Europe was destroyed, worn out, occupied, and divided after the end of World War II. Compared to the first war of the century, the second one caused considerably more death and destruction. After controlling the continent for centuries, the main European nations have all been overrun, bombed, destroyed, or vanquished. Millions of troops in uniform from both the US and the USSR’s triumphant armies stood atop the continent. However, disagreements over how to handle Germany and other conquered territories caused their wartime alliance, which had beaten Nazi Germany, to quickly disintegrate. The Cold War was the name given to the tensions between the US and the USSR because they saw each other as mortal foes yet did not actually engage in combat.
With the start of the Cold War, Europe was split into Western Europe and Eastern Europe in terms of terminology. The United States encouraged the growth of liberal democracies in Western Europe and helped the continent’s economy recover. Eastern Europe came under the influence and domination of the Soviet Union, which established communist political regimes there. Germany was split into East and West during the Cold War, just like Berlin, the former capital. The Berlin Wall, which went through the heart of the city, came to represent both the Cold War and the divide of Europe. For the following fifty years, a large portion of global politics was determined by East-West conflicts centred in Europe. The Cold War did not end until communism and the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989.
The European imperial governments were compelled to grant their colonies independence due to the weakening of Europe following World War II and the emergence of national liberation groups in their colonies abroad. Decolonization started at the same time as the Cold War was starting and lasted for the following twenty years. West Europeans were forced to grow more reliant on the United States and on one another as a result of decolonization, which ultimately aided in the economic unification that resulted in the European Union.
Europe’s Division
Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt convened at the Soviet resort town of Yalta in February 1945 to discuss the postwar order in Europe and to plot the last phases of World War II. Since the Soviet army had driven the Germans out of most of Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania and was only a hundred miles from Berlin (which they would take three months later), the Anglo-Americans were in a weak negotiating position because they had only liberated France.
The Yalta Agreements, as these negotiations became known, included the agreement that the countries of Eastern Europe would be democratic and “friendly” to the Soviet Union, the temporary partition of Germany into occupation zones (with the Soviets occupying the eastern part), and the relocation of Poland’s borders about 100 miles westward, leaving parts of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union. Additionally, the three leaders decided to start creating the United Nations (UN), a new international organization.
Later on, Yalta came to represent treachery to many Eastern European peoples who believed the Allies had granted Stalin unrestricted power in the area. In fact, the Soviets actively weakened democratic politics and installed Soviet-style communist governments throughout the region in the three years that followed the Yalta Conference. However, the Soviet Union’s eventual dominance over Eastern Europe seemed all but certain given the conditions of 1945. By the time the Nazis surrendered in May 1945, the region was nearly entirely under Soviet military rule due to postwar military actions. Thus, the Soviets conquered Eastern Europe and constructed “people democracies” that were “friendly” to the Soviet Union at the same time as American, British, and French armies drove the Germans from Western Europe and established democratic governments in those nations. From the Soviet perspective, particularly Stalin’s, “friendly” meant “socialist”; a capitalist state would inherently be antagonistic to the Soviet Union’s communism.
In addition, Eastern European territories were significantly more militarily and ideologically significant to the Soviet Union than they were to the West. The majority of these nations shared a border with the Soviet Union, and historically, several armies, notably those of Napoleon in 1812, the Poles in 1919–20, and the Germans in both World Wars, had used this area as their main entry point into Russia and the Soviet Union. Thus, Stalin and the Soviet Union placed a high value on maintaining control over the region.
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were all under the military authority of the Soviet Union at the end of the conflict. One slice at a time, or “salami tactics,” as the head of the Hungarian Communist party put it, Moscow started a slow process of expanding its political domination over these nations. Most nations had free and fair first-round parliamentary elections that produced coalition governments with both communist and non-communist parties. However, by 1947, the majority of non-communist parties had been driven out, communists had taken control of the police and news media, and elections were becoming more and more skewed.
Democratic politics in Eastern Europe came to an end when the Communist Party took control of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Two years before, in a lecture at Westminster College in Missouri, former British prime minister Winston Churchill had predicted this divide of Europe, stating that an “iron curtain” had fallen across the continent “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.”
The beginning of the Cold War
The US administration bemoaned the decline of democracy in Eastern Europe, but it was neither willing nor able to take any action in a region that was of little strategic importance to the US. However, in two other areas—Germany and the united regions of Greece and Turkey—the United States was ready to intervene, and the boundaries of the Cold War started to solidify. The Soviet Union put pressure on Turkey in 1946 and 1947 to give back part of the land it had taken from Russia shortly after the 1917 communist revolution.
The royalist administration and communist rebels, who had gained widespread public support for their opposition to the Nazis during World War II, were embroiled in a civil war in Greece. In the past, Greece and Turkey had both sought to Britain for assistance against their formidable northern neighbour. However, Britain notified the US administration that it was no longer able to take on these commitments due to its weakened state following the war and a financial crisis. The money would be used “to assist free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” according to American President Harry Truman’s wide and universal appeal to Congress for funding to support the two nations. The Truman Doctrine, a commitment to support democracy worldwide, was a dramatic break from conventional American isolationism and was essentially a statement of free global leadership.
The Truman Doctrine emerged at a period of increased US-Soviet tensions over the management of Germany as well as the establishment of communist control in Eastern Europe. It was mainly a reaction to events in Greece and Turkey. Germany was split up into four occupation zones (US, Soviet, British, and French) after the conclusion of the war, each of which was jointly governed by an Allied Control Commission. Deep within the Soviet zone, Berlin, the capital, was likewise split into four zones. Moscow and the Western allies disagreed on how to handle Germany from the beginning. Stalin’s main goal was to keep Germany weak and stop it from ever posing a military danger to the Soviet Union.Understanding the impact of reparations on Germany during World War I, the US Truman government was more focused on reconstructing Germany and reintegrating it into the international community.
The United States, Britain, and France went their own way, combining their three zones into one and launching a new currency in their zone without consulting the Russians in 1948 after the Allied Control Commission was immobilized by the conflicts. One hundred kilometres within the Soviet zone, Moscow objected by obstructing rail and road connections between the Western zone of Germany and the Western zone of Berlin. For a brief moment, President Truman thought of sending a column of US armoured forces into Berlin to break the siege. Three years after the end of World War II, this most likely would have resulted in a war with the Soviet Union. Rather, Truman decided to airlift supplies to the three million people living in West Berlin. Before Moscow eventually removed the embargo, one jet would land in West Berlin per minute for over a year during the Berlin airlift. But Europe was deeply split by that time. The Federal Republic of Germany was established in 1949 after elections were held in West Germany. A few months later, the Soviet Union established the German Democratic Republic in East Germany.
President Truman believed that the Berlin crisis, Moscow’s salami tactics in Eastern Europe, the communist insurrection in Greece, and Soviet pressure on Turkey were all components of a larger Soviet strategy to spread communism. George Kennan, a State Department officer, wrote a significant piece supporting the US strategy of “containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” For the following fifty years, American strategy was guided by this containment of communist concept. The United States initiated the Marshall Plan in 1947, providing $17 billion for the reconstruction of Europe over a five-year period, out of concern that the unstable political and economic circumstances of some European nations served as a fertile environment for communist development.
The United States funded the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, which provided Western European nations under attack with US military defence. This was the United States’ first peacetime military alliance since the Revolutionary War, and it was another sign of the transfer of power from Europe to the United States in terms of politics, the military, and diplomacy.
Soon, the Cold War moved to Asia and spread around the world. When Mao Zedong and his communists took power in China in October 1949, American concerns about a global “red tide” of communism were heightened. “If the Russian totalitarian state was intending to follow in the path of the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini,” he declared, “they should be met head-on in Korea.” President Truman saw the attack on South Korea by communist North Korea the following year as an act of 1930s-style aggression, this time spurred by Moscow.
US commander Douglas MacArthur advocated for extending the war into China, including the use of nuclear weapons, as US soldiers assigned to Korea quickly found themselves engaged in combat with communist Chinese forces in the north. An armistice was reached in 1953 as the Korean War came to a standstill, but a few years later, the US was determined to keep South Vietnam, another Asian nation, safe from communist control.
The Cold War also included the nuclear weapons race and the “balance of terror.” The Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, ending the United States’ monopoly on nuclear weapons. Following that, both sides engaged in a competitive armaments’ buildup, and by the 1990s, each superpower possessed over 25,000 nuclear weapons, including roughly 11,000 “strategic weapons” (i.e., missiles with intercontinental ranges).
While many intermediate and short-range missiles were stationed on European soil, on either side of the Iron Curtain, the strategic weapons were stationed on American or Soviet territory or aboard submarines. Concerned about becoming mere bystanders in international affairs, Britain and France also built their own separate nuclear weapons. A large portion of the devastation would have happened in Europe if the Cold War had escalated into a heated and nuclear conflict.
Another victim of the Cold War was the United Nations. Roosevelt served as a major inspiration for the UN, which was designed to supplant and enhance the discredited League of Nations. Each of the Big Five winning allies—the United States, the Soviet Union, China, France, and Britain—was granted permanent seats on the UN’s ruling Security Council in addition to veto power in an attempt to incorporate all the major countries this time. Any one of the five might so stop any activity they disapproved of. However, as the Cold War developed, the US and the USSR were unable to reach a consensus on nearly any international matter; as a result, US or Soviet vetoes frequently thwarted UN efforts to resolve international conflicts.
Decolonization
Europe was losing its colonies at the same time it was healing from World War II and becoming divided in two by the Cold War. The majority of the European empires were gained throughout the nineteenth century and were now an essential component of the economy of the continent. Up to World War II, the majority of the European empires held together, with a few notable exceptions. After losing the First World War, Germany lost its colonies; after losing the Second World War, Italy (as well as Japan) lost their colonies. Nevertheless, Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Portugal continued to control a sizable portion of the world’s population and land masses in 1945. The size of Britain’s vast empire was 125 times greater than that of Britain. The Dutch empire was 55 times larger than its native nation, the French empire was 19 times larger, and the Belgian empire was 78 times larger. Within thirty years or so, almost all of these empires vanished.
Following the war, a number of issues prevented European imperialism from continuing. Old-style colonialism was opposed by both the United States and the recently established UN. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill recognized the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and demanded that “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them” when they signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941, outlining their wartime objectives and postwar strategies. This carried potential for the colonies of Churchill’s Britain and the other Allied powers, while it may have been primarily directed at areas signed by Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
The Europeans were not truly in a position to maintain their colonies, even if they so desired. Many of these nations were still giving ration coupons to their citizens years after the war ended since they had all been decimated and worn out by the conflict. They were no longer able to impose their authority in far-off lands due to a lack of financial or military resources. Additionally, a new generation of colonial elites—many of whom had received their education in Europe—were advancing their aspirations for independence after learning the vocabulary of nationalism and democracy. The fall of the European empires and the rise of dozens of new sovereign republics from their ashes changed world politics and created the conditions for a new Europe.
India, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire with a population of 400 million, was the site of the most significant independence movement for Britain, the biggest empire in history. In 1947, India gained independence from Britain under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, the prophet of nonviolent resistance. Although the fight against Britain was mainly peaceful, independence had terrible consequences, including the largest population shifts in recorded history, an orgy of violence between Muslims and Hindus, and the separation of Muslim (Pakistan, and later Bangladesh) and Hindu (India) states from British India.
A Hindu fundamentalist who opposed the Mahatma’s attempts to unite Muslims and Hindus in a single nation killed Gandhi in 1948. India became the biggest (and poorest) democracy in the world, but since gaining independence, the subcontinent has been plagued by violence and tensions between religious groups as well as between India and Pakistan, both of which now possess nuclear weapons.
Britain attempted to distance itself from its obligations in the Eastern Mediterranean at the same time as it was negotiating India’s independence. The most volatile of these areas was Palestine, part of the former Ottoman Empire that had been entrusted to Britain by the League of Nations after World War I. Most of the residents of Palestine were Arabs, although the interwar period had seen a steady stream of Jewish immigrants, mostly from Europe, hoping to establish a Jewish state in what they considered the Promised Land. During and after World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews who had escaped or survived the Holocaust migrated to Palestine.
The Arabs rejected the UN’s 1947 proposal to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab governments, and Jewish leaders unilaterally declared the creation of Israel in 1948 following Britain’s official withdrawal from the region. The first of several wars that would break out over the following thirty years was immediately proclaimed against Israel by neighbouring Arab governments. In neighbouring Jordan and other Arab nations, almost a million Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from Israel. The region continues to be an apparently unsolvable source of tension, violence, and war, and the majority of Arab governments still do not legally recognize the state of Israel.
North Africa and Southeast Asia were France’s principal colonial holdings. In the former, a communist named Ho Chi Minh led a national independence movement that arose in Vietnam during World War II in what was known as French Indochina. Initially, the fight was primarily a guerrilla uprising against the French, but as the Cold War progressed, the local struggle turned into a global one, with regular troops supplied and supported by the US andthe USSR on both sides.
The French suffered a significant setback at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, despite having committed half a million soldiers to the fight. The Parisian administration made the decision to reduce its losses, shut the books on Indochina, and remove its soldiers. Later that year, the Geneva Accord called for free all-Vietnamese elections within two years and a temporary split of Vietnam into a communist north and a non-communist south. However, Vietnam remained split during the Cold War, the United States replaced the French, and the conflict continued for another twenty years until the communist North Vietnamese finally prevailed in 1975.
A few months after Dine Bien Phu’s catastrophic collapse, France faced yet another nationalist rebellion in Algeria, an even more significant colony. Compared to Vietnam, this was a very different sort of colony for France. After all, more than a million French residents lived in Algeria, which was only across the Mediterranean from France. (An additional 500,000 resided in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco). As represented by the popular slogan”Algeria c’est la France,” Algeria was in fact regarded as a part of France. The French were even less inclined to leave Algeria after losing Vietnam, and the struggle there raged for ten years, upending both the colony and France. In order to resolve the situation, the Parisian administration defeated a military coup d’état, reinstated World War II military hero Charles de Gaulle as president, and established the Fourth Republic in 1958 with a new constitution that de Gaulle had written. In 1962, Algeria gained independence.
De Gaulle was elected to prevent the loss of France’s most important colony; Britain’s Winston Churchill complained that he had not become prime minister “in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” However, both nations lost their most significant colonial holdings—India and Algeria, respectively—as well as almost all of their other colonies shortly after. In 1949, Holland gave Indonesia its independence. Following Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957, several of Europe’s colonies in Africa gained their freedom. The Scramble for Africa in the last decades of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of the Age of Imperialism, which ended nearly as rapidly in the early decades after World War II.
With roots in the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, the development of liberty and democracy in Europe led to the colonies’ independence and right to self-determination. As a result, the ideas that had defined modern Europe gave rise to these numerous new sovereign nations, which by the 1980s accounted for more than half of the UN’s membership. However, decolonization also had a significant impact on Europe and the rest of the globe, thus the influence was reciprocal.
Following World War II, Europeans began to prioritize domestic economic development above colonial trade. Simultaneously, the loss of colonies put the imperial powers on par with other European nations, which facilitated their incorporation into the Common Market (and ultimately the European Union) and made collaboration between them easier. However, all of the European nations maintained close relations to their former colonies, which made it possible for a large number of immigrants to enter Europe. The main issues facing Europe in the twenty-first century were these two opposing forces: immigration and diversity on the one hand, and harmonization and integration on the other.
Due to their lack of affiliation with either the communist Second World or the First World of capitalist democracies, the several newly independent nations were dubbed the “Third World.” In fact, the Third World became the focal point of the Cold War competition between the US and the USSR, each of which sought to increase its worldwide influence and reduce that of the other. The “Non-Aligned Movement,” which eventually came to represent over two-thirds of the UN’s members, was made up of many Third World leaders who refused to be lured into this major power struggle.
Postwar Western Europe
By 1949, Berlin, Germany, and Europe had all been split into communist and non-communistEast and West. The postwar rehabilitation process was extremely difficult for both sides of the continent. Almost every nation experienced political instability and economic collapse as a result of the massive human and material devastation caused by the war. Territorial shifts and the biggest population shift in recorded history at the period exacerbated these issues. Poland’s boundaries were moved nearly 100 miles to the west, with the Soviet Union annexing a portion of eastern Poland and compensating Poland with German territory to the west. This resulted in the greatest population transfers. Two to three million Poles fled from the east (later part of Soviet Ukraine) into Poland, many of them settling in the houses and fields left by the German refugees in the west. Approximately nine million Germans were driven from Poland’s new western possessions and into Germany.
Millions of other Germans fled into the Soviet or Western regions of Germany from the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Together with millions of other displaced people, including survivors of Nazi concentration camps, the new German administrations had to deal with all of these refugees.
The rate of recovery in Western Europe was astounding considering the social and economic turmoil of the immediate postwar era. With the exception of Spain and Portugal, which had dictatorships until the 1970s, nearly other Western nations swiftly returned to democratic governance. Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party were overthrown in 1945 British parliamentary elections, and a Labour administration dedicated to democratic socialism and the contemporary welfare state was elected. After drafting yet another constitution and establishing the Fourth Republic, socialists and communists emerged victorious in the initial elections.
The Italians created a new constitution for a parliamentary republic and abolished the monarchy. The Communist Party also performed well in that nation’s elections, consistently obtaining the second-highest number of members in Parliament but consistently being left out of all coalition administrations. Given what was going on in Eastern Europe, some were concerned about the large presence of communist and socialist parties in Western nations. However, these parties were a part of democratic political processes in England, France, Italy, and other places, and they never posed a danger to democratic institutions.
Western Europe likewise saw a rapid and long-lasting economic rebound. By 1947, the majority of nations had restored prewar levels of industrial productivity, and the US Marshall Plan contributed to the recovery. Over the next twenty-five years, the area had an “economic miracle” of unprecedented and uninterrupted economic development, fuelling rising living standards and widespread prosperity. This expansion was largely attributed to Germany, which by 1958 was the most industrialized nation in Western Europe. Economic policy was governed by the theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), who had published an influential book in 1936, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes had argued that government planning and spending was often necessary to “prime the pump” of the capitalist economy, particularly in difficult economic times.
European governments utilized their monetary and fiscal authority in the 1950s and 1960s to control inflation and encourage employment, production, and investment. Strong welfare states with nearly full employment, social security, subsidized or free health care and education, and wealth redistribution through progressive tax systems were developed as a result of these policies as well as the significant influence of democratic socialist parties on the continent. By the 1970s, Western European countries had, in a sense, accomplished Karl Marx’s objectives without adopting Marxism. A new wave of feminism and growing support from the European Union led to the steady expansion of gender equality throughout the area.
The combination of decolonization and Cold War tensions rendered the European states more dependent on each other and on the United State for both national security and trade. As noted above, the NATO alliance, signed in 1949 by the United States, Canada, Britain, and most Western European countries, obligated the United States to defend the European member states and provided a US “nuclear umbrella” over Europe. The permanent placement of US soldiers in a number of European nations, including eventually 300,000 in Germany, demonstrated Washington’s commitment to both Europe and Moscow. These were viewed as a “trip wire” that, should the Soviet Union ever invade Western Europe, would prompt a more extensive (and perhaps nuclear) reaction from the United States.
After the war, Europe also started a significant project of community development and economic unification. Robert Schuman, the foreign minister of France, took the initial moves in this direction in 1950 when he suggested creating an international agency to coordinate the iron and steel sectors, especially between France and Germany. After these two nations had fought three wars in the preceding 75 years, Schuman’s main goal was to bring them together. Additionally, he considered it to be “a first step in the federation of Europe.” This led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, which was so successful in fostering collaboration and trade that its ideals were expanded to the entire economy in 1957 with the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC), which later developed into the European Union. These groups’ membership increased over time from the initial six to twenty-eight, including several former communist republics.
Following the War, Eastern Europe
Eleven European nations with a population of one hundred million fell under communist authority during and after World War II. During the conflict, Moscow annexed Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and merged them into the USSR. Despite adopting communism, Yugoslavia and Albania—neither of which was close to Soviet territory—followed their own courses mostly apart from Moscow. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania were progressively transformed into “people’s democracies” with Soviet-style political and economic structures and political leaders obedient to Moscow. Between 1948 and 1952, a series of purges eliminated those leaders of the Eastern European Communist Party who Moscow deemed to be too patriotic.
There were both beneficent and repressive aspects to the communist governments’ programs. Initially, the majority of the huge landed estates were taken over by the new governments, which then divided the property to common farmers and peasants, a move that greatly increased support for the regimes. They also started the popular socialist programs of guaranteed employment, healthcare, education, and subsidized housing. Conversely, the communist administrations absorbed the Soviet state’s repressive machinery, which included censorship, limitations on independent groups, media, and foreign travel, as well as increasingly formidable secret police. Most churches, with the exception of Poland, were demolished or closed. Anti-communist guerrillas battled the new governments in a number of nations, particularly Poland and the Baltic republics, until the early 1950s, when they were ruthlessly put down.
Stalin’s first five-year plan, which started in the Soviet Union in 1928, was based on the dual economic strategies of fast industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, which were pursued by all of the Eastern European governments. Collectivization was opposed by many farmers who had just recently received land from the government, although the results were not quite as terrible as they had been in the Soviet Union twenty years prior. Similar to the Soviet Union, heavy industries like metallurgy and machine tools were prioritized above light industries and consumer products in economic strategy. Government organizations set pricing and pay as well as planned investments, output, and distribution. Almost every worker in industry, agriculture, and services ended up working for the state.
A single foreign policy of communist internationalism and many international institutions that united the region and guaranteed conformity strengthened Soviet control over the area. Moscow supported the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon) to facilitate trade and strengthen economic ties between the European communist republics, in part as a reaction to the US Marshall Plan. In response to West Germany’s 1955 NATO membership, the Soviets established the Warsaw Treaty Organization (often known as the Warsaw Pact), an Eastern European military alliance. Just as the US did in NATO nations, the Soviet Union stationed soldiers and nuclear weapons in Warsaw Pact nations, particularly East Germany. The states of Eastern Europe grew more isolated from the rest of Europe when these organizations were established. Churchill was much more accurate in 1955 than he had been in 1946 when he said that the Iron Curtain divided Europe.
All of the Eastern European states had significant economic development and swift social transformation between the end of the war and the 1960s. With the exception of Albania, all were converted from predominantly rural, agricultural civilizations to urban, industrial ones. The region’s gross national product grew at an average yearly pace of more than 7% in the 1950s and more than 5% in the 1960s, which was even higher than growth rates in Western Europe. For the majority of individuals in the area, living standards, health, and literacy all significantly improved.
Eastern Europe remained quite restless despite these achievements. The nations’ freedoms of expression, the press, assembly, religion, and travel were all curtailed, and their sovereignty was reduced. There were protests, riots, and strikes against communism and the Soviet Union almost from the start, but the army or the police put an end to them all, often with help from Moscow. It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev took over as Soviet leader in 1985 that Moscow started to relax its hold on Eastern Europe. When Gorbachev did this, the entire system started to fall apart.
Conclusions: From Cold War to Perestroika
Following the end of World War II, Europe was divided, the US and the USSR gained authority over the continent, and these two superpowers and ideological rivals began to dominate global affairs. Given that Nazi Germany had been brought to its knees by a tight wartime collaboration between these two nations, this was somewhat of an odd turn of events. However, mistrust and hostility had existed between the US and the USSR since the start of the communist state, and hard-nosed realists like Winston Churchill had fully anticipated that hostilities would resurface during the war. The universalist objectives of communism and the motivations of Lenin and Stalin had long raised suspicions in the United States. For sixteen years following the Russian Revolution, the United States refused to acknowledge the new communist state.
Related Article: The Cold War’s end and How it impacted International Relations
During World War II, American leaders, including future president Senator Harry Truman, expressed the hope that the Nazis and the Soviets would destroy one another in their titanic conflict. Stalin and the Soviet leadership took note of such sentiments and found confirmation of US hostility in country’s long delay in opening a second front against the Germans in Europe, all through 1942 and 1943 until June 1944.
These growing postwar tensions led to the split of Europe and Germany, and with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Churchill’s Iron Curtain—a symbol of that divide—became tangible. Barbed wire fences, guard posts, and minefields divided Eastern and Western Europe throughout the continent. Westerners needed visas granted by the governments of Eastern Europe in order to study throughout the region, and people of Eastern Europe needed special authorization from the authorities in order to travel to the West.
