IB History: The Cold War — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The World the War Left

The security dilemma — two rational fears. Soviet leaders wanted distance between Moscow and a possible invader. Two invasions through Poland in thirty years, followed by a war that killed some 27 million Soviet people, made that desire urgent. American leaders drew a different lesson from two world wars entered amid European collapse: no single power should dominate Eurasia. A Soviet-controlled buffer appeared to Washington to advance precisely that danger. American efforts to resist it, meanwhile, could appear to Moscow as encirclement. The steps taken for safety could leave both sides feeling less safe.

Ideology made compromise read as defeat. The rivalry was also a dispute about the nature of political systems. Leninism taught that capitalist encirclement made eventual war likely; American liberal thought drew from the 1930s the lesson that closed societies bred aggression. Both offered explanations meant to apply far beyond one border. A struggle over Polish ministries or Iranian oil could consequently seem to disclose the direction of world politics. If each local dispute carried that significance, giving way in one might look like a defeat for the whole cause.

Poland: the test case that failed. Britain had entered the war in 1939 over Poland. At Yalta Stalin agreed to “free and unfettered elections”, but Home Army leaders were arrested, the 1946 referendum was rigged, and the 1947 election was falsified. Washington saw the sequence as evidence that Soviet promises could not be trusted. Moscow saw Western protest through its fear of being surrounded again by hostile states. For Poles the immediate consequence was that the promised choice had been denied.

A power vacuum with two occupants. The defeat of Germany and Japan left the powers that had organized either end of Eurasia in ruins. Britain was financially exhausted and, within three years, would devalue and retreat from commitments in Greece, India and Palestine. France had been humiliated. The United States and the Soviet Union retained resources to shape events on a comparable worldwide scale. Neither had chosen to become one of two such powers, but their decisions would be made in the space their defeated and weakened rivals had left.

Chapter 2: Containment

Europe was starving, and hunger votes. Marshall’s planners looked at Europe’s political troubles alongside its material shortages. In the winter of 1946–47 frozen canals interrupted supplies and German rations were halved. French and Italian communist parties already had about a quarter of the vote. If hunger increased their support, they could gain power at the ballot box without Soviet tanks. Aid would meet immediate needs while helping restore production and confidence. Western European output passed its prewar level by 1951, and communist electoral support eventually receded. Recovery had several causes; the Plan contributed substantially.

Why Moscow refused the money. Stalin had to consider what acceptance would require. Marshall aid was offered to the Soviet Union and its sphere, and he sent Molotov to Paris with ninety economists before withdrawing him. Open accounts and integration into a Western-led system threatened Soviet control over both the command economy and its buffer. Historians still debate whether Washington expected acceptance or intended to drive a wedge into the bloc. Czechoslovakia’s government agreed to attend the talks, only to reverse course after Soviet pressure by phone. Moscow kept control, while its neighbors lost access to the aid.

Berlin: geography as leverage. The occupation arrangements of 1945 placed Western Berlin deep inside the Soviet zone. The Western powers had no written guarantee of ground access, but they did have three agreed air corridors, each twenty miles wide; the three arrows show them. Closing the land routes let Stalin exert pressure without an overt attack. Supplying the city by air let the West respond without sending an armed convoy through. Geography gave each side a way to contest the city while trying to avoid direct combat.

The bomb behind the politeness. Behind the Berlin crisis stood the possibility of a much larger war. The United States retained an atomic monopoly until August 1949. Stalin did not shoot down the transports, and Truman sent B-29 bombers to England as a signal. Those aircraft were not configured to carry atomic weapons, so the signal depended partly on what Moscow believed they could do. Both governments applied pressure while trying to avoid turning the confrontation into a shooting war.

Who ended it? The four-way argument. Why did it end? American military competition and the Strategic Defense Initiative increased the strain and encouraged reformers. Stagnation, technological backwardness and a defense burden estimated at 15–20% of output narrowed Soviet choices. Yet Gorbachev chose to renounce force in Eastern Europe, and movements such as Solidarity, the Leipzig demonstrators and the Baltic chain used the opening. These explanations do different work: pressure and weakness help explain the need for change; decisions by leaders and organized people help explain its course.

What the new map inherits. Four successor states inherited Soviet nuclear weapons on their territory: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In the following years the latter three gave up the weapons on their soil under treaty agreements, a nonproliferation achievement with a long shadow. The final map also shows hatching where Yugoslavia was already breaking apart in war. NATO remained, and its later enlargement became contentious. In Russia, economic depression and the loss of empire accompanied competing stories of defeat and dismantlement. Frozen conflicts and the wars of 2014 and 2022 later brought renewed attention to borders inherited from the Soviet republics.

The ledger of the “long peace”. The superpowers avoided direct war for 46 years. Deterrence, alliance discipline and luck help explain that achievement. The chart below asks a different question: what did conflicts connected to their rivalry cost elsewhere? Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Central America all suffered major violence. One broad estimate is about 20 million deaths, though the total depends on which conflicts and indirect deaths are counted. Many victims lived far from Europe, in countries whose people pursued their own aims as well as experiencing outside intervention. Both the absence of direct superpower war and the violence elsewhere belong in the ledger.