MR SPENCE HISTORY
Who was to blame for the Cold War?
Key ideas to be covered
• Why did the US–Soviet alliance begin to break down in 1945?
• How had the USSR gained control of Eastern Europe by 1948?
• How did the United States react to Soviet expansionism?
• What were the consequences of the Berlin Blockade?
By 1943 it was apparent that the Allies would be victorious in the Second World War. On 28 November, the three leaders from the USA, USSR and Britain met in Tehran to discuss the strategy for the war's remainder and some Middle East issues. Aside from Churchill taking offence at a joke and Stalin's continued frustration at delays launching a second front, the meeting was largely successful. It was agreed that there would be a later meeting to settle formally the issues facing post war Europe and the World.
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In February 1945, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met at the Soviet resort town of Yalta to formulate the post-war settlement. Propaganda portrayed the conference as successful, and, on the surface much was achieved. However, a desire to avoid confrontation saw Yalta produce a vague unsatisfactory agreement. Roosevelt's believed his relationship with Stalin would see the Soviet dictator abide by the spirit of the agreement without nailing him down to specific terms. Churchill had misgivings, but Britain was too weak to do anything but fall behind American leadership.
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The optimism of Yalta quickly disappeared. By the time the three great powers met in Potsdam, Germany just five months later relations were strained. You will need to know not just how the agreements at Yalta were not upheld but the other significant changes that would make the Potsdam Conference much more fractious. Your summative assessment will be on why the six months between the two conferences is often pinpointed as the beginning of the Cold War.
Yalta and Potsdam
The Potsdam Conference had not ended well, but we are not yet at the stage where there was outright hostility between the Soviet Union and the USA. That point really began following the Berlin Blockade and the division of Europe between the military alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Still, between 1946 and 1948 the Soviet-American relationship deteriorated, largely a result of the USA taking firmer action to prevent further Soviet influence in Europe.
The first incident that increased tensions was the speech that Churchill made in April 1946 which crystalised precisely what had happened following the end of the Second World War. This is on the syllabus, and you will often be asked a four mark question about it.
The second is the Long Telegram by George Kennan which I think is very significant but it is not on the syllabus. It is however an excellent piece of evidence when arguing why the USA was responsible for the Cold War.
Also in September 1946, Secretary of State Byrnes publicly repudiated the Morgenthau Plan to win support from the German people; despite the Reparations Commission still meeting in Moscow.
The Truman Doctrine of March 1947 marked an important point in US Foreign Policy signifying that isolationism was no longer a policy of the US Government.
The reasons for it are more complex than those outlined in the text of the speech given by Truman in March 1947.
The Greek government was in a permanent state of crisis and the referendum to retain the King was not regarded as legitimate. It was facing a small force of Communist guerilla's who refused to recognise the legitimacy of this government. The Soviet Union was not sending aid to Greece (despite what the IGCSE claims) as Stalin was honouring the agreement that he made with Churchill in 1944. Instead they were being supported in a limited way by Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. By 1947, Britain was no longer financially solvent enough to provide support to the Greeks and were planning on ceasing military and economic aid.
The American's were worried that if Greece became Communist then Turkey would do the same. This is an early version of the Domino Theory that would be used to justify entry into the Vietnam War. While Turkey had been under intense pressure over its refusal to open the Dardanelles to Soviet shipping (after telling Roosevelt they would) there was no evidence that the tiny Communist party had any prospect of gaining power in Islamic Turkey. You will need to make notes on the real reasons why Turkey was given aid from the video.
The final action the US took to counter communist influence in Europe was the Marshall Plan of 1948. This programme has long been regarded as one of the greatest American foreign policy successes. It saw the US provide $12 billion in aid ($207 billion in 2023) to the countries of Western Europe. Whilst it was less than the $17 billion that Truman asked for it was still a significant movement from away from isolationism and an embodiment of strongpoint containment in action. It was actually called the European Recovery Program (ERP) but it is more commonly named after the US General George Marshall who proposed it and oversaw the implementation.
You will need to understand for what reasons the US introduced the ERP and also evaluate the impact on Europe. You need to understand how it was beneficial to the US and Europe even if the economic impacts have been questioned over time.
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Actions of the USA - 1946-1948
While the US tended to view the Soviet Union as a monolith that sought global domination. In actuality it was riven by internal difficulties which roused Stalin's insecurities and made him more bellicose internationally.
The first problem was the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who returned from German prison camps. More than a third of them were marched straight from German to Soviet prison camps. Even victorious Red Army soldiers returning from the battlefront were seen as suspect. The deportations of millions of minorities deemed unreliable to the East during the war meant there were still guerilla fighters resisting Soviet rule. Most notably the OUN of Ukraine.
Efforts to enforce Cominform orthodoxy caused the Yugoslavian dictator Josef Tito to bristle, and by the end of June, 1948, he had openly broken with Moscow. Stalin professed not to be worried. “I will shake my little finger, and there will be no more Tito.”46 Much more than a finger shook within the Soviet Union and the international communist movement over this first act of defiance by a communist against the Kremlin, but Tito survived—and was soon receiving economic assistance from the United States. The Yugoslav dictator might be a “son-of-a-bitch,” the new American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, acknowledged astringently in 1949, but he was now “our son-of-a-bitch. Up to Stalin’s death in 1953, denunciations, purges, and show trials were the order of the day. This was of course nothing new in Soviet history; in many ways it was a repeat of what had happened on several occasions since the Bolshevik revolution and that had peaked in Stalin’s great terror of the 1930s. World War II had intensified Stalin’s suspicions and the Cold War brought them to another peak. These insecurities provided the background to two of Stalin's biggest foreign policy blunders. The clumsy takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the disastrous Berlin Blockade of 1948-1949.
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