Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. The Americans reacted to the Zhdanov Doctrine with the so-called “Long Telegram,” written by George Kennan, Deputy Chief of Mission in Moscow, saying in part: On the other hand, according to this Doctrine, the Soviet Union was intent on eliminating imperialism and the remaining traces of fascism, while strengthening democracy. The Zhdanov Doctrine claimed that the United States was seeking global domination through American imperialism, as well as the collapse of democracy. The Soviets responded to the Marshall Plan with the Zhdanov Doctrine, unveiled in October of 1947.
The Americans responded to Stalin’s maneuvers in Eastern Europe with the Marshall Plan, a generous provision of free financial aid for the reconstruction of war-torn Western Europe. What some historians call anti-communism, others analyze as fear, because Stalin, shortly after invading Berlin, had gone on to conquer all of Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. On March 5, 1946, in a famous speech characteristic of the political climate of the time, he said:įrom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “Iron Curtain” has descended across the continent. One of the earliest events in the origin of the Cold War arose from the anti-Communism remarks of British leader Winston Churchill. In basketball and hockey, in ballet and the arts, from the Berlin Wall to the movies, the political and cultural war waged by Communists and Capitalists was a colossal confrontation on a scale never before seen in human history.
It ranged from nuclear submarines gliding noiselessly through the depths of the oceans to the most technologically-advanced satellites in geosynchronous orbits in space.
Conflict spanned from subtle espionage in the biggest cities of the world to violent combat in the tropical jungles of Vietnam. The Cold War was marked by continuous rivalry between the two former World War II allies. The Cold War was the geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle between two world superpowers, the USA and the USSR, that started in 1947 at the end of the Second World War and lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991. Jay asks: When/How did the Cold War start and finish?