Outbreak of the Cold War

• 1945 – Stalin honours agreement to let allies into Berlin
• Stalin wanted Socialist/Communist Alliance
• USSR had 2 million soldiers in Eastern Europe
• Allied Control Council run Berlin
• Non-communist socialists win election
• 1947- UK and US combine zones and plan a separate West German state
• West introduce new currency, which includes West Berlin
• June 25 1948 All supplies are cut to Berlin
• Two main American approaches
• Hawks – 'we have the right to use that highway, let's just put a ridiculous amount of tanks on it, smash through, and dare the Russians to shoot at us'
• Obviously would have caused war
• Hawks argued that they could have just used their nuke/s
• Doves – favour negotiation
• Some even say give up Berlin as it's expensive, you have hostages as it's easy to surround, and it would help heal relations with the Soviets
• The Americans are not sure how well the airlift will work – a bit of guesswork
• Airlift follows – planes every 30 seconds, food, coal, oil, 5,000 tons a day
• 75 killed in accidents
• Yet huge achievement – through the winter of Berlin it's cold, so need to supply not only food but heating otherwise the people will freeze
• Massive success – people hungry and cold because of the Soviet Union but being fed by the west
• Lots of nice touches – sweets for children, writing paper to communicate, newspapers so that they can know what’s going on in the outside world
• This makes the people of West Berlin even more unified and anti-communist
• However, it could be argued that the West are breaking their agreement, uniting but excluding him and in a way 'ganging up on him'
• Counter argument is that Soviets can't take the moral high ground as they are blocking transports of coal, food, etc
• July 1949 – 1st USSR nuclear bomb
• Took the USSR 5 years after throwing everything at it
• West threatened and form NATO with the idea of collective security
• Russians respond with the Warsaw Pact, which is fairly irrelevant as the West assumed that the communists were going to act together anyway
• The economic plan by the US became a dividing line seen by the USSR as an attempt to gain economic and political influence, which they referred to as "dollar imperialism".
• The economic plan divided countries, with those who wanted to be Soviet aligned unable to accept it.
• The economic plan exposed differences between capitalist and communist countries, and villainised Stalin.
• The economic plan led to the creation of Cominform, a direct result of the plan.
• The economic plan exposed the Soviet Union's control of Eastern Europe.
• The Czechoslovakian foreign minister was summoned to Moscow and berated by Stalin as a result of the economic plan.
• The Polish prime minister was rewarded for his rejection of the economic plan with a lucrative agreement equivalent to 450 million 1948 dollars in credit, 200,000 tons of grain, heavy machinery, and factories.
• Other Eastern European nations immediately rejected the economic plan, demonstrating the lack of freedom in the USSR.
• The economic plan led to the "iron curtain" forming across Europe, showing that the USSR and the USA could not govern a region together.
• The economic plan showed Stalin that the US had not been completely honest with him, leading to a ground for competition past the point of reasonable deniability, where nuclear weapons could only be used at such a scale against each other.
• The USSR became the first country to develop nuclear weapons in 1947.
• Stalin honours agreement to let allies into Berlin


  1945
• Stalin wanted Socialist/Communist Alliance