The Cold War was a period of global
geopolitical rivalry between the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
(US) and the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
(USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist
Western Bloc and communist
Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 until the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term ''
cold war
The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
'' is used because there was no direct fighting between the two
superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as
proxy wars. In addition to the struggle for ideological and economic influence and an
arms race in both conventional and
nuclear weapons
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either nuclear fission, fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and nuclear fusion, fusion reactions (thermonuclear weap ...
, the Cold War was expressed through technological rivalries such as the
Space Race,
espionage
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering, as a subfield of the intelligence field, is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence). A person who commits espionage on a mission-specific contract is called an ...
,
propaganda campaigns,
embargoes, and
sports diplomacy.
After the end of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
in 1945, during which the US and USSR had been allies, the USSR installed
satellite governments in its occupied territories in Eastern Europe and
North Korea
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders China and Russia to the north at the Yalu River, Yalu (Amnok) an ...
by 1949, resulting in the political division of Europe (and Germany) by an "
Iron Curtain". The USSR tested
its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after their use by the US
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and allied with the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
, founded in 1949. The US declared the
Truman Doctrine of "
containment" of communism in 1947, launched the
Marshall Plan in 1948 to assist Western Europe's economic recovery, and founded the
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; , OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental Transnationalism, transnational military alliance of 32 Member states of NATO, member s ...
military alliance in 1949 (matched by the Soviet-led
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (WP), formally the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA), was a Collective security#Collective defense, collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Polish People's Republic, Poland, between the Sovi ...
in 1955). The
Berlin Blockade of 1948 to 1949 was an early confrontation, as was the
Korean War
The Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was an armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula fought between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea; DPRK) and South Korea (Republic of Korea; ROK) and their allies. North Korea was s ...
of 1950 to 1953, which ended in a stalemate.
US involvement in regime change during the Cold War included support for
anti-communist and
right-wing dictatorships and uprisings, while
Soviet involvement included the funding of
left-wing parties,
wars of independence, and dictatorships. As nearly all the colonial states underwent
decolonization, many became
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Southern Cone, NATO, Western European countries and oth ...
battlefields of the Cold War. Both powers used economic aid in an attempt to win the loyalty of
non-aligned countries. The
Cuban Revolution of 1959 installed the first communist regime in the Western Hemisphere, and in 1962, the
Cuban Missile Crisis began after deployments of US missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles in Cuba; it is widely considered
the closest the Cold War came to escalating into
nuclear war. Another major proxy conflict was the
Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975, which ended in defeat for the US.
The USSR solidified its domination of Eastern Europe with its crushing of the
Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Relations between the USSR and China broke down by 1961, with the
Sino-Soviet split bringing the two states to the brink of war amid
a border conflict in 1969. In 1972,
the US initiated diplomatic contacts with China and the US and USSR signed a series of treaties limiting their nuclear arsenals during a period known as
détente. In 1979, the toppling of US-allied governments in
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...
and
Nicaragua
Nicaragua, officially the Republic of Nicaragua, is the geographically largest Sovereign state, country in Central America, comprising . With a population of 7,142,529 as of 2024, it is the third-most populous country in Central America aft ...
and the outbreak of the
Soviet–Afghan War again raised tensions. In 1985,
Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the USSR and expanded political freedoms, which contributed to the
revolutions of 1989 in the Eastern Bloc and the
collapse of the USSR in 1991, ending the Cold War.
Terminology
Writer
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...
used ''
cold war
The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
'', as a general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published 19 October 1945. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of
nuclear warfare
Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a War, military conflict or prepared Policy, political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are Weapon of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conven ...
, Orwell looked at
James Burnham's predictions of a polarized world, writing:
In ''
The Observer'' of 10 March 1946, Orwell wrote, "after the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire."
The first use of the term to describe the specific
post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by
Bernard Baruch, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents, on 16 April 1947. The speech, written by journalist
Herbert Bayard Swope, proclaimed, "we are today in the midst of a cold war." Newspaper columnist
Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency with his book ''The Cold War''. When asked in 1947 about the source of the term, Lippmann traced it to a French term from the 1930s, .
Background and periodization
The roots of the Cold War can be traced to diplomatic and military tensions preceding World War II. The 1917
Russian Revolution and the subsequent
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where Soviet Russia ceded vast territories to Germany, deepened distrust among the Western Allies. Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War further complicated relations, and although the Soviet Union later allied with Western powers to defeat
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...
, this cooperation was strained by mutual suspicions.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, disagreements about the future of Europe, particularly
Eastern Europe, became central. The Soviet Union's establishment of communist regimes in the countries it had liberated from Nazi control—enforced by the presence of the
Red Army—alarmed the US and UK. Western leaders saw this as Soviet expansionism, clashing with their vision of a democratic Europe. Economically, the divide was sharpened with the introduction of the
Marshall Plan in 1947, a US initiative to provide financial aid to rebuild Europe and prevent the spread of communism by stabilizing capitalist economies. The Soviet Union rejected the Marshall Plan, seeing it as an effort by the US to impose its influence on Europe. In response, the Soviet Union established
Comecon
The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, often abbreviated as Comecon ( ) or CMEA, was an economic organization from 1949 to 1991 under the leadership of the Soviet Union that comprised the countries of the Eastern Bloc#List of states, Easter ...
(Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) to foster economic cooperation among communist states.
The United States and its
Western Europe
Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's extent varies depending on context.
The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the Western half of the ancient Mediterranean ...
an allies sought to strengthen their bonds and used the policy of
containment against Soviet influence; they accomplished this most notably through the formation of
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; , OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental Transnationalism, transnational military alliance of 32 Member states of NATO, member s ...
, which was essentially a defensive agreement in 1949. The Soviet Union countered with the
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (WP), formally the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA), was a Collective security#Collective defense, collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Polish People's Republic, Poland, between the Sovi ...
in 1955, which had similar results with the Eastern Bloc. As by that time the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states, the pact has been long considered superfluous. Although nominally a defensive alliance, the Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard
Soviet hegemony over its
Eastern European satellites, with the pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away; in the 1960s, the pact evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained significant scope to pursue their own interests. In 1961, Soviet-allied
East Germany
East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from Foundation of East Germany, its formation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on ...
constructed the
Berlin Wall to prevent the citizens of
East Berlin from fleeing to
West Berlin
West Berlin ( or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin from 1948 until 1990, during the Cold War. Although West Berlin lacked any sovereignty and was under military occupation until German reunification in 1 ...
, at the time part of United States-allied
West Germany
West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...
. Major crises of this phase included the
Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, the
Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945–1949, the
Korean War
The Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was an armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula fought between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea; DPRK) and South Korea (Republic of Korea; ROK) and their allies. North Korea was s ...
of 1950–1953, the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the
Suez Crisis of that same year, the
Berlin Crisis of 1961, the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the
Vietnam War of 1955–1975. Both superpowers competed for influence in
Latin America
Latin America is the cultural region of the Americas where Romance languages are predominantly spoken, primarily Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese. Latin America is defined according to cultural identity, not geogr ...
and the
Middle East
The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.
The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...
, and the decolonising states of
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...
,
Asia
Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...
, and
Oceania.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, this phase of the Cold War saw the
Sino-Soviet split. Between China and the Soviet Union's complicated relations within the Communist sphere, leading to the
Sino-Soviet border conflict, while France, a Western Bloc state, began to demand greater autonomy of action. The
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred to suppress the
Prague Spring of 1968, while the United States experienced internal turmoil from the
civil rights movement and
opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. In the 1960s–1970s, an international
peace movement took root among citizens around the world. Movements against
nuclear weapons testing
Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the performance of nuclear weapons and the effects of Nuclear explosion, their explosion. Nuclear testing is a sensitive political issue. Governments have often performed tests to si ...
and for
nuclear disarmament took place, with large
anti-war protests. By the 1970s, both sides had started making allowances for peace and security, ushering in a period of
détente that saw the
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the
1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China that opened relations with China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. A number of self-proclaimed
Marxist–Leninist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in
developing countries, including
Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...
,
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique, is a country located in Southeast Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west, and Eswatini and South Afr ...
,
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
,
Cambodia,
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
, and
Nicaragua
Nicaragua, officially the Republic of Nicaragua, is the geographically largest Sovereign state, country in Central America, comprising . With a population of 7,142,529 as of 2024, it is the third-most populous country in Central America aft ...
.
Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the
Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. Beginning in the 1980s, this phase was another period of elevated tension. The
Reagan Doctrine led to increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, which at the time was undergoing the
Era of Stagnation. This phase saw the new Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev introducing the liberalizing reforms of ''
glasnost'' ("openness") and ''
perestroika'' ("reorganization") and ending Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in 1989. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to further support the Communist governments militarily.
The fall of the
Iron Curtain after the
Pan-European Picnic and the
Revolutions of 1989, which represented a peaceful revolutionary wave with the exception of the
Romanian revolution and the
Afghan Civil War (1989–1992), overthrew almost all of the Marxist–Leninist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...
itself lost control in the country and was banned following the
1991 Soviet coup attempt that August. This in turn led to the formal
dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist governments across much of Africa and Asia. The
Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state, while many of the other republics emerged as fully independent
post-Soviet states
The post-Soviet states, also referred to as the former Soviet Union or the former Soviet republics, are the independent sovereign states that emerged/re-emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Prior to their independence, they ...
.
The United States was left as the world's sole superpower.
Containment, Truman Doctrine, Korean War (1947–1953)
Iron Curtain, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and Poland
In February 1946,
George F. Kennan's "
Long Telegram" from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union. The telegram galvanized a policy debate that would eventually shape the
Truman administration's Soviet policy. Washington's opposition to the Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and
Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. Following the World War II
Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, the country was occupied by the Red Army in the far north and the British in the south. Iran was used by the United States and British to supply the Soviet Union, and the Allies agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months after the cessation of hostilities. However, when this deadline came, the Soviets remained in Iran under the guise of the
Azerbaijan People's Government and
Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. On 5 March, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "
Iron Curtain" speech calling for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" dividing Europe.
A week later, on 13 March, Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying Churchill could be compared to
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...
insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of
English-speaking nations so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that such a declaration was "a call for war on the USSR." The Soviet leader also dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere. He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety,
astrying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries."
Soviet territorial demands to Turkey regarding the Dardanelles in the
Turkish Straits crisis and Black Sea
border disputes were also a major factor in increasing tensions. In September, the Soviet side produced the
Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by
Vyacheslav Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war". On 6 September 1946,
James F. Byrnes delivered a
speech
Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, suc ...
in Germany repudiating the
Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes stated a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..." In December, the Soviets agreed to withdraw from Iran after persistent US pressure, an early success of containment policy.
By 1947, US president
Harry S. Truman was outraged by the perceived resistance of the Soviet Union to American demands in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Soviet rejection of the
Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the
Kingdom of Greece in
its civil war against Communist-led insurgents. In the same month, Stalin conducted the rigged
1947 Polish legislative election which constituted an open breach of the
Yalta Agreement. The
US government responded by adopting a policy of
containment, with the goal of stopping the spread of
communism
Communism () is a political sociology, sociopolitical, political philosophy, philosophical, and economic ideology, economic ideology within the history of socialism, socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a ...
. Truman delivered a speech calling for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the
Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and
totalitarian regimes. American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to
expand Soviet influence even though Stalin had told the Communist Party to cooperate with the British-backed government.
Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between
Republicans and
Democrats focused on containment and
deterrence that weakened during and after the
Vietnam War, but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while
European and
American Communists, financed by the
KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from
anti-Vietnam War activists, the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the
anti-nuclear movement.
Marshall Plan, Czechoslovak coup and formation of two German states

In early 1947, France, Britain and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for a plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already taken by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the
Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the
Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate. Under the plan, which President Harry S. Truman signed on 3 April 1948, the US government gave to Western European countries over $13 billion (equivalent to $189 billion in 2016). Later, the program led to the creation of the
OECD
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; , OCDE) is an international organization, intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and international trade, wor ...
.
The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to the
European balance of power, such as communist parties seizing control. The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the
National Security Act of 1947, creating a unified
Department of Defense, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the
National Security Council
A national security council (NSC) is usually an executive branch governmental body responsible for coordinating policy on national security issues and advising chief executives on matters related to national security. An NSC is often headed by a n ...
(NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War.
Stalin believed economic integration with the West would allow
Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that the US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with central and eastern Europe, became known as the
Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union.
In early 1948, Czech Communists executed a
coup d'état in
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
(resulting in the formation of the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), the only Eastern Bloc state that the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.
In an immediate aftermath of the crisis, the
London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in the
Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event marking the beginning of the full-blown Cold War, as well as ending any hopes at the time for a single German government and leading to formation in 1949 of the
Federal Republic of Germany and
German Democratic Republic.
The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey. With the US assistance, the Greek military
won its civil war. Under the leadership of
Alcide De Gasperi the Italian
Christian Democrats defeated the powerful
Communist–
Socialist alliance in the
elections of 1948.
Outside of Europe, the United States also began to express interest in the development of many other countries, so that they would not fall under the sway of Eastern Bloc communism. In his January 1949 inaugural address, Truman declared for the first time in U.S. history that
international development would be a key part of U.S. foreign policy. The resulting program later became known as the
Point Four Program because it was the fourth point raised in his address.
Espionage
All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies,
double agents,
moles, and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The Soviet
KGB ("Committee for State Security"), the bureau responsible for foreign espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness. The most famous Soviet operation involved its
atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States'
Manhattan Project, leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. A massive network of informants throughout the Soviet Union was used to monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals. Although to an extent
disinformation had always existed, the term itself was invented, and the strategy formalized by a
black propaganda department of the Soviet KGB.
Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian
Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of
HUMINT (human intelligence or interpersonal espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however, he concludes:
We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that there were no successful "moles" at the political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side.
According to historian Robert L. Benson, "Washington's forte was
'signals' intelligencethe procurement and analysis of coded foreign messages," leading to the
Venona project or Venona intercepts, which monitored the communications of Soviet intelligence agents.
Moynihan wrote that the Venona project contained "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." The Venona project was kept highly secret even from policymakers until the
Moynihan Commission in 1995. Despite this, the decryption project had already been betrayed and dispatched to the USSR by
Kim Philby and
Bill Weisband in 1946, as was discovered by the US by 1950. Nonetheless, the Soviets had to keep their discovery of the program secret, too, and continued leaking their own information, some of which was still useful to the American program. According to Moynihan, even President Truman may not have been fully informed of Venona, which may have left him unaware of the extent of Soviet espionage.
Clandestine
atomic spies from the Soviet Union, who infiltrated the
Manhattan Project during WWII, played a major role in increasing tensions that led to the Cold War.
In addition to usual espionage, the Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing
Eastern Bloc defectors.
Edward Jay Epstein describes that the CIA understood that the KGB used "provocations", or fake defections, as a trick to embarrass Western intelligence and establish Soviet double agents. As a result, from 1959 to 1973, the CIA required that East Bloc defectors went through a counterintelligence investigation before being recruited as a source of intelligence.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, the KGB perfected its use of espionage to sway and distort diplomacy.
Active measures were "clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy goals," consisting of disinformation, forgeries, leaks to foreign media, and the channeling of aid to militant groups. Retired KGB Major General
Oleg Kalugin described active measures as "the heart and soul of
Soviet intelligence."
During the
Sino-Soviet split, "spy wars" also occurred between the USSR and PRC.
Cominform and the Tito–Stalin Split
In September 1947, the Soviets created
Cominform to impose orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet
satellites through coordination of communist parties in the
Eastern Bloc. Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the
Tito–Stalin split obliged its members to expel
Yugoslavia
, common_name = Yugoslavia
, life_span = 1918–19921941–1945: World War II in Yugoslavia#Axis invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Axis occupation
, p1 = Kingdom of SerbiaSerbia
, flag_p ...
, which remained communist but adopted a
non-aligned position and began accepting financial aid from the US.
Besides Berlin, the status of the city of
Trieste
Trieste ( , ; ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital and largest city of the Regions of Italy#Autonomous regions with special statute, autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, as well as of the Province of Trieste, ...
was at issue. Until the break between Tito and Stalin, the Western powers and the Eastern bloc faced each other uncompromisingly. In addition to capitalism and communism, Italians and Slovenes, monarchists and republicans as well as war winners and losers often faced each other irreconcilably. The neutral buffer state
Free Territory of Trieste, founded in 1947 with the United Nations, was split up and dissolved in 1954 and 1975, also because of the détente between the West and Tito.
Berlin Blockade

The US and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into "
Bizone" (1 January 1947, later "Trizone" with the addition of France's zone, April 1949). As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives of a number of Western European governments and the United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the
Marshall Plan, they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the West German economy, including the introduction of a new
Deutsche Mark currency to replace the old
Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased. The US had secretly decided that a unified and neutral Germany was undesirable, with
Walter Bedell Smith telling General Eisenhower "in spite of our announced position, we really do not want nor intend to accept German unification on any terms that the Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our requirements."
Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 – May 1949), one of the first major crises of the Cold War, preventing Western supplies from reaching West Germany's exclave of
West Berlin
West Berlin ( or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin from 1948 until 1990, during the Cold War. Although West Berlin lacked any sovereignty and was under military occupation until German reunification in 1 ...
. The United States (primarily), Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with provisions despite Soviet threats.
The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against the policy change. Once again, the East Berlin communists attempted to disrupt the
Berlin municipal elections, which were held on 5 December 1948 and produced a turnout of 86% and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. The results effectively divided the city into East and West, the latter comprising US, British and French sectors. 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue, and US Air Force pilot
Gail Halvorsen created "
Operation Vittles", which supplied candy to German children. The Airlift was as much a logistical as a political and psychological success for the West; it firmly linked West Berlin to the United States. In May 1949, Stalin lifted the blockade.
In 1952, Stalin repeatedly
proposed a plan to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in elections supervised by the United Nations, if the new Germany were to stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal was turned down by the Western powers. Some sources dispute the sincerity of the proposal.
Beginnings of NATO and Radio Free Europe

Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the
North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, the
first Soviet atomic device was detonated in
Semipalatinsk,
Kazakh SSR. Following Soviet refusals to participate in a German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of the
Federal Republic of Germany from the
three Western zones of occupation in April 1949. The Soviet Union proclaimed
its zone of occupation in Germany the
German Democratic Republic that October.
Media in the
Eastern Bloc was an
organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. Radio and television organizations were state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party. Soviet radio broadcasts used Marxist rhetoric to attack capitalism, emphasizing themes of labor exploitation, imperialism and war-mongering.
Along with the broadcasts of the
BBC and the
Voice of America to Central and Eastern Europe, a major propaganda effort began in 1949 was
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press in the Soviet Bloc. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. Soviet and Eastern Bloc authorities used various methods to suppress Western broadcasts, including
radio jamming.
American policymakers, including Kennan and
John Foster Dulles, acknowledged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world. The CIA also
covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called
Crusade for Freedom.
German rearmament
The rearmament of West Germany was achieved in the early 1950s. Its main promoter was
Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, with France the main opponent. Washington had the decisive voice. It was strongly supported by the Pentagon (the US military leadership), and weakly opposed by President Truman; the State Department was ambivalent. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 changed the calculations and Washington now gave full support. That also involved naming
Dwight D. Eisenhower in charge of NATO forces and sending more American troops to West Germany. There was a strong promise that West Germany would not develop nuclear weapons.
Widespread fears of another rise of
German militarism necessitated the new military to operate within an alliance framework under
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; , OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental Transnationalism, transnational military alliance of 32 Member states of NATO, member s ...
command. In 1955, Washington secured full German membership of NATO. In May 1953,
Lavrentiy Beria, by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of a neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO, but his attempts were cut short after he was
executed several months later during a Soviet power struggle. The events led to the establishment of the ''
Bundeswehr'', the West German military, in 1955.
Chinese Civil War, SEATO, and NSC 68
In 1949,
Mao Zedong's
People's Liberation Army
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It consists of four Military branch, services—People's Liberation Army Ground Force, Ground Force, People's ...
defeated
Chiang Kai-shek's United States-backed
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the one party state, sole ruling party of the country Republic of China (1912-1949), during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until Retreat ...
(KMT) Nationalist Government in China. The KMT-controlled territory was now
restricted to the island of
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
, the nationalist government of which exists to this day. The Kremlin promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China. According to Norwegian historian
Odd Arne Westad, the communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military mistakes than Chiang Kai-Shek made, and because in his search for a powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest groups in China. Moreover, his party was weakened during the
war against Japan. Meanwhile, the communists told different groups, such as the peasants, exactly what they wanted to hear, and they cloaked themselves under the cover of
Chinese nationalism.
Confronted with the
communist revolution in China and
the end of the American atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand its
containment doctrine. In
NSC 68, a secret 1950 document, the National Security Council proposed reinforcing pro-Western alliance systems and quadrupling spending on defense. Truman, under the influence of advisor
Paul Nitze, saw containment as implying complete
rollback of Soviet influence in all its forms.
United States officials moved to expand this version of containment into
Asia
Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...
,
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...
, and
Latin America
Latin America is the cultural region of the Americas where Romance languages are predominantly spoken, primarily Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese. Latin America is defined according to cultural identity, not geogr ...
, in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by communist parties financed by the USSR. In this way, this US would exercise "
preponderant power," oppose neutrality, and
establish global hegemony. In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the "
Pactomania"), the US formalized a series of alliances with
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
(a former WWII enemy),
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...
,
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
,
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
,
New Zealand
New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...
,
Thailand
Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and historically known as Siam (the official name until 1939), is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. With a population of almost 66 million, it spa ...
and the
Philippines
The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...
(notably
ANZUS in 1951 and
SEATO in 1954), thereby guaranteeing the United States a number of long-term military bases.
Korean War

One of the more significant examples of the implementation of containment was the United Nations US-led intervention in the
Korean War
The Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was an armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula fought between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea; DPRK) and South Korea (Republic of Korea; ROK) and their allies. North Korea was s ...
. In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities,
Kim Il Sung
Kim Il Sung (born Kim Song Ju; 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he led as its first Supreme Leader (North Korean title), supreme leader from North Korea#Founding, its establishm ...
's
North Korean People's Army invaded
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...
. Stalin had been reluctant to support the invasion but ultimately sent advisers. To Stalin's surprise, the
United Nations Security Council
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, an ...
backed the defense of South Korea, although the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest of the fact that
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
(Republic of China), not the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
, held a permanent seat on the council. A
UN force of sixteen countries faced North Korea, although 40 percent of troops were South Korean, and about 50 percent were from the United States.

The US initially seemed to follow containment, only pushing back North Korea across the
38th Parallel and restoring South Korea's sovereignty while allowing North Korea's survival as a state. However, the success of the
Inchon landing inspired the US/UN forces to pursue a
rollback strategy instead and to overthrow communist North Korea, thereby allowing nationwide elections under U.N. auspices. General
Douglas MacArthur then advanced into North Korea. The Chinese, fearful of a possible US invasion, sent in a large army and pushed the U.N. forces back below the 38th parallel. The episode was used to support the wisdom of the
containment doctrine as opposed to rollback. The Communists were later pushed to roughly around the original border, with minimal changes. Among other effects, the Korean War galvanised
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; , OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental Transnationalism, transnational military alliance of 32 Member states of NATO, member s ...
to develop a military structure. The
Korean Armistice Agreement was approved in July 1953.
Nuclear Arms Race and escalation (1953–1962)
Khrushchev, Eisenhower, and de-Stalinization

In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president that January. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the American defense budget had quadrupled, and Eisenhower moved to reduce military spending by a third while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively.
Joseph Stalin
died in 1953.
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Chai ...
eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he
denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society (
de-Stalinization).
On 18 November 1956, while addressing Western dignitaries at a reception in Moscow's Polish embassy, Khrushchev infamously declared, "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.
We will bury you", shocking everyone present. He would later claim he had not been referring to nuclear war, but the "historically fated victory of communism over capitalism."
Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated a "
New Look" for the
containment strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime. Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "
massive retaliation", threatening a severe US response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, allowed Eisenhower to face down Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956
Suez Crisis. The declassified US plans for retaliatory nuclear strikes in the late 1950s included the "systematic destruction" of 1,200 major urban centers in the Soviet Bloc and China, including Moscow, East Berlin and Beijing.
In spite of these events, there were substantial hopes for détente when
an upswing in diplomacy took place in 1959, including a two-week visit by Khrushchev to the US, and plans for a two-power summit for May 1960. The latter was disturbed by the
U-2 spy plane scandal, however, in which Eisenhower was caught lying about the intrusion of American surveillance aircraft into Soviet territory.
Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution

While
Stalin's death in 1953 slightly relaxed tensions, the situation in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce. The Soviets, who had already created a network of mutual assistance treaties in the
Eastern Bloc by 1949, established a formal alliance therein, the
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact (WP), formally the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA), was a Collective security#Collective defense, collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Polish People's Republic, Poland, between the Sovi ...
, in 1955. It stood opposed to NATO.

The
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader
Mátyás Rákosi. In response to a popular anti-communist uprising, the new regime formally disbanded the
secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. The
Soviet Army invaded. Thousands of Hungarians were killed and arrested, imprisoned and deported to the Soviet Union, and approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary. Hungarian leader
Imre Nagy and others were executed following secret trials.
From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city. According to
John Lewis Gaddis, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's "belief in the inevitability of war," however. The new leader declared his ultimate goal was "
peaceful coexistence". In Khrushchev's formulation, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own, as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities, which remained for decades until Gorbachev's later "new thinking" envisioning peaceful coexistence as an end in itself rather than a form of class struggle.
The events in Hungary produced ideological fractures within the communist parties of the world, particularly in Western Europe, with great decline in membership, as many in both western and socialist countries felt disillusioned by the brutal Soviet response. The communist parties in the West would never recover.
Rapacki Plan and Berlin Crisis of 1958–1959
In 1957, Polish foreign minister
Adam Rapacki proposed the
Rapacki Plan for a nuclear free zone in central Europe. Public opinion tended to be favourable in the West, but it was rejected by leaders of West Germany, Britain, France and the United States. They feared it would leave the powerful conventional armies of the Warsaw Pact dominant over the weaker NATO armies.
During November 1958, Khrushchev made an unsuccessful attempt to turn all of Berlin into an independent, demilitarized "free city". He gave the United States, Great Britain and France a six-month ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the sectors of West Berlin, or he would transfer control of Western access rights to the East Germans. Khrushchev earlier explained to
Mao Zedong that "Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin." NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid-December and Khrushchev withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question.
American military buildup
Like Truman and Eisenhower,
John F. Kennedy supported containment. President Eisenhower's
New Look policy had emphasized the use of less expensive nuclear weapons to
deter Soviet aggression by threatening massive nuclear attacks on all of the Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons were much cheaper than maintaining a large standing army, so Eisenhower cut conventional forces to save money. Kennedy implemented a new strategy known as
flexible response. This strategy relied on conventional arms to achieve limited goals. As part of this policy, Kennedy expanded the
United States special operations forces, elite military units that could fight unconventionally in various conflicts. Kennedy hoped that the flexible response strategy would allow the US to counter Soviet influence without resorting to nuclear war.
To support his new strategy, Kennedy ordered a massive increase in defense spending and a rapid build-up of the nuclear arsenal to restore the lost superiority over the Soviet Union. In his inaugural address, Kennedy promised "to bear any burden" in the defense of liberty, and he repeatedly asked for increases in military spending and authorization of new weapons systems. From 1961 to 1964, the number of nuclear weapons increased by 50 percent, as did the number of B-52 bombers to deliver them. The new ICBM force grew from 63 intercontinental ballistic missiles to 424. He authorized 23 new Polaris submarines, each of which carried 16 nuclear missiles. Kennedy also called on cities to construct fallout shelters.
Competition in the Third World

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably
Guatemala
Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico, to the northeast by Belize, to the east by Honduras, and to the southeast by El Salvador. It is hydrologically b ...
, Indonesia and
Indochina, were often allied with communist groups or otherwise perceived to be unfriendly to Western interests. In this context, the United States and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as
decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s. Both sides were selling armaments to gain influence. The Kremlin saw continuing territorial losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.
The United States used the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undermine neutral or hostile Third World governments and to support allied ones. In 1953, President Eisenhower implemented
Operation Ajax, a covert coup operation to overthrow the Iranian prime minister,
Mohammad Mosaddegh. The popularly elected Mosaddegh had been a Middle Eastern nemesis of Britain since nationalizing the British-owned
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951.
Winston Churchill told the United States that Mosaddegh was "increasingly turning towards Communist influence." The pro-Western
shah
Shāh (; ) is a royal title meaning "king" in the Persian language.Yarshater, Ehsa, ''Iranian Studies'', vol. XXII, no. 1 (1989) Though chiefly associated with the monarchs of Iran, it was also used to refer to the leaders of numerous Per ...
,
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, assumed control as an
autocratic monarch. The shah's policies included banning the communist
Tudeh Party of Iran, and general suppression of political dissent by
SAVAK, the shah's domestic security and intelligence agency.
In Guatemala, a
banana republic, the
1954 Guatemalan coup d'état ousted the left-wing President
Jacobo Árbenz with material CIA support. The post-Arbenz government—a
military junta
A military junta () is a system of government led by a committee of military leaders. The term ''Junta (governing body), junta'' means "meeting" or "committee" and originated in the Junta (Peninsular War), national and local junta organized by t ...
headed by
Carlos Castillo Armas—repealed a
progressive land reform law, returned nationalized property belonging to the
United Fruit Company, set up a
National Committee of Defense Against Communism, and decreed a
Preventive Penal Law Against Communism at the request of the United States.
The non-aligned Indonesian government of
Sukarno was faced with a major threat to its legitimacy beginning in 1956 when several regional commanders began to demand autonomy from
Jakarta
Jakarta (; , Betawi language, Betawi: ''Jakartè''), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta (; ''DKI Jakarta'') and formerly known as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, Batavia until 1949, is the capital and largest city of Indonesia and ...
. After mediation failed, Sukarno took action to remove the dissident commanders. In February 1958, dissident military commanders in Central Sumatra (Colonel
Ahmad Husein) and North Sulawesi (Colonel Ventje Sumual) declared the
Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia-
Permesta Movement aimed at overthrowing the Sukarno regime. They were joined by many civilian politicians from the
Masyumi Party, such as
Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, who were opposed to the growing influence of the communist
Partai Komunis Indonesia. Due to their anti-communist rhetoric, the rebels received arms, funding, and other covert aid from the CIA until
Allen Lawrence Pope, an American pilot, was shot down after a bombing raid on government-held
Ambon in April 1958. The central government responded by launching airborne and seaborne military invasions of rebel strongholds at
Padang and
Manado. By the end of 1958, the rebels were militarily defeated, and the last remaining rebel guerilla bands surrendered by August 1961.
In the
Republic of the Congo
The Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo-Brazzaville, the Congo Republic or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo), is a country located on the western coast of Central ...
, also known as Congo-Léopoldville, newly independent from
Belgium
Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...
since June 1960, the
Congo Crisis erupted on 5 July leading to the secession of the regions
Katanga and
South Kasai. CIA-backed President
Joseph Kasa-Vubu ordered the dismissal of the democratically elected Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba and the Lumumba cabinet in September over massacres by the armed forces during the
invasion of South Kasai and for involving Soviets in the country. Later the CIA-backed Colonel
Mobutu Sese Seko quickly mobilized his forces to seize power through a military coup d'état, and worked with Western intelligence agencies to imprison Lumumba and hand him over to Katangan authorities who executed him by firing squad.
In
British Guiana, the leftist
People's Progressive Party (PPP) candidate
Cheddi Jagan won the position of chief minister in a colonially administered election in 1953 but was quickly forced to resign from power after Britain's suspension of the still-dependent nation's constitution. Embarrassed by the landslide electoral victory of Jagan's allegedly Marxist party, the British imprisoned the PPP's leadership and maneuvered the organization into a divisive rupture in 1955. Jagan again won the colonial elections in 1957 and 1961, despite Britain's shift to a reconsideration of its view of the left-wing Jagan as a Soviet-style communist at this time. The United States pressured the British to withhold
Guyana's independence until an alternative to Jagan could be identified, supported, and brought into office. In
Malaya, the British colonialists
suppressed the communist anti-colonial rebellion.
Worn down by the communist
guerrilla war for Vietnamese full independence and handed a watershed defeat by communist
Viet Minh rebels at the
Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French accepted a negotiated abandonment of their neo-colonial stake in Vietnam right in 1954. On June 4, France granted full sovereignty to the anti-communist
State of Vietnam, an independent country within the
French Union. In the
Geneva Conference in July, peace accords were signed, leaving Vietnam divided between a pro-Soviet administration in
North Vietnam and a pro-Western administration in
South Vietnam at the
17th parallel north. Between 1954 and 1961, Eisenhower's United States sent economic aid and military advisers to strengthen South Vietnam's pro-Western government against communist efforts to destabilize it.
Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East–West competition. In 1955, at the
Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the
Belgrade
Belgrade is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Serbia, largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers and at the crossroads of the Pannonian Basin, Pannonian Plain and the Balkan Peninsula. T ...
-headquartered
Non-Aligned Movement
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a forum of 121 countries that Non-belligerent, are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. It was founded with the view to advancing interests of developing countries in the context of Cold W ...
in 1961. Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with
India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.
Sino-Soviet split

After 1956, the Sino-Soviet alliance began to break down. Mao had defended Stalin when Khrushchev criticized him in 1956 and treated the new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost his revolutionary edge. For his part, Khrushchev, disturbed by Mao's glib attitude toward nuclear war, referred to the Chinese leader as a "lunatic on a throne".
After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal. The Chinese-Soviet animosity spilled out in an intra-communist propaganda war. Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement. Historian Lorenz M. Lüthi argues:
:The Sino-Soviet split was one of the key events of the Cold War, equal in importance to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Second Vietnam War, and
Sino-American rapprochement. The split helped to determine the framework for the
Cold War period 1979–1985 in general, and influenced the course of the Second Vietnam War in particular.
Space Race

On the
nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear weapon), producing a nuclear exp ...
s front, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other. In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first
intercontinental ballistic missile
An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range (aeronautics), range greater than , primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more Thermonuclear weapon, thermonuclear warheads). Conven ...
(ICBM), and in October they launched the first Earth satellite,
Sputnik 1. This led to what became known as the
Sputnik crisis. The
Central Intelligence Agency described the orbit of Sputnik 1 as a "stupendous scientific achievement" and concluded that the USSR had likely perfected an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching 'any desired target with accuracy'.
The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the
Space Race. This led to a series of historic space exploration milestones, and most notably the
Apollo
Apollo is one of the Twelve Olympians, Olympian deities in Ancient Greek religion, ancient Greek and Ancient Roman religion, Roman religion and Greek mythology, Greek and Roman mythology. Apollo has been recognized as a god of archery, mu ...
Moon landings from 1969 by the United States, which astronaut
Frank Borman
Frank Frederick Borman II (March 14, 1928 – November 7, 2023) was an American United States Air Force (USAF) colonel (United States), colonel, aeronautical engineer, NASA astronaut, test pilot, and businessman. He was the commander of Apollo ...
later described as "just a battle in the Cold War." The public's reaction in the Soviet Union was mixed. The Soviet government limited the release of information about the lunar landing, which affected the reaction. A portion of the populace did not give it any attention, and another portion was angered by it. A major Cold War element of the Space Race was
satellite reconnaissance, as well as
signals intelligence to gauge which aspects of the space programs had military capabilities. The Soviet
Salyut programme
The ''Salyut'' programme (, , meaning "salute" or "fireworks") was the first space station programme, undertaken by the Soviet Union. It involved a series of four crewed scientific research space stations and two crewed military reconnaissa ...
, conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, put a crewed space station in long term orbit; two of the successful installations to the station were covers for secret military
Almaz
The Almaz () program was a highly secret Soviet Union, Soviet military space station program, begun in the early 1960s.
Three crewed military reconnaissance stations were launched between 1973 and 1976: Salyut 2, Salyut 3 and Salyut 5.
To co ...
reconnaissance stations:
Salyut 3, and
Salyut 5.
During the whole duration of the cold war, the US and the USSR represented the largest and dominant space powers of the world. Despite their fierce competition, both nations signed international space treaties in the 1960s which would limit the militarization of space.
The first research of
anti-satellite weapon technology also came about during this period.
Later, the US and USSR pursued some cooperation in space as part of
détente, notably the
Apollo–Soyuz
Apollo–Soyuz was the first crewed international Space exploration, space mission, carried out jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union in July 1975. Millions of people around the world watched on television as an American Apollo comm ...
orbital rendezvous and docking.
Aftermath of the Cuban Revolution

In
Cuba
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...
, the
26th of July Movement, led by young revolutionaries
Fidel Castro and
Che Guevara, seized power in the
Cuban Revolution on 1 January 1959. Although Fidel Castro's first refused to categorize his new government as socialist and repeatedly denying being a communist, Castro appointed Marxists to senior government and military positions.
Diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States continued for some time after Batista's fall, but President Eisenhower deliberately left the capital to avoid meeting Castro during the latter's trip to
Washington, D.C. in April, leaving Vice President
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until Resignation of Richard Nixon, his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...
to conduct the meeting in his place. Cuba began negotiating for arms purchases from the Eastern Bloc in March 1960. The same month, Eisenhower gave approval to
CIA plans and funding to overthrow Castro.
In January 1961, just prior to leaving office, Eisenhower formally severed relations with the Cuban government. That April, the administration of newly elected American President
John F. Kennedy mounted the unsuccessful CIA-organized
ship-borne invasion of the island by
Cuban exiles at Playa Girón and Playa Larga in
Santa Clara Province—a failure that publicly humiliated the United States. Castro responded by publicly embracing
Marxism–Leninism
Marxism–Leninism () is a communist ideology that became the largest faction of the History of communism, communist movement in the world in the years following the October Revolution. It was the predominant ideology of most communist gov ...
, and the Soviet Union pledged to
provide further support. In December, the US government
began a violent campaign of
terrorist attacks against civilians in Cuba, and
covert operations and sabotage against the administration, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.
Berlin Crisis of 1961
The
Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and
post–World War II Germany. By the early 1950s, the
Soviet approach to restricting emigration movement was emulated by most of the rest of the
Eastern Bloc. However, hundreds of thousands of
East Germans annually emigrated to free and prosperous
West Germany
West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...
through a "loophole" in the system that existed between
East Berlin and
West Berlin
West Berlin ( or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin from 1948 until 1990, during the Cold War. Although West Berlin lacked any sovereignty and was under military occupation until German reunification in 1 ...
.
The emigration resulted in a massive "
brain drain" from East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals, such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West Germany by 1961. That June, the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
issued a new
ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of
Allied forces from West Berlin. The request was rebuffed, but the United States now limited its security guarantees to West Berlin. On 13 August, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the
Berlin Wall, effectively closing the loophole and preventing its citizens from fleeing to the West.
Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev's ousting

The Kennedy administration continued seeking ways to oust Castro following the Bay of Pigs invasion, experimenting with various ways of covertly facilitating the overthrow of the Cuban government. Significant hopes were pinned on the program of terrorist attacks and other destabilization operations known as
Operation Mongoose, that was devised under the Kennedy administration in 1961. Khrushchev learned of the project in February 1962, and preparations to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were undertaken in response.
Alarmed, Kennedy considered various reactions. He ultimately responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a
naval blockade, and he presented an ultimatum to the Soviets. Khrushchev backed down from a confrontation, and the Soviet Union removed the missiles in return for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba again as well as a covert deal to remove US missiles from Turkey.
The
Cuban Missile Crisis (October–November 1962) brought the world closer to
nuclear war than ever before. The aftermath led to efforts in the
nuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations, although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the
Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961.
The compromise embarrassed Khrushchev and the Soviet Union because the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey was a secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the Soviets were seen as retreating from circumstances that they had started. In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to
oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement. He was accused of rudeness and incompetence, and John Lewis Gaddis argues that he was also blamed with ruining Soviet agriculture, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and becoming an "international embarrassment" when he authorized construction of the Berlin Wall. According to Dobrynin, the top Soviet leadership took the Cuban outcome as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation".
From confrontation to détente (1962–1979)

In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs. From the beginning of the post-war period, with American help Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, with per capita GDPs approaching those of the United States, while
Eastern Bloc economies stagnated.
The
Vietnam War descended into a quagmire for the United States, leading to a decline in international prestige and economic stability, derailing arms agreements, and provoking domestic unrest. America's withdrawal from the war led it to embrace a policy of
détente with both China and the Soviet Union.
Backed by the
Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization of Khmer pro-Soviet Communists and Khmer Rouge defectors, Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 22 December 1978. The
invasion succeeded in deposing Pol Pot, but the new state struggled to gain international recognition beyond the Soviet Bloc sphere. Despite the international outcry at Pol Pot regime's gross human rights violations, representatives of the Khmer Rouge were allowed to be seated in the
UN General Assembly, with strong support from China, Western powers, and the member countries of
ASEAN. Following the destruction of the Khmer Rouge, the national reconstruction of Cambodia was hampered, and Vietnam suffered a punitive
Chinese attack. Although unable to deter Vietnam from ousting Pol Pot, China demonstrated that its Cold War communist adversary, the Soviet Union, was unable to protect its Vietnamese ally. Former U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger
Henry Alfred Kissinger (May 27, 1923 – November 29, 2023) was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the 56th United States secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and the 7th National Security Advisor (United States), natio ...
wrote that "China succeeded in exposing the limits of...
ovietstrategic reach" and speculated that the desire to "compensate for their ineffectuality" contributed to the Soviets' decision to
intervene in Afghanistan a year later.
In the
1973 oil crisis
In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Eg ...
, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (
OPEC) cut their petroleum output. This raised oil prices and hurt Western economies, but helped the Soviet Union by generating a huge flow of money from its oil sales.
As a result of the oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as OPEC and the
Non-Aligned Movement
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a forum of 121 countries that Non-belligerent, are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. It was founded with the view to advancing interests of developing countries in the context of Cold W ...
, less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower. Meanwhile, Moscow was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems. During this period, Soviet leaders such as
Leonid Brezhnev and
Alexei Kosygin embraced the notion of détente.
Vietnam War
Under President
John F. Kennedy, US troop levels in Vietnam grew from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's heavy-handed
crackdown on Buddhist monks in 1963 led the US to endorse a deadly
military coup against Diem. The war escalated further in 1964 following the controversial
Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a US destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. The
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President
Lyndon B. Johnson broad authorization to increase US military presence, deploying ground
combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev responded by reversing Khrushchev's policy of disengagement and increasing aid to the North Vietnamese, hoping to entice the North from its pro-Chinese position. The USSR discouraged further escalation of the war, however, providing just enough military assistance to tie up American forces. From this point, the
People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) engaged in more
conventional warfare with US and South Vietnamese forces.
The
Tet Offensive of 1968 proved to be the turning point of the war. Despite years of American tutelage and aid, the South Vietnamese forces were unable to withstand the communist offensive and the task fell to US forces instead. At the same time, in 1963–1965, American domestic politics saw the triumph of
liberalism. According to historian Joseph Crespino:
:It has become a staple of twentieth-century historiography that Cold War concerns were at the root of a number of progressive political accomplishments in the postwar period: a high progressive marginal tax rate that helped fund the arms race and contributed to broad income equality; bipartisan support for far-reaching civil rights legislation that transformed politics and society in the American South, which had long given the lie to America's egalitarian ethos; bipartisan support for overturning an explicitly racist immigration system that had been in place since the 1920s; and free health care for the elderly and the poor, a partial fulfillment of one of the unaccomplished goals of the New Deal era. The list could go on.
Nuclear testing and Use of Outer-Space treaties
The
Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed on August 5, 1963, by the United States, the Soviet Union, and over 100 other nations. This treaty banned nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, restricting such tests to underground environments. The treaty followed heightened concerns over the militarization of space, amplified by the United States' Starfish Prime test in 1962, which involved the detonation of a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere.
To further delineate the peaceful use of outer space, the United Nations facilitated the drafting of the ''
Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies'', commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty. Signed on January 27, 1967, by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, it entered into force on October 10, 1967. The treaty established space as a domain to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, prohibiting the placement of nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies.
Invasion of Czechoslovakia

In 1968, a period of political liberalization took place in
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
called the
Prague Spring. An "
Action Program" of reforms included increasing
freedom of the press,
freedom of speech and
freedom of movement, along with an economic emphasis on
consumer goods
A final good or consumer good is a final product ready for sale that is used by the consumer to satisfy current wants or needs, unlike an intermediate good, which is used to produce other goods. A microwave oven or a bicycle is a final good.
W ...
, the possibility of a multiparty government, limitations on the power of the secret police, and potential withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.
In answer to the Prague Spring, on 20 August 1968, the
Soviet Army, together with most of their Warsaw Pact allies,
invaded Czechoslovakia. The invasion was followed by a wave of emigration, including an estimated 70,000 Czechs and Slovaks initially fleeing, with the total eventually reaching 300,000. The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania, China, and from Western European countries.
Sino-Soviet split and Nixon-China visit
As a result of the
Sino-Soviet split, tensions along the Chinese–Soviet border
reached their peak in 1969, when the Soviet planned to launch a
large-scale nuclear strike against China.
United States President
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until Resignation of Richard Nixon, his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...
intervened,
and decided to use the conflict to shift the balance of power towards the West in the Cold War through a policy of rapproachment with China, which began with his
1972 visit to China and culminated in 1979 with the signing of the
Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations by
President Carter and Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping.
Nixon, Brezhnev, and détente

Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease. Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of
collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary,
Alexei Kosygin as Premier and
Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.
Following his visit to China, Nixon met with Soviet leaders in Moscow. These
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks resulted in landmark arms control treaties. These aimed to limit the development of costly anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear missiles.
Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence" and established the groundbreaking new policy of
détente (or cooperation) between the superpowers. Meanwhile, Brezhnev attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures. The Soviet Union's
military budget in the 1970s was massive, 40–60% of the federal budget and 15% of GDP. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties, including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, ''détente'' would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually. These developments coincided with
Bonn's "
Ostpolitik" policy formulated by the West German Chancellor
Willy Brandt, an effort to normalize relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the
Helsinki Accords
The Helsinki Final Act, also known as Helsinki Accords or Helsinki Declaration, was the document signed at the closing meeting of the third phase of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) held in Helsinki, Finland, betwee ...
signed at the
Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.

The Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviets promised to grant free elections in Europe, has been called a major concession to ensure peace by the Soviets. In practice, the Soviet government significantly curbed the
rule of law
The essence of the rule of law is that all people and institutions within a Body politic, political body are subject to the same laws. This concept is sometimes stated simply as "no one is above the law" or "all are equal before the law". Acco ...
,
civil liberties,
protection of law and
guarantees of property, which were considered examples of "bourgeois morality" by Soviet legal theorists such as
Andrey Vyshinsky
Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (; ) ( – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.
He is best known as a Procurator General of the Soviet Union, state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trial ...
. The Soviet Union signed legally-binding human rights documents, such as the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a multilateral treaty that commits nations to respect the civil and political rights of individuals, including the right to life, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom ...
in 1973 and the Helsinki Accords in 1975, but they were neither widely known or accessible to people living under Communist rule, nor were they taken seriously by the Communist authorities. Human rights activists in the Soviet Union were regularly subjected to harassment, repressions and arrests.
The pro-Soviet American business magnate
Armand Hammer of
Occidental Petroleum often mediated trade relations. Author
Daniel Yergin, in his book ''The Prize'', writes that Hammer "ended up as a go-between for five Soviet General Secretaries and seven U.S. Presidents." Hammer had extensive business relationship in the Soviet Union stretching back to the 1920s with Lenin's approval.
According to ''Christian Science Monitor'' in 1980, "although his business dealings with the Soviet Union were cut short when Stalin came to power, he had more or less single-handedly laid the groundwork for the
980state of Western trade with the Soviet Union."

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide because those goals were too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive, and neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.
Late 1970s deterioration of relations
In the 1970s, the KGB, led by
Yuri Andropov, continued to persecute distinguished
Soviet dissidents, such as
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and
Andrei Sakharov, who were criticising the Soviet leadership in harsh terms. Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia, and Angola.
In 1973, Nixon announced his administration was committed to seeking
most favored nation trade status with the USSR, which was challenged by Congress in the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The United States had long linked trade with the Soviet Union to its foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and, especially since the early 1980s, to
Soviet human rights policies. The
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which was attached to the
1974 Trade Act, linked the granting of
most-favored-nation to the USSR to the right of persecuted
Soviet Jews to emigrate. Because the Soviet Union refused the right of emigration to Jewish
refuseniks, the ability of the President to apply most-favored nation trade status to the Soviet Union was restricted.
Although President
Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a
SALT II agreement in 1979, his efforts were undermined by the other events that year, including the
Iranian Revolution
The Iranian Revolution (, ), also known as the 1979 Revolution, or the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (, ) was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. The revolution led to the replacement of the Impe ...
and the
Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US governments, and his retaliation against the
Soviet coup in Afghanistan in December.
Renewal of tensions (1979–1985)
The period in the late 1970s and early 1980s showed an intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts. Tensions greatly increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militant.
Diggins says, "Reagan went all out to fight the second cold war, by supporting counterinsurgencies in the third world."
Cox says, "The intensity of this 'second' Cold War was as great as its duration was short."
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and end of détente

In April 1978, the communist
People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...
in the
Saur Revolution. Within months, opponents of the communist regime launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that quickly expanded into a
civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...
waged by guerrilla
mujahideen against government forces countrywide. The
Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen insurgents received military training and weapons in neighboring
Pakistan
Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...
and
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
, while the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisers to support the PDPA government. Meanwhile, increasing friction between the competing factions of the PDPA—the dominant
Khalq and the more moderate
Parcham—resulted in the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami military officers under the pretext of a Parchami coup. By mid-1979, the United States had started a covert program to assist the mujahideen.
In September 1979, Khalqist President
Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member
Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency. Distrusted by the Soviets, Amin was assassinated by Soviet special forces during
Operation Storm-333 in December 1979. Afghan forces suffered losses during the Soviet operation; 30 Afghan palace guards and over 300 army guards were killed while another 150 were captured. In the aftermath of the operation, a total of 1,700 Afghan soldiers who surrendered to Soviet forces were taken as prisoners, and the Soviets installed
Babrak Karmal, the leader of the PDPA's Parcham faction, as Amin's successor. Veterans of the Soviet Union's
Alpha Group have stated that Operation Storm-333 was one of the most successful in the unit's history. Documents released following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s revealed that the Soviet leadership believed Amin had secret contacts within the
American embassy in Kabul and "was capable of reaching an agreement with the United States"; however, allegations of Amin colluding with the Americans have been widely discredited. The PDBA was tasked to fill the vacuum and carried out a purge of Amin supporters. Soviet troops were deployed to put Afghanistan under Soviet control with Karmal in more substantial numbers, although the Soviet government did not expect to do most of the fighting in Afghanistan. As a result, however, the Soviets were now directly involved in what had been a domestic war in Afghanistan.

Carter responded to the Soviet invasion by withdrawing the
SALT II treaty from ratification, imposing embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, and demanding a significant increase in military spending, and further announced the
boycott of the
1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which was joined by 65 other nations. He described the Soviet incursion as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".
Reagan and Thatcher
In January 1977, four years prior to becoming president,
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...
bluntly stated, in a conversation with
Richard V. Allen, his basic expectation in relation to the Cold War. "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic," he said. "It is this: We win and they lose." In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the
1980 presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere. Both Reagan and new British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...
denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "
evil empire" and predicted that Communism would be left on the "
ash heap of history," while Thatcher inculpated the Soviets as "bent on world dominance." In 1982, Reagan tried to cut off Moscow's access to hard currency by impeding its proposed gas line to Western Europe. It hurt the Soviet economy, but it also caused ill will among American allies in Europe who counted on that revenue. Reagan retreated on this issue.
By early 1985, Reagan's anti-communist position had developed into a stance known as the new
Reagan Doctrine—which, in addition to containment, formulated an additional right to subvert existing communist governments. Besides continuing Carter's policy of supporting the Islamic opponents of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed
PDPA government in Afghanistan, the CIA also sought to weaken the Soviet Union itself by promoting
Islamism
Islamism is a range of religious and political ideological movements that believe that Islam should influence political systems. Its proponents believe Islam is innately political, and that Islam as a political system is superior to communism ...
in the majority-Muslim
Central Asian Soviet Union. Additionally, the CIA encouraged anti-communist Pakistan's ISI to train Muslims from around the world to participate in the
jihad against the Soviet Union.
Polish Solidarity movement and martial law
Pope John Paul II
Pope John Paul II (born Karol Józef Wojtyła; 18 May 19202 April 2005) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 16 October 1978 until Death and funeral of Pope John Paul II, his death in 2005.
In his you ...
provided a moral focus for
anti-communism
Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism, communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global ...
; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centered on the
Solidarity movement trade union that galvanized opposition, and may have led to his
attempted assassination two years later. In December 1981, Poland's
Wojciech Jaruzelski reacted to the crisis by imposing
a period of martial law. Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Poland in response.
Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's top ideologist, advised Soviet leaders not to intervene if Poland fell under the control of Solidarity, for fear it might lead to heavy economic sanctions, resulting in a catastrophe for the Soviet economy.
US and USSR military and economic issues

The Soviet Union had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of its gross national product at the expense of
consumer goods
A final good or consumer good is a final product ready for sale that is used by the consumer to satisfy current wants or needs, unlike an intermediate good, which is used to produce other goods. A microwave oven or a bicycle is a final good.
W ...
and investment in civilian sectors. Soviet spending on the
arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which experienced at least
a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.
Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity but in large part by the interests of the
nomenklatura, which was dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. The
Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their
military–industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. For example, the
Persian Gulf War demonstrated how the
armor,
fire control systems, and firing range of the Soviet Union's most common main battle tank, the
T-72, were drastically inferior to the American
M1 Abrams, yet the USSR fielded almost three times as many T-72s as the US deployed M1s.

By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter began massively building up the United States military. This buildup was accelerated by the Reagan administration, which increased the military spending from 5.3 percent of GNP in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 1986, the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history. The American-Soviet tensions present during 1983 was defined by some as the start of "Cold War II". While in retrospective this phase of the Cold War was generally defined as a "war of words", the Soviet's "peace offensive" was largely rejected by the West.
Tensions continued to intensify as Reagan revived the
B-1 Lancer program, which had been canceled by the Carter administration, produced
LGM-118 Peacekeeper
The LGM-118 Peacekeeper, originally known as the MX for "Missile, Experimental", was a Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, MIRV-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) produced and deployed by the United States from 1986 ...
missiles, installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced the experimental
Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. The Soviets deployed
RSD-10 Pioneer ballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, and NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy
MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany. This deployment placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.
After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military, because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient
planned manufacturing and
collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the
Soviet economy. At the same time,
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the centre of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries ...
increased oil production, even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production. These developments contributed to the
1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues. Issues with
command economics, oil price decreases and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to stagnation.
On 1 September 1983, the Soviet Union shot down
Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a
Boeing 747
The Boeing 747 is a long-range wide-body aircraft, wide-body airliner designed and manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in the United States between 1968 and 2023.
After the introduction of the Boeing 707, 707 in October 1958, Pan Am ...
with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman
Larry McDonald, an action which Reagan characterized as a massacre. The airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, it flew through Russian
prohibited airspace. The
Soviet Air Force treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding U.S.
spy plane and destroyed it with
air-to-air missiles.
The incident increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. During the early hours of 26 September 1983, the
1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident occurred; systems in
Serpukhov-15 underwent a glitch that claimed several
intercontinental ballistic missile
An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range (aeronautics), range greater than , primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more Thermonuclear weapon, thermonuclear warheads). Conven ...
s were heading towards Russia, but officer
Stanislav Petrov correctly suspected it was a
false alarm, ensuring the Soviets did not respond to the non-existent attack. As such, he has been credited as "the man who saved the world". The
Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, was perhaps the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership feared that a nuclear attack might be imminent.
American domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost
counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts. In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided
Lebanese Civil War
The Lebanese Civil War ( ) was a multifaceted armed conflict that took place from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 150,000 fatalities and led to the exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon.
The religious diversity of the ...
,
invaded Grenada,
bombed Libya and backed the Central American
Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned
Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the United States, his backing of the Contra rebels was
mired in controversy. The Reagan administration's backing of the military government of
Guatemala
Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico, to the northeast by Belize, to the east by Honduras, and to the southeast by El Salvador. It is hydrologically b ...
during the
Guatemalan Civil War, in particular the regime of
Efraín Ríos Montt
José Efraín Ríos Montt (; 16 June 1926 – 1 April 2018) was a Guatemalan military officer, politician, and dictator who served as ''de facto'' President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the blo ...
, was also controversial.
Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the
Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US, China, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion. The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam". However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system.
A senior
US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a:
Final years (1985–1991)
Gorbachev's reforms
By the time the comparatively youthful
Mikhail Gorbachev became
General Secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s. These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.
An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary, and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called ''
perestroika'', or restructuring. Perestroika relaxed the
production quota system, allowed cooperative ownership of small businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more productive areas in the civilian sector.
Despite initial skepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader proved to be committed to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition instead of continuing the arms race with the West. Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced ''
glasnost'', or openness, which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions. ''Glasnost'' was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the
Communist Party and moderate the
abuse of power
Abuse of power or abuse of authority, in the form of "malfeasance in office" or "official abuse of power", is the commission of an Crime, unlawful act, done in an official capacity, which affects the performance of official duties. Malfeasan ...
in the
Central Committee. Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the Western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating
détente between the two nations.
Thaw in relations

In response to the Kremlin's military and
political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The first
summit was held in November 1985 in
Geneva
Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...
, Switzerland. A
second summit was held in October 1986 in
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the Capital city, capital and largest city in Iceland. It is located in southwestern Iceland on the southern shore of Faxaflói, the Faxaflói Bay. With a latitude of 64°08′ N, the city is List of northernmost items, the worl ...
, Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Gorbachev wanted to be eliminated. Reagan refused. The negotiations failed, but the third summit (
Washington Summit (1987), 8–10 December 1987) led to a breakthrough with the signing of the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The INF treaty eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between and their infrastructure.

During 1988, it became apparent to the Soviets that oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels, represented a substantial economic drain. In addition, the security advantage of
a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and the Soviets
officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of
satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe.
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker BushBefore the outcome of the 2000 United States presidential election, he was usually referred to simply as "George Bush" but became more commonly known as "George H. W. Bush", "Bush Senior," "Bush 41," and even "Bush th ...
and Gorbachev met at the
Moscow Summit in May 1988 and the
Governors Island Summit in December 1988.
In 1989,
Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan without achieving their objectives. Later that year, the
Berlin Wall, the
Inner German border and the
Iron Curtain fell. On 3 December 1989, Gorbachev and Bush declared the Cold War over at the
Malta Summit. In February 1990, Gorbachev agreed with the US-proposed
Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany and signed it on 12 September 1990, paving the way for the
German reunification
German reunification () was the process of re-establishing Germany as a single sovereign state, which began on 9 November 1989 and culminated on 3 October 1990 with the dissolution of the East Germany, German Democratic Republic and the int ...
. When the Berlin Wall came down, Gorbachev's "
Common European Home" concept began to take shape. The two former adversaries were partners in the
Gulf War
, combatant2 =
, commander1 =
, commander2 =
, strength1 = Over 950,000 soldiers3,113 tanks1,800 aircraft2,200 artillery systems
, page = https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-PEMD-96- ...
against
Iraq
Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...
(August 1990 – February 1991). During the final summit in Moscow in July 1991, Gorbachev and Bush signed the
START I
START I (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was a bilateral treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the reduction and the limitation of strategic offensive arms. The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 De ...
arms control treaty.
Eastern Europe breaks away
Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in ''
Beyond Oil'' that the
Reagan administration encouraged
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the centre of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries ...
to
lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's
hard currency reserves.
Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long.
Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and
Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected
Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called ''
perestroika''. His policy of ''
glasnost'' freed public
access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its
war in Afghanistan and began to
withdraw its forces. In the following year,
Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the
Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the
Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion, at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the
Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing re-unification, the
Iron Curtain between
the West and Soviet-occupied regions came down.
[Andreas Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland – Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (2009).][Thomas Roser: DDR-Massenflucht: Ein Picknick hebt die Welt aus den Angeln (German – Mass exodus of the GDR: A picnic clears the world) in: Die Presse 16 August 2018.][Otmar Lahodynsky: Paneuropäisches Picknick: Die Generalprobe für den Mauerfall (Pan-European picnic: the dress rehearsal for the fall of the Berlin Wall – German), in: Profil 9 August 2014.]
By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. Grassroots organizations, such as Poland's
Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground with strong popular bases.
The Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 in Hungary finally started a peaceful movement that the rulers in the Eastern Bloc could not stop. It was the largest movement of refugees from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and ultimately brought about the fall of the Iron Curtain. The patrons of the picnic,
Otto von Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State
Imre Pozsgay, saw the planned event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction. The Austrian branch of the
Paneuropean Union, which was then headed by Otto von Habsburg, distributed thousands of brochures inviting the GDR holidaymakers in Hungary to a picnic near the border at Sopron. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic the subsequent hesitant behavior of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-interference of the Soviet Union broke the dams. Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer willing to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use armed force. On the one hand, this caused disagreement among the Eastern European states and, on the other hand, it was clear to the Eastern European population that the governments no longer had absolute power.
In 1989, the communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the first to negotiate the organization of competitive elections. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany, mass protests unseated entrenched communist leaders. The communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the latter case as the result of a
violent uprising. Attitudes had changed enough that US Secretary of State
James Baker suggested that the American government would not be opposed to Soviet intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition, to prevent bloodshed.
The tidal wave of change culminated with the
fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which symbolized the collapse of European communist governments and graphically ended the Iron Curtain divide of Europe. The
1989 revolutionary wave swept across Central and Eastern Europe and peacefully overthrew all of the Soviet-style
Marxist–Leninist states: East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria; Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state.
Soviet dissolution
At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring
sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the '
War of Laws'. In 1989, the
Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies.
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Soviet and Russian politician and statesman who served as President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1961 to ...
was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress
declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of
Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990, citing the illegality of the
Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Soviet forces attempted to halt the secession by crushing popular demonstrations in Lithuania (
Bloody Sunday) and Latvia (
The Barricades), as a result, numerous civilians were killed or wounded. However, these actions only bolstered international support for the secessionists.

A
referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union in the form of a new federation. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the
New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the
August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Russian president Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected
President of Russia
The president of Russia, officially the president of the Russian Federation (), is the executive head of state of Russia. The president is the chair of the State Council (Russia), Federal State Council and the President of Russia#Commander-in-ch ...
in July 1991.

Later in August, Gorbachev resigned as
general secretary of the Communist party
The title of General Secretary or First Secretary is commonly used for the leaders of most communist parties. When a communist party is the ruling party of a socialist state—often labeled as communist states by external observers—the general s ...
, and
Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until 25 December 1991, when the
USSR dissolved.
Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, with by far the largest and most populous one (which also was the founder of the Soviet state with the
October Revolution in Petrograd), the
Russian Federation, taking full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's
UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces.
In his
1992 State of the Union Address, US President George H. W. Bush expressed his emotions: "The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership". In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to
START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.
Aftermath

In summing up the international ramifications of these events,
Vladislav Zubok stated: 'The collapse of the
Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance.' After the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia drastically cut
military spending, and restructuring the economy left millions unemployed. According to Western analysis, the neoliberal reforms in Russia culminated in a
recession in the early 1990s more severe than the
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...
as experienced by the United States and Germany. Western analysts suggest that in the 25 years following the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the rich and capitalist world while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take several decades to catch up to where they were before the collapse of communism.
Decommunization
Stephen Holmes of the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...
argued in 1996 that decommunization, after a brief active period, quickly ended in near-universal failure. After the introduction of
lustration, demand for scapegoats has become relatively low, and former communists have been elected for high governmental and other administrative positions. Holmes notes that the only real exception was former
East Germany
East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from Foundation of East Germany, its formation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on ...
, where thousands of former
Stasi informers have been fired from public positions.
Holmes suggests the following reasons for the failure of decommunization:
*After 45–70 years of communist rule, nearly every family has members associated with the state. After the initial desire "to root out the reds" came a realization that massive punishment is wrong and finding only some guilty is hardly justice.
*The urgency of the current economic problems of postcommunism makes the crimes of the communist past "old news" for many citizens.
*Decommunization is believed to be a power game of elites.
*The difficulty of dislodging the social elite makes it require a
totalitarian state to disenfranchise the "
enemies of the people" quickly and efficiently and a desire for normalcy overcomes the desire for punitive justice.
*Very few people have a perfectly clean slate and so are available to fill the positions that require significant expertise.
Compared with the
decommunization efforts of the other former constituents of the
Eastern Bloc and the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, decommunization in Russia has been restricted to half-measures, if conducted at all. Notable anti-communist measures in the Russian Federation include the banning of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...
(and the creation of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation) as well as changing the names of some Russian cities back to what they were before the 1917
October Revolution (Leningrad to
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...
, Sverdlovsk to
Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg (, ; ), alternatively Romanization of Russian, romanized as Ekaterinburg and formerly known as Sverdlovsk ( ; 1924–1991), is a city and the administrative centre of Sverdlovsk Oblast and the Ural Federal District, Russia. The ci ...
and Gorky to
Nizhny Novgorod), though others were maintained, with
Ulyanovsk (former Simbirsk),
Tolyatti (former Stavropol) and
Kirov (former Vyatka) being examples. Even though Leningrad and Sverdlovsk were renamed, regions that were named after them are still officially called Leningrad and Sverdlovsk oblasts.
Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is gradually on the rise in Russia. Communist symbols continue to form an important part of the rhetoric used in
state-controlled media, as banning on them in other countries is seen by the
Russian foreign ministry as "sacrilege" and "a perverse idea of good and evil". The process of
decommunization in Ukraine, a neighbouring
post-Soviet state, was met with fierce criticism by Russia. The
State Anthem of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2000 (the same year
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Ru ...
began his first term as president of Russia), uses the exact same music as the
State Anthem of the Soviet Union
The State Anthem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the national anthem of the Soviet Union and the regional anthem of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1944 to 1991, replacing "The Internationale". Its original ...
, but with new lyrics written by
Sergey Mikhalkov.
Conversely, decommunization in Ukraine started during and after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 With the success of the
Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the
Ukrainian government approved
laws
Law is a set of rules that are created and are law enforcement, enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a Socia ...
that outlawed
communist symbols.
In July 2015, President of Ukraine
Petro Poroshenko signed a set of laws that started a six-month period for the removal of communist monuments (excluding
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
monuments) and renaming of public places named after communist-related themes. At the time, this meant that 22 cities and 44 villages were set to get new names. In 2016, 51,493 streets and 987 cities and villages were renamed, and 1,320
Lenin monuments and 1,069 monuments to other communist figures removed.
Violation of the law carries a penalty of a potential media ban and prison sentences of up to five years.
["Ukraine lawmakers ban 'Communist and Nazi propaganda](_blank)
'' Deutsche Welle'' (9 April 2015)["New laws in Ukraine potential threat to free expression and free media, OSCE Representative says"](_blank)
'' OSCE'' (18 May 2015) The
Ministry of the Interior stripped the
Communist Party of Ukraine, the
Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed), and the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants of their right to participate in elections and stated it was continuing the court actions that started in July 2014 to end the registration of w:Communist parties in Ukraine, communist parties in Ukraine.
By 16 December 2015, these three parties had been banned in Ukraine; the Communist Party of Ukraine appealed the ban to the European Court of Human Rights.
Collapse of Yugoslavia and Balkan conflicts

The Cold War had provided external stabilizing pressures. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had a vested interest in Yugoslavia's stability, ensuring it remained a buffer state in the East-West divide. This resulted in financial and political support for its regime. When the Cold War ended, this external support evaporated, leaving Yugoslavia more vulnerable to internal divisions.
As Yugoslavia fragmented, Yugoslav Wars, the wars began after Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991. Serbia, under Slobodan Milošević, opposed these moves. Bosnian War, The Bosnian War (1992–1995) was the most brutal of the Yugoslav Wars, characterized by ethnic cleansing and genocide. International organizations, including the United Nations, struggled to manage the violence. NATO eventually intervened with airstrikes in Bosnia (1995) as part of Operation Deliberate Force and later in Kosovo (1999) as part of Operation allied force. These interventions marked the transition of NATO as a deterrent to the Soviet Union, to also functioning at the time as an active peacekeeping and conflict-resolution force.
Influence
The post-Cold War world is considered to be Polarity (international relations)#Unipolarity, unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining
superpower.
The Cold War defined the political role of the United States after World War II—by 1989 the United States had military alliances with 50 countries, with 526,000 troops stationed abroad,
with 326,000 in Europe (two-thirds of which were in
West Germany
West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...
) and 130,000 in Asia (mainly
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
and
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...
).
The Cold War also marked the zenith of peacetime military–industrial complexes and large-scale History of military technology, military funding of science.

Cumulative US military expenditures throughout the entire Cold War amounted to an estimated $8 trillion. Nearly 100,000 Americans died in the Korean War, Korean and
Vietnam Wars. Although Soviet casualties are difficult to estimate, as a share of gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was much higher than that incurred by the United States.
Millions died in the superpowers'
proxy wars around the globe, most notably in eastern Asia. Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises have declined sharply in the post-Cold War years.
However, the aftermath of the Cold War is not considered to be concluded. Many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former
Yugoslavia
, common_name = Yugoslavia
, life_span = 1918–19921941–1945: World War II in Yugoslavia#Axis invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Axis occupation
, p1 = Kingdom of SerbiaSerbia
, flag_p ...
. In Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracy, liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by failed state, state failure.
In popular culture
The Cold War endures as a popular topic reflected in entertainment media, and continuing to the present with post-1991 Cold War-themed feature films, novels, television and web series, and other media.
Historiography
Interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet–US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.
Although explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three different approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism", and "post-revisionism".
"Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion further into Europe. "Revisionist" writers place more responsibility for the breakdown of post-war peace on the United States, citing a range of US efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. "Post-revisionists" see the events of the Cold War as more nuanced and attempt to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold War. Much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.
See also
* :Cold War by period
* American imperialism
* Canada in the Cold War
* Cold peace
* McCarthyism
* Outline of the Cold War
* Red Scare
* Second Cold War
* War on terror
Notes and quotes
References
Sources
Books
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* Ang, Cheng Guan. ''Southeast Asia's Cold War: An Interpretive History'' (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018)
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Further reading
External links
Archives
The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP)The Cold War FilesSelect "Communism & Cold War" value to browse Maps from 1933–1982 at the Persuasive Cartography, The PJ Mode Collection Cornell University Library
CONELRAD Cold War Pop Culture Site
Bibliography
Annotated bibliography for the arms race from the Alsos Digital Library
Educational resource
Electronic Briefing Booksat the National Security Archive, George Washington University
News
* Video and audio news reports from during the cold war.
Films
* André Bossuroy, Europe for Citizens Programme of the European Union,
{{Authority control
Cold War,
1940s beginnings
1940s neologisms
1990s endings
20th-century conflicts
Aftermath of World War II
Historical eras
History of international relations
History of NATO
Nuclear warfare
Presidency of Harry S. Truman
Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower
Presidency of John F. Kennedy
Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson
Presidency of Richard Nixon
Presidency of Gerald Ford
Presidency of Jimmy Carter
Presidency of Ronald Reagan
Presidency of George H. W. Bush
Soviet Union–United States military relations
Wars involving NATO
Wars involving the Soviet Union
Wars involving the United States
Soviet Union–United States relations
International relations
Capitalism
1950s
1960s