socialism by reforming it. They effectively dismantled it.

Chernobyl (26 April 1986) demonstrated the cost of secrecy. The Reykjavik summit (October 1986) with Reagan came within an inch of abolishing all nuclear weapons. The INF Treaty (December 1987) eliminated an entire class of missiles. Most consequentially, Gorbachev declined the Brezhnev Doctrine: the Soviet Union, he announced, would not intervene in eastern European affairs.

The Wall

The Union Dissolves

Soviet authority collapsed at the periphery first. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990. The Baltic states followed. A coup attempt against Gorbachev by hardline Communists on 19 August 1991 was defeated within three days, partly by Boris Yeltsin's televised resistance from atop a tank outside the Russian parliament. The post-coup Soviet Union effectively no longer existed. On 8 December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met at Belovezha and agreed to dissolve the USSR. On 25 December Gorbachev resigned. The red flag came down over the Kremlin.

The Cold War had ended without the war. That this seemed so unlikely, even to those who lived through it, is the surprise the twenty-first century has been digesting ever since.

Cast

What Remained

The Cold War left the Bretton Woods world (Russia entered the IMF), the European Union (Maastricht, 1992; Eastern enlargement, 2004), and the United States as a sole superpower for a generation. NATO survived its enemy and expanded eastward. The nuclear arsenals shrank but did not vanish: about 12,500 warheads remain in the world today.

The cultural sediments — paranoid spy fiction, science-fiction allegory, the Olympic boycotts and the Reagan jokes, the Stasi files in Berlin, the still-divided peninsula of Korea — saturate twenty-first-century life. So does the unresolved question that ended the war: what does a non-communist former empire owe its citizens, its neighbours, and its history? The answer, since 1991, has not been encouraging.

Where to go

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History · Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History · Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain · Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire · Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time.

↑ CNN's Cold War documentary (1998), produced by Jeremy Isaacs. Watch on YouTube.