The Origins of the Cold War

Origins of the Cold War timeline

Here is a brief timeline of the events that brought about the Cold War.

To find out how the Cold War actually began, check out The beginning of the Cold War.

The origins of the Cold War summary

The origins of the Cold War can be broken down and summarised into long-term and medium-term causes prior to the final breakdown of relations between the powers.

Long-term causes

The origins of the Cold War can be tracked all the way back to 1917 when the communist-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia overthrew the government of Tsar Nicholas II. Due to the threat posed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the Allied governments of Britain, the US, France, and Japan intervened in the Russian Civil War that followed supporting the conservative anti-communist ‘Whites’. Allied support gradually declined, and the Bolsheviks triumphed in 1921.

Other tensions included:

• The Soviet regime refused to repay the debts of the previous Russian governments.

• The US did not officially recognise the Soviet Union until 1933.

• The British and French policy of appeasement concerning Nazi Germany created suspicion in the Soviet Union. The USSR was concerned that the West was not hard enough on fascism. This was most clearly demonstrated by the Munich Agreement of 1938 between Germany, the UK, France, and Italy, which allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia.

• The German-Soviet Pact made in 1939 increased Western suspicion of the USSR. The Soviet Union made a non-aggression pact with Germany in hopes of delaying invasion, but this was seen by the West as an untrustworthy act.

What were the immediate causes of the Cold War?

These causes refer to the period of 1939–45. During the Second World War, the US, the USSR, and Britain formed an unlikely alliance. It was called the Grand Alliance, and its objective was to coordinate their efforts against the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Although these countries worked together against a common enemy, issues of mistrust and fundamental differences in ideologies and national interests led to a break in their relations upon the end of the War.

The Second Front

The leaders of the Grand Alliance –Joseph Stalin of the USSR, Franklin Roosevelt of the US, and Winston Churchill of Great Britain– met for the first time at the Tehran Conference in November 1943. During this meeting, Stalin demanded the US and Britain to open a second front in Western Europe in order to relieve pressure on the USSR, who at that point was facing the Nazis mostly on their own. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 in what was called Operation Barbarossa, and ever since then, Stalin had requested a second front.

Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at the Tehran Conference, Wikimedia Commons.

The opening of the front in Northern France was however delayed multiple times until the D-Day landings of June 1944, leaving the Soviet Union to suffer huge casualties. This created suspicion and mistrust, which were furthered when the Allies chose to invade Italy and North Africa before providing military assistance to the USSR.

The future of Germany

There were fundamental disagreements between the powers about the future of Germany after the War. Whilst Stalin wanted to weaken Germany by taking reparations, Churchill and Roosevelt favoured rebuilding the country. The only agreement made at Tehran regarding Germany was that the Allies must achieve unconditional surrender.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, it was agreed that Germany would be split into four zones between the USSR, the US, Britain, and France. At Potsdam in July 1945, the leaders agreed that each of these zones would be run in their own way. The dichotomy which emerged between the Soviet Eastern zone and the Western zones would prove to be an important factor in the Cold War and the first direct confrontation.

The issue of Poland

Another strain on the Alliance was the issue of Poland. Poland was particularly important for the USSR due to its geographical position. The country had been the route of three invasions of Russia during the twentieth century, so having a Soviet-friendly government in Poland was seen as vital for security. At the Tehran Conference, Stalin demanded territory from Poland and a pro-Soviet government.

However, Poland was also a key issue for Britain as Poland’s independence was one of the reasons they went to war with Germany. Additionally, Soviet interference in Poland was a point of contention due to the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. This involved the execution of over 20,000 Polish military and intelligence officers by the Soviet Union.

The Polish Question, as it was known, focused on two groups of Poles with opposing political views: the London Poles and the Lublin Poles. The London Poles were opposed to Soviet policies and demanded a free government, whilst the Lublin Poles were pro-Soviet. After the discovery of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the London Poles. The Lublin Poles became thus the provisional government of Poland in December 1944 after forming the Committee of National Liberation.

The Warsaw Rising of August 1944 saw Poles in Poland linked to the London Poles rise up against the German forces, but they were crushed as the Soviet forces refused to help. The Soviet Union subsequently captured Warsaw in January 1945 at which point the anti-Soviet Poles could not resist.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Poland’s new borders were decided, and Stalin agreed to conduct free elections, though this was not to be the case. A similar agreement was made and broken regarding Eastern Europe.

What were the attitudes of the Allies in 1945?

It’s important to understand the post-war attitudes and national interests of the Allies in order to understand how the Cold War originated.

Attitudes of the Soviet Union

Since the Bolshevik Revolution, the two key aims of Soviet foreign policy had been to protect the Soviet Union from hostile neighbours and to spread communism. In 1945, the focus was very much on the former: Stalin was obsessed with security which led to the desire for a buffer zone in Eastern Europe. Rather than a defensive measure, this was seen by the West as spreading communism.

Over 20 million Soviet citizens were killed in the Second World War, so preventing another invasion from the West was a pressing issue. Therefore, the USSR attempted to take advantage of the military situation in Europe to strengthen Soviet influence.

Attitudes of the United States

US entry to the War had been based on securing freedom from want, freedom of speech, freedom of religious belief, and freedom from fear. Roosevelt had sought a working relationship with the USSR, which had arguably been successful, but his replacement by Harry Truman after his death in April 1945 led to increased hostility.

Truman was inexperienced in foreign affairs and tried to assert his authority through a hard-line approach against communism. In 1941, he is recorded to have said:

His hostility to communism was also partly a reaction to the failure of appeasement, which demonstrated to him that aggressive powers needed to be dealt with harshly. Crucially, he failed to understand the Soviet obsession with security, which led to further mistrust.

Attitudes of Britain

Upon the end of the war, Britain was economically bankrupt and feared that the US would return to a policy of isolationism.

In order to protect British interests, Churchill had signed the Percentages Agreement with Stalin in October 1944, which divided Eastern and Southern Europe between them. This agreement was later ignored by Stalin and criticised by Truman.

Clement Attlee took over from Churchill in 1945 and undertook a similar foreign policy that was hostile to communism.

What caused the final breakdown of the Grand Alliance?

By the end of the war, the tensions between the three powers had grown due to the lack of a mutual enemy and the many disagreements. The Alliance collapsed by 1946. A series of factors contributed to this:

The Atomic Bomb and the origins of the Cold War

On 16 July 1945, the US successfully tested the first atomic bomb without telling the Soviet Union. The US planned to use their new weapons against Japan and did not encourage the Soviet Union to join this war. This created fear in the Soviet Union and eroded trust further.

The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe

Stalin did not conduct the free elections in Poland and Eastern Europe that he had promised. In the Polish elections conducted in January 1947, a communist victory was secured by disqualifying, arresting, and murdering opponents.

Communist governments were also secured throughout Eastern Europe. By 1946, Moscow-trained communist leaders returned to Eastern Europe in order to ensure these governments were dominated by Moscow.

The Soviet refusal to withdraw from Iran

30,000 Soviet troops remained in Iran at the end of the war against the agreement made at Tehran. Stalin refused to remove them until March 1946 when the situation was referred to the United Nations.

Communism elsewhere in Europe

Due to economic hardship after the War, communist parties grew in popularity. Parties in Italy and France were thought to be encouraged by Moscow, according to the US and Britain.

After the Second World War, Greece and Turkey were highly unstable and involved in nationalist and pro-communist rebellions. This angered Churchill as Greece and Turkey were supposedly in the Western ‘sphere of influence’ according to the Percentages Agreement. Fear of communism here also influenced US foreign policy.

Kennan’s long telegram

In February 1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat and historian, sent a telegram to the US state department saying that the USSR was ‘fanatically and implacably’ hostile to the West and only listened to the ‘logic of force’.

The Iron Curtain Speech

On 5 March 1946, Churchill gave a speech about the ‘iron curtain’ in Europe to warn of the Soviet take-over in Eastern Europe. In response, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler, withdrew from the International Monetary Fund, and stepped up anti-Western propaganda.

Origins of the Cold War in historiography

Historiography concerning the origins of the Cold War is split into three main views: liberal/orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist.

Liberal/orthodox

This view was dominant in the 1940s and 1950s and was put forward by Western historians who perceived Stalin’s foreign policy after 1945 as expansionist and a threat to liberal democracy. These historians justified Truman’s hard-line approach and ignored the defence needs of the USSR, misunderstanding their obsession with security.

Revisionist

In the 1960s and 1970s, the revisionist view became popular. It was promoted by Western historians of the New Left who were more critical of US foreign policy, seeing it as unnecessarily provocative and motivated by US economic interests. This group emphasised the USSR’s defensive needs but ignored provocative Soviet actions.

A notable revisionist is William A Williams, whose 1959 book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy argued that US foreign policy was focused on spreading American political values in order to create a global free-market economy to support US prosperity. It was this, he argued, that ‘crystallized’ the Cold War.

Post-revisionist

A new school of thought began to emerge in the 1970s, started by John Lewis Gaddis’ The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972). Generally, post-revisionism sees the Cold War as a result of a complex set of particular circumstances, exacerbated by the presence of a power vacuum due to WW2.

Gaddis articulates that the Cold War arose due to external and internal conflicts in both the US and the USSR. Hostility between them after the Second World War was caused by a combination of the Soviet obsession with security and Stalin’s leadership with the US ‘illusion of omnipotence’ and nuclear weaponry.

Another post-revisionist, Ernest May, considered the conflict inevitable due to ‘traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience.’

Melvyn Leffler offered a differing post-revisionist view on the Cold War in A Preponderance of Power (1992). Leffler argues that the US was largely responsible for the emergence of the Cold War by antagonising the USSR but that this was done for long-term national security needs as restricting the spread of communism was beneficial to the US.

1. Turner Catledge, ‘Our Policy Stated’, New York Times, June 24, 1941, p 1, 7.