The Cold War: History in an Hour

THE COLD WAR

History in an Hour

Rupert Colley

About History in an Hour

History in an Hour is a series of ebooks to help the reader learn the basic facts of a given subject area. Everything you need to know is presented in a straightforward narrative and in chronological order. No embedded links to divert your attention, nor a daunting book of 600 pages with a 35-page introduction. Just straight in, to the point, sixty minutes, done. Then, having absorbed the basics, you may feel inspired to explore further.

Give yourself sixty minutes and see what you can learn . . .

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

About History in an Hour

Introduction

The End of the Second World War: Apocalypse

The Beginning of the Cold War: The Freeze

Three Speeches: ‘An iron curtain has descended’

The Marshall Plan: ‘Communism cannot be stopped in Europe’

Berlin: ‘You should not and cannot abandon this city and this people’

The Bomb: ‘MAD’

The Korean War: Hot War

US Anti-Communism: ‘Reds Under the Bed.’

Stalin’s Final Years: ‘I’m finished, I don’t even trust myself’

Khrushchev: ‘Different roads to socialism’

Space Wars: ‘Flopnik’

The Berlin Wall: ‘Berlin is the testicles of the West’

The Cuban Missile Crisis: ‘We’ll all meet together in Hell’

The Vietnam War: Unwinnable

Rebellion: 1968

Nixon: ‘Vietnamization’

China, the USA and the Soviet Union: ‘Ping-pong diplomacy’

The Decline of Détente: ‘Lennonism, not Leninism’

Afghanistan: ‘The Soviet Vietnam’

The Polish Pope and Solidarity: ‘The last nails in the coffin of communism’

The Ex-Actor: ‘Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root’

Gorbachev: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

1989: ‘Time to yield power’

The End of the Soviet Union: ‘The threat of a world war is no more’

Appendix 1: Key Players

Appendix 2: Timeline of the Cold War

Copyright

Got Another Hour?

About the Publisher

Introduction

From the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the world lived within the shadow of the Cold War. For almost half a century the East and the West eyed each other with suspicion and often hostility. Two ideologies, two political systems, two cultures, two superpowers fought for dominance, each firm in the belief that history would prove them right. And all the time the threat of a Third World War remained a distinct possibility, the spectre of nuclear weapons a constant fear. This, in an hour, is how it happened.

The End of the Second World War: Apocalypse

Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, said of Stalin, he would ‘work with the Devil if it would help defeat Hitler’. Towards the end of the Second World War, with the defeat of Hitler’s Germany only a matter of time, the ‘Big Three’ – Churchill, Joseph Stalin and the US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (pictured below) – met a number of times to discuss their strategy for winning the war and the make-up of a post-war Europe. US soldiers, advancing on Berlin from the west, and Soviet soldiers from the east, met on the River Elbe on 25 April 1945. Amidst the handshakes and toasts they promised everlasting friendship between the two nations. But while the soldiers visualized a bright future of camaraderie and peace, the Big Three had already begun carving Europe up between the East and the West.

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, February 1945

With the Red Army taking Berlin and indulging in an orgy of mass rape against German women, Hitler, deep within his bunker, committed suicide on 30 April. A week later, on 7 May, Germany surrendered unconditionally. The war – in Europe, at least – was over.

In the Far East, Japan, although on the brink of starvation and collapse, its armed forces shattered, refused to do likewise. The Americans, having successfully tested the first atomic bomb on 16 July, used this new apocalyptic weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August, followed, three days later, with a second on Nagasaki. Finally, the Japanese surrendered. After six years and a day, the Second World War had ended. And the Cold War began.

The Beginning of the Cold War: The Freeze

The Big Three talks, the last taking place in Potsdam, west of Berlin in July 1945, had agreed to split the responsibility for Germany between the Western allies (Britain, the US and France) in western Germany and the Soviet Union in the east. Berlin, one hundred miles within the Soviet hemisphere, would also be split into four zones, one for each of the Allied powers, with a line of communication through eastern Germany to link the western zones of Berlin to western Germany.

It was the attitude of how to treat post-war Germany that illustrated the real differences. The Soviet Union had, both in terms of actual numbers and also proportionately, shed the greatest amount of blood in defeating the Nazis. Therefore Stalin wanted heavy reparations from Germany and for it to be kept economically poor to prevent it rising again as a threat. France, who had been invaded three times by Germany during the previous hundred years, was sympathetic to this view. The Americans, however, felt that an economically strong Germany was vital to the future of Europe, where both capitalism and democracy could flourish and so the country would not descend again into a breeding ground for extremism. It was precisely the period of economic and political chaos in post-First World War Germany that gave Hitler and the Nazis the opportunity to exploit people’s dissatisfaction and gain power.

Three Speeches: ‘An iron curtain has descended’

In eastern Europe Stalin spread his influence to set up communist governments, where hardline communists loyal to Stalin used intimidation, violence and threats to disrupt the democratic process and seize control. In doing so the east European satellites provided the Soviet Union with a buffer against western Europe. The free elections in eastern Europe that Stalin had promised during the Big Three talks never materialized, except in East Berlin where, in October 1946, the communists polled only 20 per cent of the vote. But Walter Ulbricht, Stalin’s man in East Germany, with the Soviet juggernaut behind him, bullied his way into power. Capitalism, according to a speech Stalin made in February 1946, made war inevitable; only communism could bring genuine world peace. And as the capitalist nations squabbled among themselves, he continued, the people of western Europe would choose communism.

Churchill, now no longer in office, gave a speech in Missouri on 5 March 1946, in which he coined the phrase the ‘Iron Curtain’, saying: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’ Britain, struggling economically, began the process of dismantling its empire – granting India independence in 1947, and removing military assistance and economic aid to Greece. The Greeks were in the midst of a bitter civil war between nationalists and communists and the US feared that without British aid, Greece would fall to communism and other struggling European nations would follow.

‘The seeds of totalitarian regimes,’ said US president, Harry S. Truman, on 12 March 1947, ‘are nurtured by misery and want.’ In other words, communism appealed to those suffering from hardship; remove the hardship, you remove the appeal of communism. Known as the Truman Doctrine, the president said that communism had to be contained, and that the USA could not, as it did after the First World War, turn its back on Europe – isolationism was no longer an option. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which brought the US into the war, was proof that physical distance was no longer a guarantee of safety. In the post-war era a stable Europe was necessary for the future of the ‘free world’. Out of fear of communism, the US decided to send aid to Greece.

The Marshall Plan: ‘Communism cannot be stopped in Europe’

Three months after Truman’s speech, the offer of US aid was extended to any European nation that needed it. This aid package, the European Recovery Program, more commonly known as the Marshall Plan after its originator George C. Marshall (pictured below), aimed to revive Europe’s post-war economies, to alleviate hardship, and to deprive communism of its foothold. Once these economies were stabilized, the theory went, the US, too, would benefit, as trade between Europe and the US increased.

George C. Marshall

The offer was extended to the countries of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. The Soviet Union had received huge loans from the US during the war to help defeat Germany and now, during the immediate post-war years, further aid would have been hugely beneficial to a country still suffering economically from the consequences of its war effort. But Stalin was never going to allow US/capitalist interference within the Soviet economy, and nor would he permit it in his satellite states. However, Poland and Czechoslovakia, still at this stage a democracy, saw the obvious benefits of US aid, and both accepted invitations to attend a conference in Paris, set for July 1947, to discuss the Marshall Plan. Furious, Stalin forbade them to go. Meekly, representatives of the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments traipsed to Moscow to face their dressing-down from Stalin, and returned home to politely decline the invitation to Paris. By February the following year, Czechoslovakia’s communists staged a coup overthrowing the only democratic government in eastern Europe, replacing it with a communist regime loyal to Stalin and Moscow.

In April 1948, Italy went to the polls. The US Congress was worried: ‘If Italy goes red, communism cannot be stopped in Europe’, and threatened to prohibit Italy from receiving Marshall aid if the communists won. They did not. The Marshall Plan, therefore, had the effect of reaffirming Churchill’s concept of the Iron Curtain by forcing countries to decide whether their loyalties lay to the west or the east. Sixteen countries finally accepted aid, which by 1952, had amounted to $13 billion. For those who chose the west, Italy and Denmark for instance, economic assistance came hand in hand with military protection with, in April 1949, the formation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), initially signed by twelve countries. West Germany joined in 1955, the same year that the Soviet Union and her seven satellites, as a direct counterbalance to NATO, formed the Warsaw Pact.

Berlin: ‘You should not and cannot abandon this city and this people’

The Marshall Plan also contributed to the unravelling of the fragile co-existence between East and West Berlin. In June 1948, the US and Britain announced proposals for establishing the new country of West Germany, and on 23 June introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, into West Berlin. This immediately caused economic chaos in the Soviet sector as people clambered to exchange their old money for the new currency. The Soviets responded on 24 June by cutting off all road, rail and canal links between West Germany and West Berlin. The Berlin Blockade had begun. ‘People of this world,’ said the mayor of West Berlin, ‘look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and this people.’

If Stalin’s aim was to force the Western powers out of Berlin, it backfired. During the 323 days of the Berlin Airlift (pictured below), US and British planes supplied West Berlin with 1.5 million tons of supplies, a plane landing every 3 minutes. Three years earlier, the Allies had been dropping bombs over Berlin, now, the West Berliners joked, they were dropping potatoes. On 12 May, 1949, Stalin, knowing he couldn’t risk shooting down the planes, and realizing the PR disaster he’d caused, lifted the blockade.

The Berlin Airlift: Berliners watching a US plane land at Berlin Tempelhof Airport, 1948

The political division of Germany became official on 23 May 1949 with the formal proclamation in Bonn of the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ (West Germany). Five months later, in response, came the proclamation of East Germany with its somewhat misleading title, the ‘German Democratic Republic’.

The Bomb: ‘MAD’

On 29 August 1949, in the Kazakhstan desert, Soviet scientists, under the leadership of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police, successfully detonated their first atomic bomb, four years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the Americans found out they were shocked – they had anticipated that it would take the Soviets until at least 1953 to reach that stage. Armed with information gleaned from spies working for the US atomic industry and with the use of forced labour, the Soviet Union had broken the US’s monopoly. The US then upped the stakes by developing the hydrogen bomb, despite fears that such bombs threatened the very existence of life on earth. But the very thought that the Soviets would develop their own ‘superbomb’ forced the US hand, and on 1 November 1952, on a tiny Pacific island, the US tested the world’s first hydrogen bomb, 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Less than a year later, on 12 August 1953, the Soviets did indeed test their own H-bomb. The race continued. In March 1954 the Americans detonated a lithium-based hydrogen bomb, the fallout spattering a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, eighty-two miles away. The unlucky crew members fell ill, one eventually dying. In October 1961 the Soviet Union successfully tested the world’s largest bomb – a single explosion that exceeded all explosives used throughout the whole of the Second World War.

The US, concerned over a perceived ‘missile gap’, increasingly used spy planes over Russia to gather information on the strength of the Soviet nuclear capacity. Khrushchev was furious about these intrusions over Soviet airspace but the US U-2s were able to fly at too high an altitude to be brought down. However, in May 1960, days before a four-power summit in Paris, a Soviet fighter plane did finally bring down a U-2. At first Eisenhower insisted it was not a spy plane but a weather plane. But when Khrushchev provided firm evidence, Eisenhower had to confess. Khrushchev then boycotted the Paris talks and relations between the superpowers deteriorated. The U-2 pilot, Gary Powers, was sentenced to ten years imprisonment but released after two in exchange for a Soviet spy in US captivity.

The superpowers knew that these bombs could not be used against each other – to do so would destroy each other and would make the world uninhabitable. To the end of the Cold War the very existence of humanity lay in this fragile balance of deterrence, known as Mutually Assured Destruction or, rather aptly, MAD. The time had come to discuss how to slow down the arms race, and the first of many, rather meaningless, agreements came in 1963 with the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

The Korean War: Hot War

The Korean War: Korean children in front of a US tank

The first major conflict – the first ‘hot war’ of the Cold War – took place in Korea between 1950 and 1953. Ruled by Japan since 1910, Korea rejoiced in Japan’s defeat, and following the end of the Second World War, was split between Soviet and US spheres of influence at the 38th parallel into North and South Korea respectively. In 1948 the newly formed United Nations called for free elections in both the North and the South. The Soviets refused to comply and proclaimed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with Kim Il Sung as its chairman. Elections did take place in the South, although they were boycotted by the communists, and Syngman Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea.

Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China, 1 October 1949

Kim Il Sung sought Stalin’s permission to invade South Korea and reunify the peninsula. Stalin, fearful of provoking the US, refused. But then two events changed his mind. First, the Soviet Union attained the atomic bomb. Second, the triumph of communism in China following a protracted civil war and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. ‘The Chinese people have now stood up!’ declared Mao Zedong (pictured above). Both these events, Stalin felt sure, would make America think twice before going to war over a relatively minor issue such as Korea. With Stalin’s authority, on 25 June 1950, Kim Il Sung ordered his army across the 38th parallel into South Korea, taking Seoul three days later. Stalin was wrong in his assessment of the US’s reaction. The US moved its army of occupation stationed in Japan into the conflict, executing a counterattack on the port of Inchon in the North and recapturing Seoul on 25 September. The US forces then pushed north, taking the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on 19 October.

Mao, keen to show his loyalty to Stalin, offered to help. Accordingly, China entered the fray, pushing back the US advance, recapturing the capitals of both North and South Korea, although, in reply, the Americans retook Seoul in March 1951. The conflict now disintegrated into a stalemate of trench warfare. It suited Stalin to keep the war going, if merely to tie the US down in East Asia. Soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953 a ceasefire was announced and the war finally ended on 27 July with the boundary between North and South Korea at much the same place as three years and 3 million casualties earlier.

US Anti-Communism: ‘Reds Under the Bed.’

Following the realization that US spies working for the Soviet Union had accelerated Russia’s development of the atomic bomb, anti-communist hysteria swept through 1950s America. In 1953, a married couple, the Rosenbergs, were sent to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. A series of witch-hunts, orchestrated by Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy (pictured below), targeted Hollywood, universities and even the originator of the Marshall Plan, George C. Marshall. Richard Nixon, then a congressman, unmasked communist agent Alger Hiss, a former insider in Roosevelt’s government, who served forty-four months in prison as a result. In an atmosphere reminiscent of Soviet Russia, people were encouraged to inform on each other and to maintain vigilance against the internal enemy.

Joseph McCarthy

Stalin’s Final Years: ‘I’m finished, I don’t even trust myself’

In Russia itself, Stalin, paranoid of everyone, including his own bodyguards, unleashed a new reign of terror, as lethal as the ‘Great Terror’ of the 1930s, and, based on his fears of a Zionist conspiracy. Every Soviet citizen lived under the cloud of possible arrest and subsequent deportation or execution. Stalin’s control over his satellites remained absolute; no socialist state could make any decision or exert any form of independence from Moscow, with the exception of Tito, popular leader of communist Yugoslavia, who placed national autonomy above ideological brotherhood and who, unlike other eastern European leaders, did not need Stalin to keep him in power. Having expelled Tito from Cominform, an alliance of communist leaders set up by Moscow in 1947, Stalin considered invading Yugoslavia to teach Tito a lesson. Ultimately he decided against it.

By the end Stalin trusted no one and suspected everyone, including his personal doctors most of whom he had arrested. ‘I’m finished,’ he said in his final days. ‘I don’t even trust myself.’ With the new terror reaching fever pitch, Stalin suffered a stroke and was left to fester for several days, his personal staff too frightened to check on him. He died eventually on 5 March 1953, aged seventy-three.

Despite his tyranny, Stalin’s death was received with a public outpouring of grief. His body lay in state and such was the mass of mourners scrabbling to pay their last respects that several people died in the crush. Immediately, the Kremlin started adopting a softer approach, issuing amnesties to many languishing in Stalin’s gulags and aborting the campaign of terror. But who, after thirty years, could take the Great Leader’s place? Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police since 1938, looked an obvious choice but his detractors within the Soviet hierarchy, fearful of a continuation of Stalin’s harsh rule, had Beria arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage, tried him and had him shot. A fate that Beria himself had inflicted on countless thousands of his fellow citizens. As Stalin had said, ‘No man, no problem.’ It was to be the only issue decided in blood. Nikita Khrushchev then emerged as the new leader. A Ukrainian peasant by origin, impulsive, rotund, by turn vindictive and charming, his ‘socialism with a human face’ was a different type of leadership to that of his predecessor.

Khrushchev: ‘Different roads to socialism’

However, if the East German workers thought Stalin’s death meant change, they were soon disabused, as the Stalinist leader, Walter Ulbricht, strove to increase industrial output. On 16 June 1953, workers in East Berlin went on strike. The strike soon spread to other cities and Soviet tanks had to intervene to quash the uprising. The human face of socialism only went so far.

On 25 February 1956, at the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered a six-hour speech to party leaders in which he denounced Stalin’s methods, acknowledged his mistakes and criticized his murderous reign. He talked also of allowing the Soviet satellites to follow ‘different roads to socialism’. The text of the speech, although secret, soon spread across Russia and abroad, causing shock that the great man’s name should be so besmirched but also relief that, through Khrushchev’s ‘de-Stalinization’, the tyranny that had overshadowed the Soviet Union for so long was now something of the past. When, eight years later in 1964, Khrushchev himself was deposed and pensioned off, he said: ‘I’m glad that the party has gotten to the point when it can rein in even its first secretary.’

In June 1956, in Poland, in a repeat of the East Berlin uprising of 1953, the workers revolted, demanding economic reform. The Polish government, in a conciliatory gesture, replaced their hardline leader with the popular and reformist Władysław Gomułka. The Poles had taken Khrushchev at his word and were following a ‘different road to socialism’. But Khrushchev was not impressed. Furious, he flew unannounced to Warsaw for a showdown with the Poles. Gomułka held his ground but promised that Poland would remain loyal to Moscow. Satisfied with this, Khrushchev withdrew.