CW crises

• The Soviet Union and USA started negotiations to sort out the Berlin problem, but they broke down.
• Khrushchev’s solution to the Berlin problem was the Berlin Wall.
• The four summit meetings of 1959–61 had failed to resolve the problem in Berlin, and President Kennedy started to prepare the USA for nuclear war.
• Khrushchev could not risk a nuclear war with the United States, but he still needed to solve the refugee problem that existed in Berlin.
• His solution was to build the Berlin Wall in August 1961.
• The Berlin Wall was designed to prevent East Berliners travelling to West Berlin.
• Any East Berliner travelling to West Berlin would be shot at.
• On 12 August 1961, East German troops erected a barbed wire fence around West Berlin.
• Soviet tanks were deployed to stop Western access to the East.
• By the end of October 1961, West Berlin was completely cut off from East Germany.
• Khrushchev backed down as he knew he couldn’t win a nuclear war.
• Despite the Berlin ultimatum, the Western powers stayed in Berlin.
• The Berlin Wall stopped East Germans leaving for the West, which solved the crisis.
• Khrushchev avoided war with USA but still looked strong.
• Over 200 East Germans were shot trying to cross the wall between 1961 and 1989.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis was a key Cold War crisis.
• The Soviet Union saw Cuba as a key strategic problem: the USA had missiles close to the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union had no missiles close to the USA.
• Cuba saw Soviet missiles as a great way to prevent the USA from invading Cuba again.
• Brezhnev’s response to Dubček’s reforms was to invade Czechoslovakia because he could not allow any weakness in control, even if it wasn’t Dubček’s intention.
• The Soviet Union withdrew from Cuba in return for the USA withdrawing from one of its missile bases close to the Soviet Union.
• President Kennedy and his team considered different options, with some advisers (the ‘hawks’) wanting to attack straight away, while others (the ‘doves’) wanted to avoid nuclear war if at all possible.
• The Soviet Union declared the right to invade any Eastern bloc country that was threatening the security of the Eastern bloc as a whole after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
• The USA condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia but did nothing to stop it, fearing war.
• The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was important to Soviet control of Eastern Europe because it showed that the Soviet Union would invade any country that threatened the security of the Eastern bloc.
• The USA imposed a blockade on Cuba to stop any more missiles or equipment coming from the Soviet Union.
• Brezhnev could not accept Dubček’s reforms and the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
• Brezhnev established the Brezhnev Doctrine after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.
• Yugoslavia and Romania also backed off from the Soviet Union, weakening the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
• The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was important because the Brezhnev Doctrine meant that the Soviet Union reserved the right to invade any country that threatened the security of the Eastern bloc.
• Western European communist parties were horrified and declared themselves independent from the Soviet Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
• In September 1962, Soviet ships carried nuclear warheads and missiles to Cuba.
• In October 1962, US spy planes photographed the Cuban missile sites and the secret was out.
• The US public learned that they were now in range of Soviet nuclear missiles.
• The Cuban missile sites were a key part of the Cold War.
• The USA also had many missile bases close to the Soviet Union, for example, in Turkey.