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Main Causes of the Cold War. The Russian Revolution .
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The Russian Revolution When Lenin and his Bolshevik party seized power in Russia in 1917 the United States and its allies made half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts to strangle the new Bolshevik regime in its infancy two years after the October Revolution and American troops intervened briefly on the side of anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian civil war. In January 1920 6,000 suspected communists in the United States were arrested and imprisoned.
Manhattan Project In 1941 American scientists had begun work on the development of an atomic bomb in a program called the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt decided to share some information about the project with Britain and Canada but not to tell the Soviet Union about it. This decision hardly showed a high level of trust in one of Americas allies.
Yalta/ Potsdam • Agreements about Germany. Shared post-war objectives of USA and USSR on Germany. • Limiting the power of Germany. • German disarmament and demilitarization. • Germany divided among the victors into four zones of occupations. • Each occupying power would be entitled to take reparations from its own zone. These reparations were intended as compensation for human, material and financial losses incurred in the war against Germany and were to take the form of industrial output and equipment. • The Russians were granted additional reparations from the three western zones in exchange for food and raw material s from the Soviet zone because the extent of Soviet war losses was recognized in the Potsdam agreement. • The occupying powers agreed to treat the four zones of occupation as a single economic area. In other words goods were supposed to move freely between the four zones.
Yalta/ Potsdam • Disagreements or differences over the Yalta and Potsdam agreements about Germany. • German coal output was an important area of disagreement. The Russians wanted coal from the western zones as reparations, but the Americans wanted to use German coal to assist in the economic reconstruction of western Europe. • The Russians were treating their zone as a self-contained economic entity which existed exclusively for their economic benefit. Some reparations from the British and American zones had been delivered to the Russians, but the Soviet Union was not supplying food and basic commodities in return. The Americans insisted that they would not send more reparations until the Russians exported essential items from their zone. In turn, the Russians argued that they would not release goods from their zone until they received a satisfactory level of reparations. • Access to the coal and steel output of the Ruhr valley, west Germany’s industrial heartland, was a further cause of conflict. The Russians demanded four-power international control over the Ruhr, which lay inside the British zone of occupation. Both the British and the Americans refused Soviet demands for international trusteeship of the Ruhr. • The United States and the Soviet Union read different meanings into the Potsdam agreements on Germany. The difficulty in implementing and interpreting agreements was a significant cause of the Cold War.
Marshall Plan • The real function of the Marshall Plan was the containment of communism. Washington’s reading of the situation in western Europe was pessimistic. Americans saw a continent in the grip of economic recession. A scenario of continuing economic crisis, growing support for European communist parties and closer alignment with Moscow alarmed the United States. The Soviet Union would then control western Europe. The domination of continental Europe by a hostile totalitarian state organized around a communist ideology would threaten the national security of the United States. To prevent that a large-scale transfusion of dollars to western Europe was necessary. • The Russians produced its own version of the Marshall Plan (the Molotov Plan), which was an attempt to bind the countries of eastern Europe into a single economic area. The division of Europe into two separate economic blocs was imminent.
The Truman Doctrine To promote democracy around the world and fight the spread of oppressive regimes in which a minority controls the majority. “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion.”
