{"id":156,"date":"2023-03-24T05:27:25","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T09:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/chapter\/chapter-19-the-soviet-union-and-the-cold-war\/"},"modified":"2025-06-28T10:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T14:03:07","slug":"chapter-19-the-soviet-union-and-the-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/chapter\/chapter-19-the-soviet-union-and-the-cold-war\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 19: The Cold War","rendered":"Chapter 19: The Cold War"},"content":{"raw":"<h2 class=\"c14 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">19.1 Introduction<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"color: #000000\">Victory in Europe or <strong>V-E day<\/strong> was declared on May 8th, 1945. After almost six years of bloody conflict, the Axis powers were defeated. The Second World War was more brutal and bloodier than the First World War. Around 60-85 million soldiers and civilians died and it was the first war that claimed the lives of more civilians than soldiers. It also witnessed the horror of the first systematic genocide in modern history, the Holocaust. Many cities, towns and villages across Europe were completely destroyed by aerial bombing and heavy artillery which resulted in hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons. A common expression after 1945 was \"Never again\" which symbolized a universal desire to avoid another world war. The peoples of Europe were especially committed to this ideal after watching their families torn apart and their homes destroyed. For ordinary citizens, members of resistance movements to politicians and intellectuals, the answer was clear: Europe must be integrated. Instead of competition between European states, there was a need for a system of cooperation. But there were many obstacles and difficulties to overcome to achieve this goal, most notable the Cold War division of Europe into zones of American and Soviet influence for the next several decades.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--examples\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Terms for Identification<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>V-E Day<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Soviet Bloc<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Tehran Conference<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Bretton Woods Agreement<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>United Nations<\/li>\r\n \t<li>NATO<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Warsaw Pact<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Mutually Assured Destruction<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Truman Doctrine<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Marshall Plan<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>Iron Curtain<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">The Berlin Airlift<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>The Berlin Wall<\/li>\r\n \t<li><span class=\"c3\">Nikita Khrushchev<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li>De-Stalinization<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Space race<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Cuban Missile Crisis<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.45jfvxd\" class=\"c19\"><span class=\"c7\">19.2 World War II and its Aftermath\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c14 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">At the height of Soviet power in the late 1960s, one-third of the world\u2019s population lived in communist countries. \u00a0The great communist powers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People\u2019s Republic of China loomed over a vast swath of Eurasia, while smaller countries occasionally erupted in revolution. Non-aligned countries like India were often as sympathetic to the \u201c<strong>Soviet Bloc<\/strong>\u201d (i.e. countries allied with or under the control of the USSR) as they were to the United States and the other major capitalist countries. \u00a0Even in the capitalist countries of the West, intellectuals, students, and workers often sympathized with communism as well, despite the apparent mismatch between the Utopian promise of Marxism and the reality of a police state in the USSR. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">This global split between communist and capitalist was only possible because of the vast might of the USSR. \u00a0The threat of world war terrified every sane person on the planet, but beyond that, the threat of conventional military intervention by the Soviets was almost as threatening. \u00a0The USSR controlled the governments of every Eastern European country, with the strange exception of Yugoslavia, and it had considerable influence almost everywhere in the globe. \u00a0Its factories churned out military hardware at an enormous rate, even as its scientists proved themselves the equal of anything the west could produce and its athletes often defeated all challengers at the Olympics every four years.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Behind the fa\u00e7ade of strength and power, however, the USSR was one of the strangest historical paradoxes of all time. \u00a0It was a country whose official political ideology, Marxism-Leninism, proclaimed an end to class warfare and the stated goal of achieving true communism, a worker\u2019s state in which everyone enjoyed the fruits of science and industrialism and no one was left behind. \u00a0In reality, the nation was in a perpetual state of economic stagnation, with its citizens enjoying dramatically lower standards of living than their contemporaries in the west and workers toiling harder and for fewer benefits than did many in the west. \u00a0Marxism-Leninism was officially hostile to imperialism, and yet the USSR controlled the governments of most of its \u201callied\u201d nations after World War II. \u00a0Of all forms of government, communism was supposed to be the most genuinely democratic, responding to the will of the people instead of false representatives bought with the money of the rich, and yet decision-making rested in the hands of high-level member of the communist party, the so-called<span class=\"c4\"> apparatchiks<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, or arch-bureaucrats. \u00a0Finally, Marxism-Leninism was officially a political program of peace, yet nothing received so much attention or priority in the USSR as did military power.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Stalin\u2019s policies transformed the USSR into a semblance of a modern state by the eve of World War II - \u201cjust in time\u201d as it turned out. \u00a0But it came at a terrible human cost. During the war the USSR bore the brunt of German military power. \u00a0More than 25 million Soviets died on the eastern front, soldiers and civilians alike, and it was through the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people that the German army was finally broken and driven back. \u00a0In the aftermath of World War II, Stalin\u2019s power was unshakable. During the war, he had played the role of the powerful, protective \"uncle\" of the Soviet people, and after victory was achieved he enjoyed a period of genuine popularity, especially as returning Soviet soldiers were given good positions in the bureaucracy.<\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">During the war, the one thing that tied Britain, the US, and the USSR together in alliance was their shared enemy, Germany, not shared perspectives on a desirable postwar outcome besides German defeat. \u00a0The war required them to work together, however, and that included making compromises that would in some cases haunt the postwar period. \u00a0In 1943, after the tide of the war had shifted against Germany but well before the end was in sight, the \"Big Three\" leaders of Britain, the US, and the USSR met in Tehran in 1943 (<strong>the Tehran Conference<\/strong>) to discuss the war and what would be done afterwards. \u00a0There, Stalin insisted that the territory seized from Poland by the USSR in 1939 would remain in Soviet hands: Poland would thus shrink enormously. \u00a0Roosevelt and Churchill, well aware of the critical role then being played by Soviet troops, were not in a position to insist otherwise.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"515\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image43.jpg\" alt=\"Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill during their meeting at the Tehran Conference in 1943.\" width=\"515\" height=\"387\" \/> The Tehran Conference in 1943 represented the first in-person meeting of the \u201cBig Three.\u201d \u00a0From left: Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1944, a team of politicians and economists from several Allied nations met in New Hampshire and devised the basis of the postwar economic order, the <strong>Bretton Woods Agreement.<\/strong> \u00a0That agreement fixed the dollar as the monetary reserve of the western world, created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to stabilize the international economy, and fixed currency exchange rates. \u00a0This plan initially included the Soviets, who would thus be eligible for financial support in addressing the devastation wrought by Germany (as noted below, however, the USSR pulled out in 1948, thereby driving home an economic as well as political divide between east and west).<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In January of 1945, when the end was finally in sight and Soviet forces already occupied most of Eastern Europe, Stalin stipulated that the postwar governments in Eastern Europe would need to be \u201cfriendly\u201d to the Soviet Union, an ambiguous term whose practical meaning suggested dominance by communist parties. \u00a0Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on the condition that Stalin promised to support free elections, something Stalin never intended to allow. \u00a0The leaders also agreed to divide Germany into different zones until such time as they could determine how to allow the Germans, purged of Nazism they hoped, to have self-government again.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In part, Britain and the US gave in to Soviet demands because of the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people in the war; 90% of the casualties on the Allied side up to 1944 were Soviets (mostly Russians, but including millions of Ukrainians and Central Asians as well). \u00a0Until 1945, Roosevelt assumed the United States would need Soviet help in bringing about the final defeat of Japan as well. \u00a0Each side tried to avoid antagonizing the other, especially while the war continued, even though they privately recognized that there were incompatible visions of postwar European reorganization at stake.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Despite those incompatible ideas, many political leaders (and regular citizens) across the globe hoped that the postwar order would be fundamentally different than its prewar analog. \u00a0Fundamental to that vision was the creation of an official international body whose purpose was the prevention of armed conflict and the pursuit of peaceful and productive policies around the world: the <strong>United Nations<\/strong>, the second attempt at an international coordinating organization after the pitiful failure of the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. \u00a0The UN was founded in 1945 as a body of arbitration and, when necessary, enforcement of internationally-agreed upon policies, seeing its first major role in the Nuremberg Trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. \u00a0Its Security Council was authorized to deploy military force when necessary, but its very reason to be was to prevent war from being used as a tool of political aggrandizement. \u00a0The Soviet Union joined the western powers as a founding member of the UN, and there were at least some hopes that it would oversee a just and equitable postwar political order.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--key-takeaways\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Creating the Soviet Bloc<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n\r\n1920s - Red Army took control of satellite states of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucuses\r\n\r\n1940 - Soviet occupation of Lituania, Latvia, and Estonia\r\n\r\n1940 - Romania cedes Bessarabia and North Nukovina to USSR\r\n\r\n1945 - USSR and Allies agree to post-war spheres of influence\r\n\r\n1950 - USSR and China sign 30-year alliance treaty\r\n\r\n1956 - Soviet troops help crush an uprising in Hungary\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c0\">19.3 The Cold War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Despite the foundation of the UN, and the fact that both the US and USSR were permanent members of the Security Council, the divide between them undermined the possibility of global unity. \u00a0Instead, by the late 1940s, the world was increasingly split into the two rival \u201ccamps\u201d of the Cold War. \u00a0The term itself refers to the decades-long rivalry between the two postwar \u201csuperpowers,\u201d the United States and the Soviet Union. \u00a0This was a conflict that, fortunately for the human species, never became a \"hot\" war. \u00a0Both sides had enormous nuclear arsenals by the 1960s that would have ensured that a \"hot\" war would almost certainly see truly unprecedented destruction, up to and including the actual possibility of the extinction of the human species (the American government invented a memorable acronym for this known as M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction). \u00a0Instead, both nations had enough of a collective self-preservation instinct that the conflict worked itself out in the form of technological and scientific rivalry, an enormous and ongoing arms race, and \"proxy wars\" fought elsewhere that did not directly draw both sides into a larger conflict.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The open declaration of the Cold War, as it were, consisted of doctrines and plans. \u00a0In 1947 the US issued the Truman Doctrine, which pledged to help people resist communism wherever it appeared \u2013 the rhetoric of the doctrine was about the defense of free people who were threatened by foreign agents, but as became very clear over the next few decades, it was more important that people were not communists than they were \u201cfree\u201d from dictatorships. \u00a0The Truman Doctrine was born out of the idea of \u201ccontainment,\u201d of keeping communism limited to the countries in which communist takeovers had already occurred. \u00a0The immediate impetus for the doctrine was a conflict raging in Greece after WWII, in which the communist resistance movement that had fought the Nazis during the war sought to overthrow the right-wing, royalist government of Greece in the aftermath. \u00a0Importantly, while both the British and then the US supported the Greek government, the USSR did not lend any aid to the communist rebels, rightly fearing that doing so could lead to a much larger war. \u00a0Furious at what he regarded as another instance of western capitalist imperialism, however, Stalin pulled the USSR out of the Bretton Woods economic agreement in early 1948. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Truman Doctrine was closely tied to the fear of what American policy-makers called the \u201cDomino Theory\u201d: if one nation \u201cfell\u201d to communism, it was feared, communism would spread to the surrounding countries. \u00a0Thus, preventing a communist takeover anywhere, even in a comparatively small and militarily insignificant country, was essential from the perspective of American foreign policy during the entire period of the Cold War. \u00a0That theory was central to American policy from the 1950s through the 1980s, deciding the course of politics, conflicts, and wars from Latin America to Southeast Asia.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Along with the Truman Doctrine, the United States introduced the <strong>Marshall Plan<\/strong> in 1948, named for the American secretary of state at the time. \u00a0The Marshall Plan consisted of enormous American loans to European countries trying to rebuild from the war. \u00a0European states also founded a intra-European economic body called the Organization of European Economic Cooperation that any country accepting loans was obliged to join. \u00a0Stalin regarded the OEEC as a puppet of the US, so he banned all countries under Soviet influence from joining, and hence from accepting loans. \u00a0Simultaneously, the Soviets were busy extracting wealth and materials from their new puppets in Eastern Europe to help recover from their own war losses. \u00a0The legacy of the Marshall Plan, the OEEC, and Soviet policy was to create a stark economic division: while Western Europe rapidly recovered from the war, the East remained poor and comparatively backwards.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Already by 1946, in the words of Winston Churchill, the <strong>\u201ciron curtain\u201d<\/strong> had truly fallen across Eastern Europe. \u00a0Everywhere, local communist parties at first ruled along with other parties, following free elections. \u00a0Then, with the aid of Soviet \u201cadvisers,\u201d communists from Poland to Romania pushed other parties out through terror tactics and legal bans on non-communist political organizations. \u00a0Soon, each of the Eastern European states was officially pledged to cooperate with the USSR. \u00a0Practically speaking, this meant that every Eastern European country was controlled by a communist party that took its orders directly from Moscow - there was no independent political decision-making allowed.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The major exception was Yugoslavia. \u00a0Ironically, the one state that had already been taken over by a genuine communist revolution was the one that was not a puppet of the USSR. \u00a0During the war, an effective anti-German resistance was led by Yugoslav communists, and in the aftermath they succeeded in seizing power over the entire country. \u00a0Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, had great misgivings about the Soviet takeover of the rest of Eastern Europe, and he and Stalin angrily broke with one another after the war. \u00a0Thus, Yugoslavia was a communist country, but not one controlled by the USSR.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In turn, it was Stalin's anger that Yugoslavia was outside of his grasp that inspired the Soviets to carry out a series of purges against the communist leadership of the Eastern European countries now under Soviet domination. \u00a0Soviet agents sought \u201cTitoists\u201d who were supposedly undermining the strength of commitment to communism. \u00a0Between 1948 and 1953 more communists were killed by other communists than had died at the hands of the Nazis during the war (i.e. in terms of direct Nazi persecution of communists, not including casualties of World War II itself). \u00a0Communist leaders were put on show trials, both in their own countries and sometimes after being hauled off to Moscow, where they were first tortured into confessing various made-up crimes (collaborating with western powers to overthrow communism was a popular one), then executed. \u00a0It is worth noting that this period, especially the first few years of the 1950s, saw anti-Semitism become a staple of show trials and purges as well, as latent anti-Semitic sentiments came to the surface and Jewish communist leaders suffered a disproportionate number of arrests and executions, often accused of being \u201cZionists\u201d secretly in league with the west.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Simultaneously, the world was dividing into the two \u201ccamps\u201d of the Cold War. \u00a0The zones of occupation of Germany controlled by the US, France, and Britain became the new nation of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as West Germany, while the Soviet-controlled zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. \u00a0Nine western European countries joined the US in forming the <strong>North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO<\/strong>, whose stated purpose was the defense of each of the member states from invasion \u2013 understood to be the invasion of Western Europe by the USSR. \u00a0The USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August of 1949, thereby establishing the stakes of the conflict: the total destruction of human life. \u00a0And, finally, by 1955 the Soviets had formalized their own military system with the <strong>Warsaw Pact<\/strong>, which bound together the Soviet Bloc in a web of military alliances comparable to NATO.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In hindsight, it is somewhat surprising that the USSR was not more aggressive in the early years of the Cold War, making no overt attempts to sponsor communist takeovers outside of Eastern Europe. \u00a0The one direct confrontation between the two camps took place between May of 1948 and June of 1949, when the Soviets blockaded West Berlin. \u00a0The city of Berlin was in East Germany, but its western \u201czones\u201d remained in the hands of the US, Britain, and France, the phenomenon a strange relic of the immediate aftermath of the war. \u00a0As Cold War tensions mounted, Stalin ordered the blockade of all supplies going to the western zones. \u00a0The US led a massive ongoing airlift of food and supplies for nearly a year while both sides studiously avoided armed confrontation, known as <strong>the Berlin Airlift<\/strong> (1948). \u00a0In the end, the Soviets abandoned the blockade, and West Berlin became a unique pocket of the western camp in the midst of communist East Germany.<span style=\"color: #000000\"> In 1961, the East German authorities constructed <strong>the Berlin Wall<\/strong> (\"The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart) to stem the flow of East Berliners emigrating to the West via West Berlin as it offered greater freedoms and economic opportunities . The Berlin Wall became an important symbol of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain until it came down in 1989.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"492\"]<img class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image45.jpg\" alt=\"Plane dropping candy while flying low over West Berlin during the airlift.\" width=\"492\" height=\"384\" \/> A US Air Force transport plane dropping candy (part of a morale-boosting campaign) to children during the Berlin Airlift.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">It is worth considering the fact that Europe had been, scant years earlier, the most powerful region on Earth, ruling the majority of the surface of the globe. \u00a0Now, it was either under the heel of one superpower or dominated by the other, unable to make large-scale international political decisions without implicating itself in the larger conflict. \u00a0The rivalries that had divided the former \u201cgreat powers\u201d in the past seemed insignificant compared to the threat of a single overwhelming war initiated by foreign powers that could result in the end of history.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>What factors contributed to the onset of the Cold War?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How did the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan contribute to the division between Eastern and Western Europe? Did these policies achieve their goals?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What was the Iron Curtain, and how did it affect Eastern Europe?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Why was Yugoslavia an exception among Eastern European countries during the Cold War, and what was the Soviet reaction to Yugoslavia's independence?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Why did Berlin become a symbol of the Cold War?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2 id=\"h.2koq656\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">19.4 The USSR During the Cold War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Stalin died in 1954, leaving behind a country that was still comparatively poor, but enormously powerful. \u00a0In addition, Stalin left a legacy of death and imprisonment that touched nearly every family in the USSR, with millions still trapped in the gulags of Siberia. \u00a0After a power struggle between the top members of the communist party, Stalin\u2019s successor emerged: <strong>Nikita Khrushchev<\/strong>, a former coal miner and engineer who rose in the ranks of the party to become its leader. \u00a0Khrushchev was a \u201ctrue believer\u201d in the Soviet system, genuinely believing that the USSR would overtake the west economically and that its citizens would in turn eventually enjoy much better standards of living than those experienced in the west. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Khrushchev broke with Stalinism soon after securing power, a process known as \"<strong>De-Stalinization<\/strong>\". \u00a0In 1956, he gave a speech to the leaders of the communist party later dubbed the \u201csecret speech\u201d - it was not broadcast to the general public, but Khrushchev allowed it to leak to the state-controlled press. \u00a0In it, Khrushchev blamed Stalin for bringing about a \u201ccult of personality\u201d that was at variance with true communist principles, and for \u201cexcesses,\u201d a thinly veiled acknowledgement of the Siberian prison camps and summary executions. \u00a0Shortly after the speech, Khrushchev had four million prisoners released from the gulags as a practical gesture demonstrating his sincerity. \u00a0This period is called \u201cThe Thaw\u201d in Soviet history. \u00a0For a brief period, there was another flowering of literary and artistic experimentation comparable to that of the early 1920s. \u00a0The ubiquitous censorship was relaxed, with a few accurate accounts of the gulags making it into mainstream publication. \u00a0In turn, among many, there were genuine hopes for larger political reforms of the system. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">This hope of a new beginning was not limited to the Soviet Union itself. \u00a0In October of 1956, a reformist faction of the Hungarian communist party inspired a mass uprising calling for not just a reformed, more humanistic communism, but the expulsion of Soviet forces and \u201cadvisers\u201d completely. \u00a0That led to a full-scale invasion by the Soviet army that killed several thousand protesters in violent clashes (primarily in the capital city of Budapest), followed by the arrests of over half a million people in the aftermath. \u00a0It was clear that Khrushchev might not want to follow directly in Stalin\u2019s footsteps, but he had no intention of allowing genuine independence in the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Angered both by the events in Hungary and by the growth of outright dissent with the Soviet system in the USSR itself, Khrushchev reasserted control. \u00a0A few noteworthy works of art that hinted at dissent were allowed to trickle out (until Khrushchev was ousted by hardliners in 1964, at any rate), but larger-scale change was out of the question. \u00a0The state instead concentrated on wildly ambitious - sometimes astonishingly impractical - economic projects. \u00a0Soviet engineers and planners drained whole river systems to irrigate fields, Soviet factories churned out thousands of tons of products and materials no one wanted, and whole regions were polluted to the point of becoming nearly uninhabitable. \u00a0Over time, cynicism replaced terror as the default outlook of Soviet citizens. \u00a0It was no longer as dangerous to be alive as it had been under Stalin, but people recognized that the system was not \"really\" about the pursuit of communism. \u00a0Instead, for most, the only hope of achieving a decent standard of living and relative personal stability was forming the right connections within the enormous party bureaucracy. \u00a0The USSR went from a murderous police state under Stalin to a bloated, corrupt police state under Khrushchev and the leaders who followed him.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">It was also under Khrushchev that the Cold War reached its most frenzied pitch. \u00a0Khrushchev himself was an explosive personality who sincerely believed in the possibility of the USSR \u201cwinning\u201d the Cold War by outstripping the western world economically and winning over the nations of the Third World to communism politically. \u00a0To that end, he continued the Stalinist focus on building up heavy industry and, especially, military hardware, but he also devoted huge energies toward science and engineering. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">During Khrushchev\u2019s tenure as premier the \u201c<strong>space race<\/strong>\u201d joined the arms race as a major centerpiece of Cold War policy. \u00a0Despite the limited practical consequences of some aspects of the space race, it was symbolically important to both sides \u2013 it was a very visible demonstration of scientific superiority, and the first superpower to reach a given breakthrough in the space race had thus \u201cwon\u201d a major symbolic victory in the eyes of the world. \u00a0In addition, since the space race was based on the mastery of rocket technology, the military implications were obvious. \u00a0In 1957, the Soviets launched <span class=\"c4\">Sputnik<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, the first satellite to orbit the earth, an event which was perceived as a major Soviet triumph in the Cold War. \u00a0Khrushchev claimed that the USSR had also developed missiles that could strike targets on the other side of the world, and thus the west feared that the Soviets could as easily detonate a nuclear weapon in the US as in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"418\"]<img class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image47-1.jpg\" alt=\"Stamp depicting Sputnik's orbit.\" width=\"418\" height=\"521\" \/> A commemorative Soviet postage stamp depicting Sputnik\u2019s orbit.[\/caption]\r\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">The resulting fear and resentment between the two sides saw even greater emphasis on both the space race and the buildup of nuclear arms going into the 1960s. \u00a0The American President John F Kennedy was a hard-line anti-communist, a \u201ccold warrior,\u201d and he believed it was important to stand up to the Soviets symbolically and, if necessary, militarily. \u00a0In 1959, Cuban revolutionaries overthrew the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (who had been an American ally), and fearing American intervention, eventually aligned themselves with the USSR. \u00a0Thus, as Kennedy took office in 1960, he faced not only the growing technological and military power of the USSR itself, but what he regarded as a Soviet puppet on the very doorstep of US territory.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1962, the US Central Intelligence Agency staged an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, an event known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. \u00a0In the aftermath, Castro and Khrushchev agreed to install missile batteries in Cuba both as a deterrent against a potential invasion by the US in the future and to redress the superiority of American missile deployments. \u00a0Khrushchev was eager to establish a military presence in the western hemisphere, especially since the US had already installed missile batteries in its allied nations of Italy and Turkey within striking distance of the USSR. \u00a0American spy planes, however, detected the construction of the missile site in Cuba and the shipments of missiles en route to Cuba, leading to the point in history when the human race stood closest to complete extinction: the <strong>Cuban Missile Crisis<\/strong>. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">When the US government learned of the Soviet missiles, there was serious consideration of launching a full-scale assault on Cuba, something that could have led directly to nuclear war. \u00a0Many American military leaders believed at the time in the possibility of a \u201climited nuclear war\u201d in which missile sites would be destroyed quickly enough to prevent the Soviets from launching counter-strikes. \u00a0Instead, however, Kennedy and Khrushchev carefully engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, both of them realizing the stakes of the conflict and, thankfully for world history, not wanting to destroy the world in the name of national pride. \u00a0The American and Soviet navies faced off in the Atlantic while frenzied diplomacy sought an end to the crisis. \u00a0After thirteen panicked days, both sides agreed to withdraw their missiles, but not before an incident in which a Soviet submarine very nearly launched nuclear torpedoes at an American ship. \u00a0A single Soviet officer - Vasili Arkhipov - called off the strike that could have led directly to nuclear war. <\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and USSR agreed to create a \u201chotline\u201d to ensure rapid communication in the event of future crises. \u00a0The United States dropped the very idea of \u201climited\u201d nuclear war from its tactical repertoire and instead recognized that any nuclear strike was the equivalent of \u201cM.A.D.\u201d (Mutually Assured Destruction). \u00a0While the arms race between the superpowers continued, spiking again during the 1980s, both sides did enter into various treaties that limited the pace of nuclear arms production as well.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1964, having lost the confidence of key members of the Politburo, Khrushchev was forced out of office. \u00a0He was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, a lifelong communist bureaucrat. \u00a0Brezhnev would hold power until 1982, overseeing a long period of what is usually characterized as stagnation by historians: the Soviet system, including its nominal adherence to Marxism-Leninism, would remain in place, but even elites abandoned the idea that \u201creal\u201d communism was achievable. \u00a0Instead, life in the USSR was about trying to find a place in the system, rather than pursuing the more far-reaching goals of communist theory. \u00a0The state and the economy - deeply wedded in any case - were rife with corruption and nepotism, and a deep-seated, bitter cynicism became the outlook of most Soviet citizens toward their government and their lot in life. \u00a0Arguably, this pattern had already emerged under Khrushchev, but it truly came of age under Brezhnev. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">During Brezhnev\u2019s tenure as the Soviet premier, another eastern bloc nation tried unsuccessfully to break away from Soviet domination: Czechoslovakia. \u00a0In the Spring of 1968, the Czech communist leader Alexander Dubcek (who had fought against the Nazis in the war and had been a staunch ally and trusted underling of the Soviets up to that point) received permission from Moscow to experiment with limited reforms. \u00a0He called for \u201csocialism with a human face,\u201d meaning a kind of communist government that allowed freedom of speech, a liberalized outlook on human expression, and a diversified economy that could address sectors besides heavy industry. \u00a0Dubcek relaxed censorship and allowed workers to organize into Soviets (councils) as they had in the early years of communist revolution in Russia. \u00a0These reforms were eagerly embraced by the Czechs and Slovaks.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">Predictably, the reforms proved too radical for Moscow. \u00a0Brezhnev sent in the Soviet military, and all of the other Warsaw Pact countries (except Romania) also sent in troops. This reaction was regarded around the world as especially crude and disproportionate, given that the Czechs and Slovaks did not rise up in any kind of violent way (as the Hungarians had done, at least briefly, twelve years earlier). \u00a0Instead, the message was clear: no meaningful reform would be possible in the East unless the leadership in Moscow somehow underwent a fundamental change of outlook. \u00a0That change did eventually come, but not until the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2 id=\"h.zu0gcz\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">19.5 Conclusion: What Went Wrong with the USSR<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In historical hindsight, the paradox of a \"communist\" country that so profoundly failed to realize its stated goals of freedom, equality, and justice, has led many people (not just historians) to speculate about what was inherently flawed with the Soviet system. \u00a0There are many theories, three of which are considered below.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c5\"><span class=\"c3\">One idea is that the Soviet state was trapped in impossible circumstances. \u00a0It was largely cut off from the aid of the rest of the world until after World War II, and the Bolsheviks inherited control of a backwards, economically-underdeveloped nation. \u00a0They did their best, however brutal their methods, to catch up with the nations of the west and to create at least the possibility of a better life for future Soviet citizens. \u00a0This thesis is supported by the success of the Red Army: if Stalin had not industrialized Russia and the Ukraine by force, the theory goes, the results of World War II would have been even more awful.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c5\"><span class=\"c3\">Another take is that communism is somehow contrary to human nature and thus doomed to failure, no matter what the circumstances or context. \u00a0Here, scholars note the incredible prevalence of corruption at every level of Soviet society: the huge black market and the nepotism and infighting present in everything from getting a job to getting an apartment in one of the major cities. \u00a0Greed proved an implacable foe to communist social organization, with the party apparatchiks reaping the benefits of their positions - better food, better housing, vacations - that were never available to rank-and-file citizens.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c5\"><span class=\"c3\">A more subtle and sympathetic interpretation is that some kind of communism might be possible (social democracies have thrived in Europe for decades, after all), but the Soviet system went mad with trying to control everything. \u00a0The Soviet economy was the ultimate expression of the idea of a command economy, with every product produced according to arcane quotas set by huge bureaucracies within the Soviet state, and every industry beholden to equally unrealistic quotas. \u00a0The most elementary laws of supply and demand in economics were ignored in favor of irrational, and indeed arbitrary, systems of production. \u00a0The results were chronic shortages of goods and services people actually needed (or wanted) and equally vast surpluses of useless, shoddy junk, from ill-fitting shoes to unreliable machinery. \u00a0To cite a single example (noted by the historian Tony Judt), party leaders in the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan told farmers to buy up grain supplies from stores in order to meet their yearly quotas; those quotas were utterly impossible to meet through actual farming.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">All of these ideas have something to them. \u00a0It should also be considered that there had never been anything like a democratic or liberal society in Russia. \u00a0There was no tradition of what the British called the \u201cloyal opposition\u201d of political parties who may disagree on particulars but who are still accepted as legitimate expressions of the will and opinion of parts of the citizenry. \u00a0There were no \u201cchecks and balances\u201d to hold back corruption either, and by the Brezhnev era political connections were far more important than was any kind of heartfelt devotion to Marxist theory. \u00a0Thus, the kinds of decisions made by the Soviet leadership were inspired by a pure, ruthless will to see results against a backdrop of staggering inefficiency and corruption.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\">In the end, perhaps the biggest problem with the Soviet system was the fact that it was more important to fit into the system than to speak the truth. \u00a0The essential threat of violence and imprisonment during the Stalinist period cast a long shadow on the rest of Soviet history. \u00a0Conformity, ideological dogmatism, and indifference to any notion of fairness were all synonymous with \u201csuccess\u201d in Soviet society. \u00a0Before long, competence and honesty were <span class=\"c4\">threats<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> to too many people already in power to be allowed to exist - as an example, famous Russian scientists lived under house arrest for decades because they could not be disposed of, but neither could they be allowed to state their views openly.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">It also bears consideration that not everything about Soviet society was, actually, a failure. \u00a0After the \u201cThaw\u201d in the early 1950s, almost no one was executed for simply disagreeing with the state, and prison terms were much shorter. \u00a0Standards of living were mediocre, but medical care, housing, and food was either free or cheap because of state subsidies. \u00a0The kind of \u201cleveling-out\u201d associated with communist theory did happen, in a sense, because most people lived at a similar standard of living, the perks allowed to senior members of the communist party notwithstanding. \u00a0In the end, the Soviet Union represented one of the most profound, albeit often blood-soaked and inhumane, political experiments in world history.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\"><header class=\"textbox__header\">\r\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\r\n<ol>\r\n \t<li>In what ways did the Soviet system change after the death of Stalin? How lasting were these changes?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What were the main problems, internally, facing the Soviet Union in the period between Stalin's death and the early 1980s?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What were the main problems, internationally, facing the USSR in the period between Stalin's death and the early 1980s?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How many of these problems were due to the system of communism itself, and how many were due to political leadership? Are they connected?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How did the threat of nuclear conflict shape diplomatic strategies between the USSR and US?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2>19.6 Working with Evidence<\/h2>\r\n<div class=\"textbox\">\r\n\r\n<strong>Source 1: \"The Russians Discovery a Spy tunnel in Berlin, 1956\"<\/strong>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Background information<\/strong>: <em>In the early 1950s the Red Army had 30 divisions based in Germany. What were the Soviets up to?... The British and Americans desperately desired information that would provide an early warning of any Soviet attack. They devised an audacious plan to get it. They would build a quarter-mile-long tunnel from Berlin's American sector to the city's Soviet sector and tap into the underground telephone cables that carried conversations to and from Soviet military headquarters\u2026. By May 1955 the tunnel was completed and the Russian cables containing an estimated 1200 telephone lines were tapped. It was a mother-lode of information that kept 650 translators and analysts based in Washington and London busy around the clock for the next three years.<\/em><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>In 1968 the CIA wrote an \"after action\" report of the Berlin Tunnel operation code-named PBJOINTLY. We join the CIA report as American agents listen to a microphone hidden in the \"tap chamber\" where the underground Soviet cables have been spliced into:<\/em><\/p>\r\n<strong>\"What a filthy trick!\"\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">\"At approximately 0050 hours on 22 April, 40 or 50 men were seen on the east side of Scboenefelder Allee, deployed along the entire area observable from our installation, digging at three to five foot intervals over the location of the cable and, incidentally, the tap chamber.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . At approximately 0200 hours the top of the tap chamber was discovered, and at 0210 Russian speech was heard from the microphone in the tap chamber. The first fragments of speech indicated that the discovery of the tap chamber aroused no suspicion among those present. A small hole was broken in the tap chamber roof permitting limited visual observation of the chamber, and a Soviet captain was brought to the spot. After some discussion all agreed that the discovery was a manhole covering a repeater point, and the working crew began enlarging the hole to gain access to the 'repeater point.'<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . The work of excavation continued, and fragments of conversation connected with it were picked up by the tap chamber microphone. . . .A German remarked that the chamber might be connected with sewage work and proposed that plans of the sewage system be obtained. . . The Russian answered that they already had this information and the plans showed 'that chamber' to be 120 meters away from this point. At about 0320 hours, when still more of the tap chamber was revealed and a better view of the interior obtained, those present began to speculate vaguely about its exact nature and the time of its construction . . . Shortly after 0330 hours, the Soviets left the site by motor vehicle, presumably to report their findings.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">At approximately 0415 hours Vyunik\u00a0[Colonel Vyunik, Chief of the Soviet signal center in Berlin]\u00a0telephoned Alpatov's apartment\u00a0[Major Alpatov, a KGB officer]\u00a0and asked Alpatov if he had spoken with General Dudakov\u00a0[Chief signal Officer of the GSFG]. Alpatov said that he had, that he was getting dressed, and that he would go to his signal center as soon as possible. Vyunik told Alpatov to telephone him at the GSFG frame room as soon as possible. Adding, 'When we speak we must do so carefully. We know what the matter is, so will speak carefully.' This indicated clearly that by 0415 hours the GSFG Signal Directorate and General Dudakov, the Chief Signal Officer, had been informed of the discovery of the PBJOINTLY chamber, viewed it with extreme suspicion, and planned to re-route circuits passing over the target cables.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . Between 0700 and 0800 hours a number of additional Soviet officers arrived at the excavation, including Colonel Gusev of the KGB Signals Regiment. A Russian-speaking German was heard to remark that a 'commission' was expected, and a Soviet officer said that they would await the arrival of this commission before making a decision as to what the next step would be.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . At approximately 1145 hours one of the German crew was heard to exclaim, 'The box is an entry to a shaft!'<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . the Germans. . .broke a hole 'through the wall and gained visual access to the equipment chamber, which they described as a long passage.' By 1300 they evidently had enlarged the access hole and described 'a complete installation \u2013 a telephone exchange. . . An installation for listening in.'<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Conversations reflected that all present realized that the planning of the tunnel approach to the cables must have necessitated a very detailed study of relevant maps and plans.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . One of the Germans rather indignantly exclaimed, 'What a filthy trick. And where you would least expect it.' To which another relied, 'Unless one had seen it for himself, nobody would believe it.'<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Between 1515 and 1530 hours the tap wires were cut, and at about 1545 the attention of the Germans began to concentrate on the microphone itself. . .At 1550 hours work began on dismantling the microphone. Shortly afterward the microphone went dead and, after 11 months and 11 days, the operational phase of PBJOINTLY was completed.\"<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"textbox\">\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Source 2: The Beginning: \"I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history.\"<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>Reporter D. Sefton Delmer filed this eyewitness account of the beginning of the uprising with the London Daily Express:<\/em><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">\"I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history, I have seen the people of Budapest catch the fire lit in Poznan and Warsaw and come out into the streets in open rebellion their Soviet overlords. I have marched with them and almost for joy with them as the Soviet emblems in the Hungary were torn out by the angry and exalted crowds. And the point about the rebellion is that it looks like being successful.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">As I telephone this dispatch I can hear the roar of delirious crowds made up of student girls and boys, of Hungarian soldiers still wearing their Russian-type uniforms, and overalled factory workers marching through Budapest and shouting defiance against Russia. 'Send the Red Army home,' they roar. 'We want free and secret elections.' And then comes the ominous cry which one always seems to hear on these occasions: 'Death to Rakosi.' Death to the former Soviet puppet dictator - now taking a 'cure' on the Russian Black Sea Riviera - whom the crowds blame for all the ills that have befallen their country in eleven years of Soviet puppet rule.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Leaflets demanding the instant withdrawal of the Red Army and the sacking of the present Government are being showered among the street crowds from trams. The leaflets have been printed secretly by students who 'managed to get access', as they put it, to a printing shop when newspapers refused to publish their political programme. On house walls all over the city primitively stenciled sheets have been pasted up listing the sixteen demands of the rebels.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the fantastic and, to my mind, really super-ingenious feature of this national rising against the Hammer and Sickle, is that it is being carried on under the protective red mantle of pretended Communist orthodoxy. Gigantic portraits of Lenin are being carried at the head of the marchers. The purged ex-Premier Imre Nagy, who only in the last couple of weeks has been readmitted to the Hungarian Communist Party, is the rebels' chosen champion and the leader whom they demand must be given charge of a new free and independent Hungary. Indeed, the Socialism of this ex-Premier and - this is my bet Premier-soon-to-be-again, is no doubt genuine enough. But the youths in the crowd, to my mind, were in the vast majority as anti-Communist as they were anti-Soviet - that is, if you agree with me that calling for the removal of the Red Army is anti-Soviet.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In fact there was one tricky moment when they almost came to blows on this point. The main body of students and marchers had already assembled outside their university in front of the monument to the poet-patriot Petofi who led the 1848 rebellion against the Austrians. Suddenly a new group of students carrying red banners approached from a side street. The banners showed them to be the students of the Leninist-Marxist Institute, which trains young teachers of Communist ideology and supplies man puppet rulers' civil servants.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The immediate reaction of the main body, I noticed was to shout defiance and disapproval of the oncoming ideologists But they were quickly hushed into silence and the ideologists joined in the march with the rest of them, happily singing the\u00a0<em>Marseillaise<\/em>... \"<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"textbox\">\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Source 3: The Soviet Reaction: \"They took up positions around our block and opened fire with everything they had.\"<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><em>Hungarian journalist George Paloczi-Horvath filed this report with the London Daily Herald:<\/em><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">\"It was dawn ... the day the Russians struck again. We were awakened by the roar of heavy guns. The radio was a shambles. All we got was the national anthem, played over and over again, and continual repetition of Premier Nagy's announcement that after a token resistance we must cease fighting and appeal to the free world for help. . .<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">After our ten days' war of liberty; after the pathetically short period of our 'victory', this was a terrible blow. But there was no time to sit paralysed in despair. The Russians had arrested General Maleter, head of the Central Revolutionary Armed Forces Council The Army had received ceasefire orders. But what of the fighting groups of workers and students?<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">These courageous civilian units now had to be told to put td only token resistance in order to save bloodshed. They had been instructed not to start firing.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I called up the biggest group, the 'Corvin regiment.' A deputy commander answered the phone. His voice was curiously calm: 'Yes, we realized we should not open fire. But the Russians did. They took up positions around our block and opened fire with everything they had. The cellars are filled with 200 wounded and dead. But we will fight to the last man. There is no choice. But inform Premier Nagy that we did not start the fight.'<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was just before seven in the morning. Premier Nagy, alas, could not be informed any more. He was not to be found.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The situation was the same everywhere. Soviet tanks rolled in and started to shoot at every centre of resistance which had defied them during our first battle for freedom.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This time, the Russians shot the buildings to smithereens. Freedom fighters were trapped in the various barracks, public buildings and blocks of flats. The Russians were going to kill them off to the last man. And they knew it. They fought on till death claimed them.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This senseless Russian massacre provoked the second phase of armed resistance. The installation of Kadar's puppet government was only oil on the fire. After our fighting days, after our brief span of liberty and democracy, Kadar's hideous slogans and stupid lies, couched in the hated Stalinite terminology, made everyone's blood boil. Although ten million witnesses knew the contrary, the puppet government brought forward the ludicrous lie that our war of liberty was a counter-revolutionary uprising inspired by a handful of Fascists.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The answer was bitter fighting and a general strike throughout the country. In the old revolutionary centers - the industrial suburbs of Csepel, Ujpest and the rest - the workers struck and fought desperately against the Russian tanks. . .<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Armed resistance stopped first. The Russians bombarded to rubble every house from which a single shot was fired. The fighting groups realized that further battles would mean the annihilation of the capital. So they stopped fighting.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the strike went on.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Workers' Councils, the Writers' Association and the Revolutionary Council of the Students decided at last that the general strike must be suspended if Hungary were not to commit national suicide. . .\"<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><em><span class=\"c8 c4\">Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\r\n<span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Category:Joseph_Stalin%23\/media\/File:JStalin_Secretary_general_CCCP_1942.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960984000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1XE6S_T1nDpMUEN5EZ7h_o\">Stalin<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/First_five-year_plan%23\/media\/File:Yakov_Guminer_-_Arithmetic_of_a_counter-plan_poster_(1931).jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960984000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0amq442x7rXhzJVWNxJebG\">Five Year Plan Propaganda<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grand_Alliance_(World_War_II)%23\/media\/File:Teheran_conference-1943.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960985000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1wrKMttdz3SoFIRGpbkut7\">Big Three<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Berlin_Blockade%23\/media\/File:C-54_dropping_candy_during_Berlin_Airlift_c1949.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960985000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3VQFkYgQx2Sb7CTb5v-jzg\">Supply Plane<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\">\r\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sputnik_1%23\/media\/File:1967_CPA_3496.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960986000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3IoX2fqnDp0anJaKCjsfoQ\">Sputnik Stamp<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> - Public Domain<\/span>\r\n<h3><em>For Further Reference:<\/em><\/h3>\r\nCold War, documentary series and web page at\u00a0<em>CNN,\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/SPECIALS\/coldwar\/\">http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/SPECIALS\/coldwar\/<\/a> This award-winning documentary series was made in 1998, not long after the end of the cold war. Several of the interviews in the series were groundbreaking and give insight from multiple perspectives.\r\n\r\n<em>Post-War Rebuilding and the Cold War: Crash Course European History #41<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/-rkIqtV07HE\">https:\/\/youtu.be\/-rkIqtV07HE<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"Space Race Timeline\" at\u00a0<em>Royal Museums Greenwich<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rmg.co.uk\/stories\/topics\/space-race-timeline\">https:\/\/www.rmg.co.uk\/stories\/topics\/space-race-timeline<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"The Soviet Lunar Program &amp; the Space Race\" at\u00a0<em>PBS American Experience<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/americanexperience\/features\/moon-soviet-lunar-program-and-space-race\/\">https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/americanexperience\/features\/moon-soviet-lunar-program-and-space-race\/<\/a>\r\n\r\n\"The Russians discover a spy tunnel in Berlin, 1956\" at CIA Historical Paper no. 150, Clandestine Services History, The Berlin Tunnel Operation 1952 - 1956 (1968, declassified Feb., 2007); Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors (1980); Stafford, David, Spies Beneath Berlin (2002), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/spytunnel.htm\">http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/spytunnel.htm<\/a>.\r\n\r\n<span class=\"style1\">The Beginning: \"I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history\" at D. Sefton Delmer's account appears in the <em>London Daily Express<\/em>, <\/span>Oct. 23, 1956; <span class=\"style1\">George Paloczi-Horvath's account appears in the <em>London Daily Herald<\/em>, Nov. 4, 1956; Sebestyen, Victor, Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (1996), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.\">http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.<\/a><\/span>\r\n\r\n<span class=\"style1\">The Soviet Reaction: \"They took up positions around our block and opened fire with everything they had\" at D. Sefton Delmer's account appears in the <em>London Daily Express<\/em>, <\/span>Oct. 23, 1956; <span class=\"style1\">George Paloczi-Horvath's account appears in the <em>London Daily Herald<\/em>, Nov. 4, 1956; Sebestyen, Victor, Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (1996), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.\">http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.<\/a><\/span>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<div class=\"textbox shaded\">\r\n\r\nThis chapter contains a remix of text from the following:\r\n\r\nThe main text is taken from Christopher Brooks, \"Chapter 12: The Cold War\" in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.nscc.ca\/worldhistory\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/a> <\/em>Volume 3, licensed under a <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.<\/a>\r\n\r\nOriginal material in the text boxes and the inclusion of a \"For Further Reference\" section by Nicole V. Jobin, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a>\r\n\r\nOriginal material in section 19.1 \"Introduction,\" 19.2 \"The Cold War,\" \"Questions for Discussion, the inclusion of a \"Working with Evidence\" section and the inclusion of references in the \"For Further Reference\" section by Meghan K. Bowe, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div><\/div>\r\n<div><\/div>","rendered":"<h2 class=\"c14 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">19.1 Introduction<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Victory in Europe or <strong>V-E day<\/strong> was declared on May 8th, 1945. After almost six years of bloody conflict, the Axis powers were defeated. The Second World War was more brutal and bloodier than the First World War. Around 60-85 million soldiers and civilians died and it was the first war that claimed the lives of more civilians than soldiers. It also witnessed the horror of the first systematic genocide in modern history, the Holocaust. Many cities, towns and villages across Europe were completely destroyed by aerial bombing and heavy artillery which resulted in hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons. A common expression after 1945 was &#8220;Never again&#8221; which symbolized a universal desire to avoid another world war. The peoples of Europe were especially committed to this ideal after watching their families torn apart and their homes destroyed. For ordinary citizens, members of resistance movements to politicians and intellectuals, the answer was clear: Europe must be integrated. Instead of competition between European states, there was a need for a system of cooperation. But there were many obstacles and difficulties to overcome to achieve this goal, most notable the Cold War division of Europe into zones of American and Soviet influence for the next several decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--examples\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Terms for Identification<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ul>\n<li>V-E Day<\/li>\n<li>Soviet Bloc<\/li>\n<li>Tehran Conference<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Bretton Woods Agreement<\/span><\/li>\n<li>United Nations<\/li>\n<li>NATO<\/li>\n<li>Warsaw Pact<\/li>\n<li>Mutually Assured Destruction<\/li>\n<li>Truman Doctrine<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Marshall Plan<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Iron Curtain<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">The Berlin Airlift<\/span><\/li>\n<li>The Berlin Wall<\/li>\n<li><span class=\"c3\">Nikita Khrushchev<\/span><\/li>\n<li>De-Stalinization<\/li>\n<li>Space race<\/li>\n<li>Cuban Missile Crisis<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.45jfvxd\" class=\"c19\"><span class=\"c7\">19.2 World War II and its Aftermath\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c14 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">At the height of Soviet power in the late 1960s, one-third of the world\u2019s population lived in communist countries. \u00a0The great communist powers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People\u2019s Republic of China loomed over a vast swath of Eurasia, while smaller countries occasionally erupted in revolution. Non-aligned countries like India were often as sympathetic to the \u201c<strong>Soviet Bloc<\/strong>\u201d (i.e. countries allied with or under the control of the USSR) as they were to the United States and the other major capitalist countries. \u00a0Even in the capitalist countries of the West, intellectuals, students, and workers often sympathized with communism as well, despite the apparent mismatch between the Utopian promise of Marxism and the reality of a police state in the USSR. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">This global split between communist and capitalist was only possible because of the vast might of the USSR. \u00a0The threat of world war terrified every sane person on the planet, but beyond that, the threat of conventional military intervention by the Soviets was almost as threatening. \u00a0The USSR controlled the governments of every Eastern European country, with the strange exception of Yugoslavia, and it had considerable influence almost everywhere in the globe. \u00a0Its factories churned out military hardware at an enormous rate, even as its scientists proved themselves the equal of anything the west could produce and its athletes often defeated all challengers at the Olympics every four years.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Behind the fa\u00e7ade of strength and power, however, the USSR was one of the strangest historical paradoxes of all time. \u00a0It was a country whose official political ideology, Marxism-Leninism, proclaimed an end to class warfare and the stated goal of achieving true communism, a worker\u2019s state in which everyone enjoyed the fruits of science and industrialism and no one was left behind. \u00a0In reality, the nation was in a perpetual state of economic stagnation, with its citizens enjoying dramatically lower standards of living than their contemporaries in the west and workers toiling harder and for fewer benefits than did many in the west. \u00a0Marxism-Leninism was officially hostile to imperialism, and yet the USSR controlled the governments of most of its \u201callied\u201d nations after World War II. \u00a0Of all forms of government, communism was supposed to be the most genuinely democratic, responding to the will of the people instead of false representatives bought with the money of the rich, and yet decision-making rested in the hands of high-level member of the communist party, the so-called<span class=\"c4\"> apparatchiks<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, or arch-bureaucrats. \u00a0Finally, Marxism-Leninism was officially a political program of peace, yet nothing received so much attention or priority in the USSR as did military power.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Stalin\u2019s policies transformed the USSR into a semblance of a modern state by the eve of World War II &#8211; \u201cjust in time\u201d as it turned out. \u00a0But it came at a terrible human cost. During the war the USSR bore the brunt of German military power. \u00a0More than 25 million Soviets died on the eastern front, soldiers and civilians alike, and it was through the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people that the German army was finally broken and driven back. \u00a0In the aftermath of World War II, Stalin\u2019s power was unshakable. During the war, he had played the role of the powerful, protective &#8220;uncle&#8221; of the Soviet people, and after victory was achieved he enjoyed a period of genuine popularity, especially as returning Soviet soldiers were given good positions in the bureaucracy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">During the war, the one thing that tied Britain, the US, and the USSR together in alliance was their shared enemy, Germany, not shared perspectives on a desirable postwar outcome besides German defeat. \u00a0The war required them to work together, however, and that included making compromises that would in some cases haunt the postwar period. \u00a0In 1943, after the tide of the war had shifted against Germany but well before the end was in sight, the &#8220;Big Three&#8221; leaders of Britain, the US, and the USSR met in Tehran in 1943 (<strong>the Tehran Conference<\/strong>) to discuss the war and what would be done afterwards. \u00a0There, Stalin insisted that the territory seized from Poland by the USSR in 1939 would remain in Soviet hands: Poland would thus shrink enormously. \u00a0Roosevelt and Churchill, well aware of the critical role then being played by Soviet troops, were not in a position to insist otherwise.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 515px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image43.jpg\" alt=\"Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill during their meeting at the Tehran Conference in 1943.\" width=\"515\" height=\"387\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Tehran Conference in 1943 represented the first in-person meeting of the \u201cBig Three.\u201d \u00a0From left: Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1944, a team of politicians and economists from several Allied nations met in New Hampshire and devised the basis of the postwar economic order, the <strong>Bretton Woods Agreement.<\/strong> \u00a0That agreement fixed the dollar as the monetary reserve of the western world, created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to stabilize the international economy, and fixed currency exchange rates. \u00a0This plan initially included the Soviets, who would thus be eligible for financial support in addressing the devastation wrought by Germany (as noted below, however, the USSR pulled out in 1948, thereby driving home an economic as well as political divide between east and west).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In January of 1945, when the end was finally in sight and Soviet forces already occupied most of Eastern Europe, Stalin stipulated that the postwar governments in Eastern Europe would need to be \u201cfriendly\u201d to the Soviet Union, an ambiguous term whose practical meaning suggested dominance by communist parties. \u00a0Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on the condition that Stalin promised to support free elections, something Stalin never intended to allow. \u00a0The leaders also agreed to divide Germany into different zones until such time as they could determine how to allow the Germans, purged of Nazism they hoped, to have self-government again.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In part, Britain and the US gave in to Soviet demands because of the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people in the war; 90% of the casualties on the Allied side up to 1944 were Soviets (mostly Russians, but including millions of Ukrainians and Central Asians as well). \u00a0Until 1945, Roosevelt assumed the United States would need Soviet help in bringing about the final defeat of Japan as well. \u00a0Each side tried to avoid antagonizing the other, especially while the war continued, even though they privately recognized that there were incompatible visions of postwar European reorganization at stake.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Despite those incompatible ideas, many political leaders (and regular citizens) across the globe hoped that the postwar order would be fundamentally different than its prewar analog. \u00a0Fundamental to that vision was the creation of an official international body whose purpose was the prevention of armed conflict and the pursuit of peaceful and productive policies around the world: the <strong>United Nations<\/strong>, the second attempt at an international coordinating organization after the pitiful failure of the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. \u00a0The UN was founded in 1945 as a body of arbitration and, when necessary, enforcement of internationally-agreed upon policies, seeing its first major role in the Nuremberg Trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. \u00a0Its Security Council was authorized to deploy military force when necessary, but its very reason to be was to prevent war from being used as a tool of political aggrandizement. \u00a0The Soviet Union joined the western powers as a founding member of the UN, and there were at least some hopes that it would oversee a just and equitable postwar political order.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--key-takeaways\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Creating the Soviet Bloc<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<p>1920s &#8211; Red Army took control of satellite states of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucuses<\/p>\n<p>1940 &#8211; Soviet occupation of Lituania, Latvia, and Estonia<\/p>\n<p>1940 &#8211; Romania cedes Bessarabia and North Nukovina to USSR<\/p>\n<p>1945 &#8211; USSR and Allies agree to post-war spheres of influence<\/p>\n<p>1950 &#8211; USSR and China sign 30-year alliance treaty<\/p>\n<p>1956 &#8211; Soviet troops help crush an uprising in Hungary<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"c17\"><span class=\"c0\">19.3 The Cold War<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Despite the foundation of the UN, and the fact that both the US and USSR were permanent members of the Security Council, the divide between them undermined the possibility of global unity. \u00a0Instead, by the late 1940s, the world was increasingly split into the two rival \u201ccamps\u201d of the Cold War. \u00a0The term itself refers to the decades-long rivalry between the two postwar \u201csuperpowers,\u201d the United States and the Soviet Union. \u00a0This was a conflict that, fortunately for the human species, never became a &#8220;hot&#8221; war. \u00a0Both sides had enormous nuclear arsenals by the 1960s that would have ensured that a &#8220;hot&#8221; war would almost certainly see truly unprecedented destruction, up to and including the actual possibility of the extinction of the human species (the American government invented a memorable acronym for this known as M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction). \u00a0Instead, both nations had enough of a collective self-preservation instinct that the conflict worked itself out in the form of technological and scientific rivalry, an enormous and ongoing arms race, and &#8220;proxy wars&#8221; fought elsewhere that did not directly draw both sides into a larger conflict.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The open declaration of the Cold War, as it were, consisted of doctrines and plans. \u00a0In 1947 the US issued the Truman Doctrine, which pledged to help people resist communism wherever it appeared \u2013 the rhetoric of the doctrine was about the defense of free people who were threatened by foreign agents, but as became very clear over the next few decades, it was more important that people were not communists than they were \u201cfree\u201d from dictatorships. \u00a0The Truman Doctrine was born out of the idea of \u201ccontainment,\u201d of keeping communism limited to the countries in which communist takeovers had already occurred. \u00a0The immediate impetus for the doctrine was a conflict raging in Greece after WWII, in which the communist resistance movement that had fought the Nazis during the war sought to overthrow the right-wing, royalist government of Greece in the aftermath. \u00a0Importantly, while both the British and then the US supported the Greek government, the USSR did not lend any aid to the communist rebels, rightly fearing that doing so could lead to a much larger war. \u00a0Furious at what he regarded as another instance of western capitalist imperialism, however, Stalin pulled the USSR out of the Bretton Woods economic agreement in early 1948. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The Truman Doctrine was closely tied to the fear of what American policy-makers called the \u201cDomino Theory\u201d: if one nation \u201cfell\u201d to communism, it was feared, communism would spread to the surrounding countries. \u00a0Thus, preventing a communist takeover anywhere, even in a comparatively small and militarily insignificant country, was essential from the perspective of American foreign policy during the entire period of the Cold War. \u00a0That theory was central to American policy from the 1950s through the 1980s, deciding the course of politics, conflicts, and wars from Latin America to Southeast Asia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Along with the Truman Doctrine, the United States introduced the <strong>Marshall Plan<\/strong> in 1948, named for the American secretary of state at the time. \u00a0The Marshall Plan consisted of enormous American loans to European countries trying to rebuild from the war. \u00a0European states also founded a intra-European economic body called the Organization of European Economic Cooperation that any country accepting loans was obliged to join. \u00a0Stalin regarded the OEEC as a puppet of the US, so he banned all countries under Soviet influence from joining, and hence from accepting loans. \u00a0Simultaneously, the Soviets were busy extracting wealth and materials from their new puppets in Eastern Europe to help recover from their own war losses. \u00a0The legacy of the Marshall Plan, the OEEC, and Soviet policy was to create a stark economic division: while Western Europe rapidly recovered from the war, the East remained poor and comparatively backwards.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Already by 1946, in the words of Winston Churchill, the <strong>\u201ciron curtain\u201d<\/strong> had truly fallen across Eastern Europe. \u00a0Everywhere, local communist parties at first ruled along with other parties, following free elections. \u00a0Then, with the aid of Soviet \u201cadvisers,\u201d communists from Poland to Romania pushed other parties out through terror tactics and legal bans on non-communist political organizations. \u00a0Soon, each of the Eastern European states was officially pledged to cooperate with the USSR. \u00a0Practically speaking, this meant that every Eastern European country was controlled by a communist party that took its orders directly from Moscow &#8211; there was no independent political decision-making allowed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">The major exception was Yugoslavia. \u00a0Ironically, the one state that had already been taken over by a genuine communist revolution was the one that was not a puppet of the USSR. \u00a0During the war, an effective anti-German resistance was led by Yugoslav communists, and in the aftermath they succeeded in seizing power over the entire country. \u00a0Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, had great misgivings about the Soviet takeover of the rest of Eastern Europe, and he and Stalin angrily broke with one another after the war. \u00a0Thus, Yugoslavia was a communist country, but not one controlled by the USSR.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In turn, it was Stalin&#8217;s anger that Yugoslavia was outside of his grasp that inspired the Soviets to carry out a series of purges against the communist leadership of the Eastern European countries now under Soviet domination. \u00a0Soviet agents sought \u201cTitoists\u201d who were supposedly undermining the strength of commitment to communism. \u00a0Between 1948 and 1953 more communists were killed by other communists than had died at the hands of the Nazis during the war (i.e. in terms of direct Nazi persecution of communists, not including casualties of World War II itself). \u00a0Communist leaders were put on show trials, both in their own countries and sometimes after being hauled off to Moscow, where they were first tortured into confessing various made-up crimes (collaborating with western powers to overthrow communism was a popular one), then executed. \u00a0It is worth noting that this period, especially the first few years of the 1950s, saw anti-Semitism become a staple of show trials and purges as well, as latent anti-Semitic sentiments came to the surface and Jewish communist leaders suffered a disproportionate number of arrests and executions, often accused of being \u201cZionists\u201d secretly in league with the west.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Simultaneously, the world was dividing into the two \u201ccamps\u201d of the Cold War. \u00a0The zones of occupation of Germany controlled by the US, France, and Britain became the new nation of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as West Germany, while the Soviet-controlled zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. \u00a0Nine western European countries joined the US in forming the <strong>North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO<\/strong>, whose stated purpose was the defense of each of the member states from invasion \u2013 understood to be the invasion of Western Europe by the USSR. \u00a0The USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August of 1949, thereby establishing the stakes of the conflict: the total destruction of human life. \u00a0And, finally, by 1955 the Soviets had formalized their own military system with the <strong>Warsaw Pact<\/strong>, which bound together the Soviet Bloc in a web of military alliances comparable to NATO.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In hindsight, it is somewhat surprising that the USSR was not more aggressive in the early years of the Cold War, making no overt attempts to sponsor communist takeovers outside of Eastern Europe. \u00a0The one direct confrontation between the two camps took place between May of 1948 and June of 1949, when the Soviets blockaded West Berlin. \u00a0The city of Berlin was in East Germany, but its western \u201czones\u201d remained in the hands of the US, Britain, and France, the phenomenon a strange relic of the immediate aftermath of the war. \u00a0As Cold War tensions mounted, Stalin ordered the blockade of all supplies going to the western zones. \u00a0The US led a massive ongoing airlift of food and supplies for nearly a year while both sides studiously avoided armed confrontation, known as <strong>the Berlin Airlift<\/strong> (1948). \u00a0In the end, the Soviets abandoned the blockade, and West Berlin became a unique pocket of the western camp in the midst of communist East Germany.<span style=\"color: #000000\"> In 1961, the East German authorities constructed <strong>the Berlin Wall<\/strong> (&#8220;The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart) to stem the flow of East Berliners emigrating to the West via West Berlin as it offered greater freedoms and economic opportunities . The Berlin Wall became an important symbol of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain until it came down in 1989.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 492px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image45.jpg\" alt=\"Plane dropping candy while flying low over West Berlin during the airlift.\" width=\"492\" height=\"384\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A US Air Force transport plane dropping candy (part of a morale-boosting campaign) to children during the Berlin Airlift.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">It is worth considering the fact that Europe had been, scant years earlier, the most powerful region on Earth, ruling the majority of the surface of the globe. \u00a0Now, it was either under the heel of one superpower or dominated by the other, unable to make large-scale international political decisions without implicating itself in the larger conflict. \u00a0The rivalries that had divided the former \u201cgreat powers\u201d in the past seemed insignificant compared to the threat of a single overwhelming war initiated by foreign powers that could result in the end of history.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>What factors contributed to the onset of the Cold War?<\/li>\n<li>How did the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan contribute to the division between Eastern and Western Europe? Did these policies achieve their goals?<\/li>\n<li>What was the Iron Curtain, and how did it affect Eastern Europe?<\/li>\n<li>Why was Yugoslavia an exception among Eastern European countries during the Cold War, and what was the Soviet reaction to Yugoslavia&#8217;s independence?<\/li>\n<li>Why did Berlin become a symbol of the Cold War?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2 id=\"h.2koq656\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">19.4 The USSR During the Cold War<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Stalin died in 1954, leaving behind a country that was still comparatively poor, but enormously powerful. \u00a0In addition, Stalin left a legacy of death and imprisonment that touched nearly every family in the USSR, with millions still trapped in the gulags of Siberia. \u00a0After a power struggle between the top members of the communist party, Stalin\u2019s successor emerged: <strong>Nikita Khrushchev<\/strong>, a former coal miner and engineer who rose in the ranks of the party to become its leader. \u00a0Khrushchev was a \u201ctrue believer\u201d in the Soviet system, genuinely believing that the USSR would overtake the west economically and that its citizens would in turn eventually enjoy much better standards of living than those experienced in the west. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Khrushchev broke with Stalinism soon after securing power, a process known as &#8220;<strong>De-Stalinization<\/strong>&#8220;. \u00a0In 1956, he gave a speech to the leaders of the communist party later dubbed the \u201csecret speech\u201d &#8211; it was not broadcast to the general public, but Khrushchev allowed it to leak to the state-controlled press. \u00a0In it, Khrushchev blamed Stalin for bringing about a \u201ccult of personality\u201d that was at variance with true communist principles, and for \u201cexcesses,\u201d a thinly veiled acknowledgement of the Siberian prison camps and summary executions. \u00a0Shortly after the speech, Khrushchev had four million prisoners released from the gulags as a practical gesture demonstrating his sincerity. \u00a0This period is called \u201cThe Thaw\u201d in Soviet history. \u00a0For a brief period, there was another flowering of literary and artistic experimentation comparable to that of the early 1920s. \u00a0The ubiquitous censorship was relaxed, with a few accurate accounts of the gulags making it into mainstream publication. \u00a0In turn, among many, there were genuine hopes for larger political reforms of the system. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">This hope of a new beginning was not limited to the Soviet Union itself. \u00a0In October of 1956, a reformist faction of the Hungarian communist party inspired a mass uprising calling for not just a reformed, more humanistic communism, but the expulsion of Soviet forces and \u201cadvisers\u201d completely. \u00a0That led to a full-scale invasion by the Soviet army that killed several thousand protesters in violent clashes (primarily in the capital city of Budapest), followed by the arrests of over half a million people in the aftermath. \u00a0It was clear that Khrushchev might not want to follow directly in Stalin\u2019s footsteps, but he had no intention of allowing genuine independence in the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">Angered both by the events in Hungary and by the growth of outright dissent with the Soviet system in the USSR itself, Khrushchev reasserted control. \u00a0A few noteworthy works of art that hinted at dissent were allowed to trickle out (until Khrushchev was ousted by hardliners in 1964, at any rate), but larger-scale change was out of the question. \u00a0The state instead concentrated on wildly ambitious &#8211; sometimes astonishingly impractical &#8211; economic projects. \u00a0Soviet engineers and planners drained whole river systems to irrigate fields, Soviet factories churned out thousands of tons of products and materials no one wanted, and whole regions were polluted to the point of becoming nearly uninhabitable. \u00a0Over time, cynicism replaced terror as the default outlook of Soviet citizens. \u00a0It was no longer as dangerous to be alive as it had been under Stalin, but people recognized that the system was not &#8220;really&#8221; about the pursuit of communism. \u00a0Instead, for most, the only hope of achieving a decent standard of living and relative personal stability was forming the right connections within the enormous party bureaucracy. \u00a0The USSR went from a murderous police state under Stalin to a bloated, corrupt police state under Khrushchev and the leaders who followed him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">It was also under Khrushchev that the Cold War reached its most frenzied pitch. \u00a0Khrushchev himself was an explosive personality who sincerely believed in the possibility of the USSR \u201cwinning\u201d the Cold War by outstripping the western world economically and winning over the nations of the Third World to communism politically. \u00a0To that end, he continued the Stalinist focus on building up heavy industry and, especially, military hardware, but he also devoted huge energies toward science and engineering. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">During Khrushchev\u2019s tenure as premier the \u201c<strong>space race<\/strong>\u201d joined the arms race as a major centerpiece of Cold War policy. \u00a0Despite the limited practical consequences of some aspects of the space race, it was symbolically important to both sides \u2013 it was a very visible demonstration of scientific superiority, and the first superpower to reach a given breakthrough in the space race had thus \u201cwon\u201d a major symbolic victory in the eyes of the world. \u00a0In addition, since the space race was based on the mastery of rocket technology, the military implications were obvious. \u00a0In 1957, the Soviets launched <span class=\"c4\">Sputnik<\/span><span class=\"c3\">, the first satellite to orbit the earth, an event which was perceived as a major Soviet triumph in the Cold War. \u00a0Khrushchev claimed that the USSR had also developed missiles that could strike targets on the other side of the world, and thus the west feared that the Soviets could as easily detonate a nuclear weapon in the US as in Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 418px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2274\/2024\/08\/image47-1.jpg\" alt=\"Stamp depicting Sputnik's orbit.\" width=\"418\" height=\"521\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A commemorative Soviet postage stamp depicting Sputnik\u2019s orbit.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"c1 c9\"><span class=\"c3\">The resulting fear and resentment between the two sides saw even greater emphasis on both the space race and the buildup of nuclear arms going into the 1960s. \u00a0The American President John F Kennedy was a hard-line anti-communist, a \u201ccold warrior,\u201d and he believed it was important to stand up to the Soviets symbolically and, if necessary, militarily. \u00a0In 1959, Cuban revolutionaries overthrew the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (who had been an American ally), and fearing American intervention, eventually aligned themselves with the USSR. \u00a0Thus, as Kennedy took office in 1960, he faced not only the growing technological and military power of the USSR itself, but what he regarded as a Soviet puppet on the very doorstep of US territory.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1962, the US Central Intelligence Agency staged an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, an event known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. \u00a0In the aftermath, Castro and Khrushchev agreed to install missile batteries in Cuba both as a deterrent against a potential invasion by the US in the future and to redress the superiority of American missile deployments. \u00a0Khrushchev was eager to establish a military presence in the western hemisphere, especially since the US had already installed missile batteries in its allied nations of Italy and Turkey within striking distance of the USSR. \u00a0American spy planes, however, detected the construction of the missile site in Cuba and the shipments of missiles en route to Cuba, leading to the point in history when the human race stood closest to complete extinction: the <strong>Cuban Missile Crisis<\/strong>. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">When the US government learned of the Soviet missiles, there was serious consideration of launching a full-scale assault on Cuba, something that could have led directly to nuclear war. \u00a0Many American military leaders believed at the time in the possibility of a \u201climited nuclear war\u201d in which missile sites would be destroyed quickly enough to prevent the Soviets from launching counter-strikes. \u00a0Instead, however, Kennedy and Khrushchev carefully engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, both of them realizing the stakes of the conflict and, thankfully for world history, not wanting to destroy the world in the name of national pride. \u00a0The American and Soviet navies faced off in the Atlantic while frenzied diplomacy sought an end to the crisis. \u00a0After thirteen panicked days, both sides agreed to withdraw their missiles, but not before an incident in which a Soviet submarine very nearly launched nuclear torpedoes at an American ship. \u00a0A single Soviet officer &#8211; Vasili Arkhipov &#8211; called off the strike that could have led directly to nuclear war. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and USSR agreed to create a \u201chotline\u201d to ensure rapid communication in the event of future crises. \u00a0The United States dropped the very idea of \u201climited\u201d nuclear war from its tactical repertoire and instead recognized that any nuclear strike was the equivalent of \u201cM.A.D.\u201d (Mutually Assured Destruction). \u00a0While the arms race between the superpowers continued, spiking again during the 1980s, both sides did enter into various treaties that limited the pace of nuclear arms production as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In 1964, having lost the confidence of key members of the Politburo, Khrushchev was forced out of office. \u00a0He was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, a lifelong communist bureaucrat. \u00a0Brezhnev would hold power until 1982, overseeing a long period of what is usually characterized as stagnation by historians: the Soviet system, including its nominal adherence to Marxism-Leninism, would remain in place, but even elites abandoned the idea that \u201creal\u201d communism was achievable. \u00a0Instead, life in the USSR was about trying to find a place in the system, rather than pursuing the more far-reaching goals of communist theory. \u00a0The state and the economy &#8211; deeply wedded in any case &#8211; were rife with corruption and nepotism, and a deep-seated, bitter cynicism became the outlook of most Soviet citizens toward their government and their lot in life. \u00a0Arguably, this pattern had already emerged under Khrushchev, but it truly came of age under Brezhnev. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">During Brezhnev\u2019s tenure as the Soviet premier, another eastern bloc nation tried unsuccessfully to break away from Soviet domination: Czechoslovakia. \u00a0In the Spring of 1968, the Czech communist leader Alexander Dubcek (who had fought against the Nazis in the war and had been a staunch ally and trusted underling of the Soviets up to that point) received permission from Moscow to experiment with limited reforms. \u00a0He called for \u201csocialism with a human face,\u201d meaning a kind of communist government that allowed freedom of speech, a liberalized outlook on human expression, and a diversified economy that could address sectors besides heavy industry. \u00a0Dubcek relaxed censorship and allowed workers to organize into Soviets (councils) as they had in the early years of communist revolution in Russia. \u00a0These reforms were eagerly embraced by the Czechs and Slovaks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">Predictably, the reforms proved too radical for Moscow. \u00a0Brezhnev sent in the Soviet military, and all of the other Warsaw Pact countries (except Romania) also sent in troops. This reaction was regarded around the world as especially crude and disproportionate, given that the Czechs and Slovaks did not rise up in any kind of violent way (as the Hungarians had done, at least briefly, twelve years earlier). \u00a0Instead, the message was clear: no meaningful reform would be possible in the East unless the leadership in Moscow somehow underwent a fundamental change of outlook. \u00a0That change did eventually come, but not until the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h.zu0gcz\" class=\"c18\"><span class=\"c22\">19.5 Conclusion: What Went Wrong with the USSR<\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">In historical hindsight, the paradox of a &#8220;communist&#8221; country that so profoundly failed to realize its stated goals of freedom, equality, and justice, has led many people (not just historians) to speculate about what was inherently flawed with the Soviet system. \u00a0There are many theories, three of which are considered below.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c5\"><span class=\"c3\">One idea is that the Soviet state was trapped in impossible circumstances. \u00a0It was largely cut off from the aid of the rest of the world until after World War II, and the Bolsheviks inherited control of a backwards, economically-underdeveloped nation. \u00a0They did their best, however brutal their methods, to catch up with the nations of the west and to create at least the possibility of a better life for future Soviet citizens. \u00a0This thesis is supported by the success of the Red Army: if Stalin had not industrialized Russia and the Ukraine by force, the theory goes, the results of World War II would have been even more awful.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c5\"><span class=\"c3\">Another take is that communism is somehow contrary to human nature and thus doomed to failure, no matter what the circumstances or context. \u00a0Here, scholars note the incredible prevalence of corruption at every level of Soviet society: the huge black market and the nepotism and infighting present in everything from getting a job to getting an apartment in one of the major cities. \u00a0Greed proved an implacable foe to communist social organization, with the party apparatchiks reaping the benefits of their positions &#8211; better food, better housing, vacations &#8211; that were never available to rank-and-file citizens.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c5\"><span class=\"c3\">A more subtle and sympathetic interpretation is that some kind of communism might be possible (social democracies have thrived in Europe for decades, after all), but the Soviet system went mad with trying to control everything. \u00a0The Soviet economy was the ultimate expression of the idea of a command economy, with every product produced according to arcane quotas set by huge bureaucracies within the Soviet state, and every industry beholden to equally unrealistic quotas. \u00a0The most elementary laws of supply and demand in economics were ignored in favor of irrational, and indeed arbitrary, systems of production. \u00a0The results were chronic shortages of goods and services people actually needed (or wanted) and equally vast surpluses of useless, shoddy junk, from ill-fitting shoes to unreliable machinery. \u00a0To cite a single example (noted by the historian Tony Judt), party leaders in the Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan told farmers to buy up grain supplies from stores in order to meet their yearly quotas; those quotas were utterly impossible to meet through actual farming.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">All of these ideas have something to them. \u00a0It should also be considered that there had never been anything like a democratic or liberal society in Russia. \u00a0There was no tradition of what the British called the \u201cloyal opposition\u201d of political parties who may disagree on particulars but who are still accepted as legitimate expressions of the will and opinion of parts of the citizenry. \u00a0There were no \u201cchecks and balances\u201d to hold back corruption either, and by the Brezhnev era political connections were far more important than was any kind of heartfelt devotion to Marxist theory. \u00a0Thus, the kinds of decisions made by the Soviet leadership were inspired by a pure, ruthless will to see results against a backdrop of staggering inefficiency and corruption.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\">In the end, perhaps the biggest problem with the Soviet system was the fact that it was more important to fit into the system than to speak the truth. \u00a0The essential threat of violence and imprisonment during the Stalinist period cast a long shadow on the rest of Soviet history. \u00a0Conformity, ideological dogmatism, and indifference to any notion of fairness were all synonymous with \u201csuccess\u201d in Soviet society. \u00a0Before long, competence and honesty were <span class=\"c4\">threats<\/span><span class=\"c3\"> to too many people already in power to be allowed to exist &#8211; as an example, famous Russian scientists lived under house arrest for decades because they could not be disposed of, but neither could they be allowed to state their views openly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"c6\"><span class=\"c3\">It also bears consideration that not everything about Soviet society was, actually, a failure. \u00a0After the \u201cThaw\u201d in the early 1950s, almost no one was executed for simply disagreeing with the state, and prison terms were much shorter. \u00a0Standards of living were mediocre, but medical care, housing, and food was either free or cheap because of state subsidies. \u00a0The kind of \u201cleveling-out\u201d associated with communist theory did happen, in a sense, because most people lived at a similar standard of living, the perks allowed to senior members of the communist party notwithstanding. \u00a0In the end, the Soviet Union represented one of the most profound, albeit often blood-soaked and inhumane, political experiments in world history.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox textbox--exercises\">\n<header class=\"textbox__header\">\n<p class=\"textbox__title\"><strong>Questions for Discussion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"textbox__content\">\n<ol>\n<li>In what ways did the Soviet system change after the death of Stalin? How lasting were these changes?<\/li>\n<li>What were the main problems, internally, facing the Soviet Union in the period between Stalin&#8217;s death and the early 1980s?<\/li>\n<li>What were the main problems, internationally, facing the USSR in the period between Stalin&#8217;s death and the early 1980s?<\/li>\n<li>How many of these problems were due to the system of communism itself, and how many were due to political leadership? Are they connected?<\/li>\n<li>How did the threat of nuclear conflict shape diplomatic strategies between the USSR and US?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2>19.6 Working with Evidence<\/h2>\n<div class=\"textbox\">\n<p><strong>Source 1: &#8220;The Russians Discovery a Spy tunnel in Berlin, 1956&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Background information<\/strong>: <em>In the early 1950s the Red Army had 30 divisions based in Germany. What were the Soviets up to?&#8230; The British and Americans desperately desired information that would provide an early warning of any Soviet attack. They devised an audacious plan to get it. They would build a quarter-mile-long tunnel from Berlin&#8217;s American sector to the city&#8217;s Soviet sector and tap into the underground telephone cables that carried conversations to and from Soviet military headquarters\u2026. By May 1955 the tunnel was completed and the Russian cables containing an estimated 1200 telephone lines were tapped. It was a mother-lode of information that kept 650 translators and analysts based in Washington and London busy around the clock for the next three years.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>In 1968 the CIA wrote an &#8220;after action&#8221; report of the Berlin Tunnel operation code-named PBJOINTLY. We join the CIA report as American agents listen to a microphone hidden in the &#8220;tap chamber&#8221; where the underground Soviet cables have been spliced into:<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;What a filthy trick!&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">&#8220;At approximately 0050 hours on 22 April, 40 or 50 men were seen on the east side of Scboenefelder Allee, deployed along the entire area observable from our installation, digging at three to five foot intervals over the location of the cable and, incidentally, the tap chamber.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . At approximately 0200 hours the top of the tap chamber was discovered, and at 0210 Russian speech was heard from the microphone in the tap chamber. The first fragments of speech indicated that the discovery of the tap chamber aroused no suspicion among those present. A small hole was broken in the tap chamber roof permitting limited visual observation of the chamber, and a Soviet captain was brought to the spot. After some discussion all agreed that the discovery was a manhole covering a repeater point, and the working crew began enlarging the hole to gain access to the &#8216;repeater point.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . The work of excavation continued, and fragments of conversation connected with it were picked up by the tap chamber microphone. . . .A German remarked that the chamber might be connected with sewage work and proposed that plans of the sewage system be obtained. . . The Russian answered that they already had this information and the plans showed &#8216;that chamber&#8217; to be 120 meters away from this point. At about 0320 hours, when still more of the tap chamber was revealed and a better view of the interior obtained, those present began to speculate vaguely about its exact nature and the time of its construction . . . Shortly after 0330 hours, the Soviets left the site by motor vehicle, presumably to report their findings.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">At approximately 0415 hours Vyunik\u00a0[Colonel Vyunik, Chief of the Soviet signal center in Berlin]\u00a0telephoned Alpatov&#8217;s apartment\u00a0[Major Alpatov, a KGB officer]\u00a0and asked Alpatov if he had spoken with General Dudakov\u00a0[Chief signal Officer of the GSFG]. Alpatov said that he had, that he was getting dressed, and that he would go to his signal center as soon as possible. Vyunik told Alpatov to telephone him at the GSFG frame room as soon as possible. Adding, &#8216;When we speak we must do so carefully. We know what the matter is, so will speak carefully.&#8217; This indicated clearly that by 0415 hours the GSFG Signal Directorate and General Dudakov, the Chief Signal Officer, had been informed of the discovery of the PBJOINTLY chamber, viewed it with extreme suspicion, and planned to re-route circuits passing over the target cables.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . Between 0700 and 0800 hours a number of additional Soviet officers arrived at the excavation, including Colonel Gusev of the KGB Signals Regiment. A Russian-speaking German was heard to remark that a &#8216;commission&#8217; was expected, and a Soviet officer said that they would await the arrival of this commission before making a decision as to what the next step would be.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . At approximately 1145 hours one of the German crew was heard to exclaim, &#8216;The box is an entry to a shaft!&#8217;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . the Germans. . .broke a hole &#8216;through the wall and gained visual access to the equipment chamber, which they described as a long passage.&#8217; By 1300 they evidently had enlarged the access hole and described &#8216;a complete installation \u2013 a telephone exchange. . . An installation for listening in.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Conversations reflected that all present realized that the planning of the tunnel approach to the cables must have necessitated a very detailed study of relevant maps and plans.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">. . . One of the Germans rather indignantly exclaimed, &#8216;What a filthy trick. And where you would least expect it.&#8217; To which another relied, &#8216;Unless one had seen it for himself, nobody would believe it.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Between 1515 and 1530 hours the tap wires were cut, and at about 1545 the attention of the Germans began to concentrate on the microphone itself. . .At 1550 hours work began on dismantling the microphone. Shortly afterward the microphone went dead and, after 11 months and 11 days, the operational phase of PBJOINTLY was completed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"textbox\">\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Source 2: The Beginning: &#8220;I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><em>Reporter D. Sefton Delmer filed this eyewitness account of the beginning of the uprising with the London Daily Express:<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">&#8220;I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history, I have seen the people of Budapest catch the fire lit in Poznan and Warsaw and come out into the streets in open rebellion their Soviet overlords. I have marched with them and almost for joy with them as the Soviet emblems in the Hungary were torn out by the angry and exalted crowds. And the point about the rebellion is that it looks like being successful.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">As I telephone this dispatch I can hear the roar of delirious crowds made up of student girls and boys, of Hungarian soldiers still wearing their Russian-type uniforms, and overalled factory workers marching through Budapest and shouting defiance against Russia. &#8216;Send the Red Army home,&#8217; they roar. &#8216;We want free and secret elections.&#8217; And then comes the ominous cry which one always seems to hear on these occasions: &#8216;Death to Rakosi.&#8217; Death to the former Soviet puppet dictator &#8211; now taking a &#8216;cure&#8217; on the Russian Black Sea Riviera &#8211; whom the crowds blame for all the ills that have befallen their country in eleven years of Soviet puppet rule.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Leaflets demanding the instant withdrawal of the Red Army and the sacking of the present Government are being showered among the street crowds from trams. The leaflets have been printed secretly by students who &#8216;managed to get access&#8217;, as they put it, to a printing shop when newspapers refused to publish their political programme. On house walls all over the city primitively stenciled sheets have been pasted up listing the sixteen demands of the rebels.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the fantastic and, to my mind, really super-ingenious feature of this national rising against the Hammer and Sickle, is that it is being carried on under the protective red mantle of pretended Communist orthodoxy. Gigantic portraits of Lenin are being carried at the head of the marchers. The purged ex-Premier Imre Nagy, who only in the last couple of weeks has been readmitted to the Hungarian Communist Party, is the rebels&#8217; chosen champion and the leader whom they demand must be given charge of a new free and independent Hungary. Indeed, the Socialism of this ex-Premier and &#8211; this is my bet Premier-soon-to-be-again, is no doubt genuine enough. But the youths in the crowd, to my mind, were in the vast majority as anti-Communist as they were anti-Soviet &#8211; that is, if you agree with me that calling for the removal of the Red Army is anti-Soviet.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">In fact there was one tricky moment when they almost came to blows on this point. The main body of students and marchers had already assembled outside their university in front of the monument to the poet-patriot Petofi who led the 1848 rebellion against the Austrians. Suddenly a new group of students carrying red banners approached from a side street. The banners showed them to be the students of the Leninist-Marxist Institute, which trains young teachers of Communist ideology and supplies man puppet rulers&#8217; civil servants.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The immediate reaction of the main body, I noticed was to shout defiance and disapproval of the oncoming ideologists But they were quickly hushed into silence and the ideologists joined in the march with the rest of them, happily singing the\u00a0<em>Marseillaise<\/em>&#8230; &#8220;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"textbox\">\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>Source 3: The Soviet Reaction: &#8220;They took up positions around our block and opened fire with everything they had.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><em>Hungarian journalist George Paloczi-Horvath filed this report with the London Daily Herald:<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">&#8220;It was dawn &#8230; the day the Russians struck again. We were awakened by the roar of heavy guns. The radio was a shambles. All we got was the national anthem, played over and over again, and continual repetition of Premier Nagy&#8217;s announcement that after a token resistance we must cease fighting and appeal to the free world for help. . .<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">After our ten days&#8217; war of liberty; after the pathetically short period of our &#8216;victory&#8217;, this was a terrible blow. But there was no time to sit paralysed in despair. The Russians had arrested General Maleter, head of the Central Revolutionary Armed Forces Council The Army had received ceasefire orders. But what of the fighting groups of workers and students?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">These courageous civilian units now had to be told to put td only token resistance in order to save bloodshed. They had been instructed not to start firing.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I called up the biggest group, the &#8216;Corvin regiment.&#8217; A deputy commander answered the phone. His voice was curiously calm: &#8216;Yes, we realized we should not open fire. But the Russians did. They took up positions around our block and opened fire with everything they had. The cellars are filled with 200 wounded and dead. But we will fight to the last man. There is no choice. But inform Premier Nagy that we did not start the fight.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was just before seven in the morning. Premier Nagy, alas, could not be informed any more. He was not to be found.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The situation was the same everywhere. Soviet tanks rolled in and started to shoot at every centre of resistance which had defied them during our first battle for freedom.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This time, the Russians shot the buildings to smithereens. Freedom fighters were trapped in the various barracks, public buildings and blocks of flats. The Russians were going to kill them off to the last man. And they knew it. They fought on till death claimed them.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">This senseless Russian massacre provoked the second phase of armed resistance. The installation of Kadar&#8217;s puppet government was only oil on the fire. After our fighting days, after our brief span of liberty and democracy, Kadar&#8217;s hideous slogans and stupid lies, couched in the hated Stalinite terminology, made everyone&#8217;s blood boil. Although ten million witnesses knew the contrary, the puppet government brought forward the ludicrous lie that our war of liberty was a counter-revolutionary uprising inspired by a handful of Fascists.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The answer was bitter fighting and a general strike throughout the country. In the old revolutionary centers &#8211; the industrial suburbs of Csepel, Ujpest and the rest &#8211; the workers struck and fought desperately against the Russian tanks. . .<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Armed resistance stopped first. The Russians bombarded to rubble every house from which a single shot was fired. The fighting groups realized that further battles would mean the annihilation of the capital. So they stopped fighting.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the strike went on.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Workers&#8217; Councils, the Writers&#8217; Association and the Revolutionary Council of the Students decided at last that the general strike must be suspended if Hungary were not to commit national suicide. . .&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h3 class=\"c17\"><em><span class=\"c8 c4\">Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"c10\"><a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Category:Joseph_Stalin%23\/media\/File:JStalin_Secretary_general_CCCP_1942.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960984000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1XE6S_T1nDpMUEN5EZ7h_o\">Stalin<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/First_five-year_plan%23\/media\/File:Yakov_Guminer_-_Arithmetic_of_a_counter-plan_poster_(1931).jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960984000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0amq442x7rXhzJVWNxJebG\">Five Year Plan Propaganda<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grand_Alliance_(World_War_II)%23\/media\/File:Teheran_conference-1943.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960985000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1wrKMttdz3SoFIRGpbkut7\">Big Three<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Berlin_Blockade%23\/media\/File:C-54_dropping_candy_during_Berlin_Airlift_c1949.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960985000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3VQFkYgQx2Sb7CTb5v-jzg\">Supply Plane<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><span class=\"c10\"><br \/>\n<a class=\"c12\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sputnik_1%23\/media\/File:1967_CPA_3496.jpg&amp;sa=D&amp;ust=1594051960986000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3IoX2fqnDp0anJaKCjsfoQ\">Sputnik Stamp<\/a><\/span><span class=\"c3\"> &#8211; Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><em>For Further Reference:<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>Cold War, documentary series and web page at\u00a0<em>CNN,\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/SPECIALS\/coldwar\/\">http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/SPECIALS\/coldwar\/<\/a> This award-winning documentary series was made in 1998, not long after the end of the cold war. Several of the interviews in the series were groundbreaking and give insight from multiple perspectives.<\/p>\n<p><em>Post-War Rebuilding and the Cold War: Crash Course European History #41<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/-rkIqtV07HE\">https:\/\/youtu.be\/-rkIqtV07HE<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Space Race Timeline&#8221; at\u00a0<em>Royal Museums Greenwich<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rmg.co.uk\/stories\/topics\/space-race-timeline\">https:\/\/www.rmg.co.uk\/stories\/topics\/space-race-timeline<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Soviet Lunar Program &amp; the Space Race&#8221; at\u00a0<em>PBS American Experience<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/americanexperience\/features\/moon-soviet-lunar-program-and-space-race\/\">https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/americanexperience\/features\/moon-soviet-lunar-program-and-space-race\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Russians discover a spy tunnel in Berlin, 1956&#8221; at CIA Historical Paper no. 150, Clandestine Services History, The Berlin Tunnel Operation 1952 &#8211; 1956 (1968, declassified Feb., 2007); Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors (1980); Stafford, David, Spies Beneath Berlin (2002), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/spytunnel.htm\">http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/spytunnel.htm<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"style1\">The Beginning: &#8220;I have been the witness today of one of the great events of history&#8221; at D. Sefton Delmer&#8217;s account appears in the <em>London Daily Express<\/em>, <\/span>Oct. 23, 1956; <span class=\"style1\">George Paloczi-Horvath&#8217;s account appears in the <em>London Daily Herald<\/em>, Nov. 4, 1956; Sebestyen, Victor, Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (1996), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.\">http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"style1\">The Soviet Reaction: &#8220;They took up positions around our block and opened fire with everything they had&#8221; at D. Sefton Delmer&#8217;s account appears in the <em>London Daily Express<\/em>, <\/span>Oct. 23, 1956; <span class=\"style1\">George Paloczi-Horvath&#8217;s account appears in the <em>London Daily Herald<\/em>, Nov. 4, 1956; Sebestyen, Victor, Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (1996), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.\">http:\/\/www.eyewitnesstohistory.com\/hungarianrevolution.htm.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox shaded\">\n<p>This chapter contains a remix of text from the following:<\/p>\n<p>The main text is taken from Christopher Brooks, &#8220;Chapter 12: The Cold War&#8221; in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/pressbooks.nscc.ca\/worldhistory\" rel=\"cc:attributionURL\">Western Civilization: A Concise History<\/a> <\/em>Volume 3, licensed under a <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Original material in the text boxes and the inclusion of a &#8220;For Further Reference&#8221; section by Nicole V. Jobin, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Original material in section 19.1 &#8220;Introduction,&#8221; 19.2 &#8220;The Cold War,&#8221; &#8220;Questions for Discussion, the inclusion of a &#8220;Working with Evidence&#8221; section and the inclusion of references in the &#8220;For Further Reference&#8221; section by Meghan K. Bowe, licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0\" src=\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/80x15.png\" alt=\"Creative Commons License\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2328,"menu_order":19,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-156","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":285,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":649,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156\/revisions\/649"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/285"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/156\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/europesince1600revised\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}