United Nations

  • Stalin’s vetoes
    • in the security council
  • meant to correct the mistakes of the League of Nation
    • membership
    • voting
    • budget
    • military power (LoN weak due to this)
      • US and SU in it as peacekeepers
  • discussions on Allied-Atomic control commission
  • Security council P5
    • UK, China, US, France, SU
  • more effective sanction powers

  • Yalta - Stalin agreed to join the UN

    Clement Attlee

  • more anti-Soviet

  • Labor party
    • more left, but still disliked / disdained communism
      • useless to improve lives!
  • limited influence on Truman and Stalin

  • concerns: sea passages and UK empire

    • more concerned with the economic reconstruction -> most of aid of Marshall Plan went to the UK
    • concerned with decolonization

      Joseph Stalin

  • paranoia / psychopath

    • cruelty
  • Cult of personality
    • Stalin statutes and posters spread all through Europe
  • relations with FDR
  • logical and practical
    • concerned with $ & security
    • spheres of influence for $
    • buffer zones for military
  • suspicions of the westerners
    • delay of the western front from 1941 to 1944
  • Stalinism
    • own type of communism

  • Georgian, not Russian

    Marshall Plan

  • accepted by Tito

  • refused by Stalin and east Europe
  • to stop spread of communism
    • to attract support for capitalism from the western states
  • ‘dollar dependence’
    • if eastern Europe’s reliance on US & aid -> adopt democracy & stop aiding SU / serving as buffer zone
  • to prevent Great Depression
    • to not let poverty make Europe fall into SU
  • not directly against any country

  • act by the US to avoid isolationist

    Containment

  • Long telegram 22 February 1946

    • George F. Kennan
  • policy US adopted after 1946

  • examples:

    • Iran
    • reparation refusal by e.g. General Clay
    • Turkey
    • Truman Doctrine
    • Marshall Plan
    • Libya

      Command economy

  • 5 year plans

  • heavy industry production
    • steel and coal
    • polluting industries
  • bureaucratic issues
    • Stalinist bureaucracy
  • collectivization + nationalization

  • no consumer good under Stalin

    • only capital good!

      Greek civil war

  • agreed by Churchill & Stalin on % agreements October 1945

  • first proxy war
  • Yugoslavia support
    • Tito
  • British backing down b/c no $ -> increasing reliance on the US
    • Britain can no longer afford
  • shows Stalin’s concessions and cooperative attitude

  • ELAS

    espionage

  • SU intelligence vs. US technology

  • CIA & FBI
  • Hollywood censorship
  • nuclear secrets
  • 1946 National security act

  • KGB - 1954 SU Committee of State Security

    FDR

  • Wilsonian

  • privately speaking of admitting spheres of influence w/ Stalin
  • subtle and more sophisticated policy making

  • Tehran & Atlantic charter

    • wanted to build an open world in an American failure
    • Curzon line

      NATO

  • 1949 - US & western forces

  • after Cominform, before COMECON
  • 1955 - west Germany
    • FRG

  • has a budget that the US paid largely for

    Trizonia

  • 1945-49

    • 4 partitioned zones of Germany -> Bizonia by UK and US (1947) -> Trizonia as France joined (1948) -> created the deutsch mark -> infuriated Stalin & created Ost mark -> Berlin blockade -> FRG

      Truman Doctrine

  • to aid Turkey and Greece

  • but also to aid anyone who is threatened by ‘armed minority’
    • = communist
  • political pillar of containment policy

  • beginning of interventionist policy

    Red Army

  • renamed the Soviet Army

  • violent and ruthless
  • 19% population

  • the main method of control of the eastern bloc / SU’s satellite states

    • the reason the London Poles left Poland, main reason for communist domination of eastern blocs\

      Yalta

  • loss of German territory and the new Oder-Neisse line between Poland and Germany

  • reparations (20 b $)

  • partition of Germany

    Cominform

  • to include all communist leaders to have monthly meetings in Moscow

    • Ho Chi Minh
    • Cuba
    • Kim Il Sung
  • method of control

  • control of communist states:

    • Red Army
    • Cominform

      Manhattan project

  • US built the atomic bomb

  • Robert Oppenheimer
    • father of the A bomb
  • Albert Einstein
  • Trinity explosion
    • first ever explosion
    • New Mexico
  • lots of German Jews worked on the project
  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • MAD - mutually assured destruction

    Berlin blockade

  • June 24 1947 - May 12 1948

  • West Berlin was blocked by the SU blocking supply lines and transportation

  • symbollic value to Cold War’s ideological struggles

    Potsdam

  • August 1945

  • more chilly
  • reconsideration on the Poland problem
  • reparation arguments

  • US denied recognition of SU spheres of influence

    Truman

  • anti-communist

  • black and white
  • came from Missouri
  • ‘tired of babying the Soviets’
  • bad at foreign diplomacy!
    • highly inexperienced
  • democratic party
  • Containment policy!
  • no respect for Stalin and not regarding them on equal bases
    • denying recognition