The origins of the Cold War, 1943-49

'American Relations with the Soviet Union' ('A Report to the President by the Special Counsel to the President'), 24 Sept 1946. Written by Clark Clifford with assistance of George Elsey. Presented solely to President Truman. (Original copy.) > Read page 32 on textbook. (On Cold War documentary attached below: Part 2, from 35 min onwards).

Stalin's response to Churchill's speech

Interview to 'Pravda' correspondent concerning Churchill’s speech at Fulton, March 1946.

Churchill's 'Iron Curtain Speech'

An address delivered by former British prime minister Winston Churchill on 5 March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. President Truman listened the speech on the platform. (Video; 7:07.)

Kennan's 'Long Telegram'

George Kennan's secret telegram from US Moscow Embassy to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes on 22 Febr 1946. (Original received copy.) > Read page 31 on textbook. (On Cold War documentary attached below: Part 2, from 27 min onwards.)

How significant was Kennan’s ’long telegram’ for the creation of American Cold War strategy?

2018-10-28T11:39:18+02:00

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War. Penguin Books 2005, 29:
"-- To say that it made an impact in Washington would be to put it mildly: Kennan's 'long telegram' became basis for the United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War. Moscow's intransigence, Kennan insisted, resulted from nothing the west had done: instead it reflected the internal necessities of the Stalinist regime, and nothing the West could do within the foreseeable future would alter that fact. Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse 'for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.' To expect concessions to be reciprocated was to be naïve: there would be no change in the Soviet Union's strategy until it encountered a sufficiently long string of failures to convince some future Kremlin leader - Kennan held out little hope that Stalin would ever see this - that nation's behavior was not advancing its interests. War would not be necessary to produce this result. What would be needed, as Kennan put it in a published version¹ of this argument the following year, was a 'long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.'"

¹ "X" [George F. Kennan], ”The Sources of Soviet Conduct", Foreign Affairs, 25 (July 1947).
> Kennan and Containment

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan

2020-10-20T09:17:41+03:00

President Truman in address to the US Congress on 12 March 1947:
'At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.'

TASK 1
Read the document above and discuss with a pair about these:
1.1. What justification does Truman give for his Doctrine?
1.2. Identify the key words that Truman uses to describe the West and key words he uses to describe countries under Soviet control. Why do you think he uses this type of language?
1.3. How important is this document for explaining the development of the Cold War?

TASK 2
Study pages 33 - 35 on textbook and answer to the following questions to your notebook.
2.1. How fair is it to argue that 'the interest that the Czechoslovakian government expressed in participating the Marshall Plan was the starting point to the communists accession to power'?
2.2. Assess how succesful the Marshall Plan was from the US point of view.
2.3. Examine the motives and results of the establishment of the COMECON.
2.4. Study the table on page 35. What kind of conclusions can you make on the allocation of the Marshall Plan assistance?

The Berlin Blockade (1948-49)

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1) Read pages 38 - 42 and find out the content for each of the following. Consider their significance of as steps of the crisis.
a) Contents of the de-Nazification policies and the mission of the Allied Control Council (ACC)?
b) Principles for the establishment of the four occupation zones (1945)?
c) Germany and the security interesses of the USSR?
d) Living conditions in the Soviet sector?
e) The confistication of German industry by the Allied?
f) German workers as a form of reparations?
g) The establishment of 'Bizonia'?
h) Arguments for proposals given by some Soviet officials to keep Germany permanently divided by sovietizing the eastern sector?
i) Why Stalin rejected these proposals?
j) A new four-power currency proposed in Febr 1948 and the Soviet reaction on it?
k) The plans of the West announced at the final meeting of the ACC in London (March 1948)?
l) Soviet response for the western announcement?
m) The currency conflict?
n) What were the other reasons for the blockade?
o) Arguments for the blame: 'The western powers had violated both Yalta and Potsdam agreements'?
p) 'No official treaty between the four powers about transportation through Soviet sector existed', so from the Soviet point of view...?
q) Why were the aides concern about the blockade but Stalin not?
r) The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949. Why?
2) What were the main reasons for the crisis?
3) What is the message of the cartoon?
4) Read page 43 and create a spider diagram/ mind map about the consequences of the Berlin blockade. Send the completed diagram to the dropbox below (take a photo or use a mind map-programme).
https://peda.net/id/8aa8b82a8b3
(A cartoon drawn by E.H. Shepard and published on Punch Magazine in 1948.)

Documentaries on early Cold War

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Part 4: 'Berlin 1948-1949’

Part 3: 'Marshall Plan 1947-52'

Part 2: 'Iron Curtain 1945-47'

Part 1: 'Comrades 1917-45'

TASK: STUDY RELATIONS BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE SOVIET UNION in following areas:
a) diplomatic b) economic c) ideological d) military e) personal (between leaders)

The 1917 October Revolution > The Soviet Russia ruled by the Bolsheviks/ The Communist Party (1918-) > a one party state
The USA returns to isolationism (based on the Monroe Doctrine) after the Paris Peace Conference 1919
The Russian civil war 1918-21: The Reds <> The Whites supported by the western countries
The establishment of the USSR in Dec 1922
Stalin as a Soviet dictator (1929-) > the 'Stalinism'

> ‘Socialism in one country’ (vs ‘World Revolution’, ‘Trotskyism’); the Collectivization, the Five-Year Plans for industrializing the Soviet economy; the gulags, The 'Great Purge', The 'Great Terror'; Cult of personality

Hitler becomes power (1933) and begins his policy for abrogation of the Versailles Treaty <> Anglo-French Appeasement policy
The Nazi-Soviet Pact (Molotov - Ribbentrop) > the 'Secret Protocol': ‘spheres of influence’ (23 August 1939)

> 1) Germany attacks on Poland on 1 Sept 1939 (<> Britain and France declare war on Germany > WW2 begins in Europe) > the occupation of western Poland by Germany
> 2) The occupation of eastern Poland by the USSR, the Finnish Winter War & the occupations of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union (1939-40)

Operation Barbarossa begins on 22 June 1941

> The USA extend the Lend-lease assistance (besides the Great Britain) to the USSR (> more about ‘the Lend-Lease Act’ on textbook pg 13)
( The ‘Katyn massacre’ in Poland revealed; made by the Soviet NKVD in 1940)

The Atlantic Charter (Churchill – Roosevelt in August 1941; on page 16)
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (7 Dec 1941)
> Italy and Germany declare war on the USA (according to their 1940 Tripartite Agreement with Japan)
> The USSR, the UK and the USA form the Grand Alliance for defeating the Axis powers

The Battle of Stalingrad > The Soviet counter attack begins in Febr 1943
The Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 < Stalin’s request for opening a second front
The Teheran Conference: The ‘Big Three’ (Nov-Dec 1943)
> Britain and the USA agreed to open a second front
>The Normandy landings (D-Day 6 June 1944)

The Warsaw uprising at the Autumn 1944
The ‘Percentages Agreement’ (Churchill - Stalin in Moscow, Oct 1944)
The Yalta Conference (The ‘Big Three’ in Febr 1945) > textbook page 25
Germany’s unconditional surrender to the allies in May 1945 (after the suicide of Hitler)
The Potsdam Conference (The ‘Big Three’ in Aug 1945) > textbook pages 26-28
The USA drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Aug 1945
The establishment of the United Nations: ratification of the UN Charter and opening of the United Nations in New York in Oct 1945 > textbook pages 23-24, 28.

Textbook:
Mamaux, A, The Cold War: Superpower tensions and rivalries (Oxford University Press 2015)