Диплом: Cold War
Ministry of education, science and culture
High College of English
Graduation Paper
on theme:
U.S. - Soviet relations.
Student: Pavlunina I.V.
Supervisor: Kolpakov A. V.
Bishkek 2000
Contents.
Introduction.
3
Chapter 1: The Historical Background of Cold War. 5
1.1 The Historical Context.
5
1.2 Causes and Interpretations.
10
Chapter 2: The Cold War Chronology.
17
2.1 The War Years.
17
2.2 The Truman Doctrine.
25
2.3 The Marshall Plan.
34
Chapter 3: The Role of Cold War in American History and Diplomacy. 37
3.1 Declaration of the Cold War.
37
3.2 Сold War Issues.
40
Conclusion.
49
Glossary.
50
The reference list.
51
Introduction.
This graduation paper is about U.S. - Soviet relations in Cold War period.
Our purpose is to find out the causes of this war, positions of the countries
which took part in it. We also will discuss the main Cold War's events.
The Cold War was characterized by mutual distrust, suspicion and
misunderstanding by both the United States and Soviet Union, and their
allies. At times, these conditions increased the likelihood of the third
world war. The United States accused the USSR of seeking to expand Communism
throughout the world. The Soviets, meanwhile, charged the United States with
practicing imperialism and with attempting to stop revolutionary activity in
other countries. Each block's vision of the world contributed to East-West
tension. The United States wanted a world of independent nations based on
democratic principles. The Soviet Union, however, tried control areas it
considered vital to its national interest, including much of Eastern Europe.
Through the Cold War did not begin until the end of World War II, in 1945,
U.S.-Soviet relations had been strained since 1917. In that year, a
revolution in Russia established a Communist dictatorship there. During the
1920's and 1930's, the Soviets called for world revolution and the
destruction of capitalism, the economic system of United States. The United
States did not grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union until 1933.
In 1941, during World War II, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviet
Union then joined the Western Allies in fighting Germany. For a time early in
1945, it seemed possible that a lasting friendship might develop between the
United States and Soviet Union based on their wartime cooperation. However,
major differences continued to exist between the two, particularly with
regard to Eastern Europe. As a result of these differences, the United States
adopted a "get tough" policy toward the Soviet Union after the war ended.
The Soviets responded by accusing the United States and the other capitalist
allies of the West of seeking to encircle the Soviet Union so they could
eventually overthrow its Communist form of government.
The subject of Cold War interests American historicans and journalists as
well as Russian ones. In particular, famous journalist Henryh Borovik fraces
this topic in his book. He analyzes the events of Cold War from the point of
view of modern Russian man. With appearing of democracy and freedom of speech
we could free ourselves from past stereotype in perception of Cold War's
events as well as America as a whole, we also learnt something new about
American people's real life and personality. A new developing stage of
relations with the United States has begun with the collapse of the Soviet
Union on independent states. And in order to direct these relations in the
right way it is necessary to study events of Cold War very carefully and try
to avoid past mistakes. Therefore this subject is so much popular in our
days.
This graduation paper consist of three chapters. The first chapter maintain
the historical documents which comment the origins of the Cold War.
The second chapter maintain information about the most popular Cold War's
events.
The third chapter analyze the role of Cold War in World policy and diplomacy.
The chapter also adduce the Cold War issues.
Chapter 1: The Historical Background of Cold War.
1.1 The Historical Context.
The animosity of postwar Soviet-American relations drew on a deep reservoir
of mutual distrust. Soviet suspicion of the United States went back to
America's hostile reaction to the Bolshevik revolution itself. At the end of
World War I, President Woodrow Wilson had sent more than ten thousand
American soldiers as part of an expeditionary allied force to overthrow the
new Soviet regime by force. When that venture failed, the United States
nevertheless withheld its recognition of the Soviet government. Back in the
United States, meanwhile, the fear of Marxist radicalism reached an
hysterical pitch with the Red Scare of 1919-20. Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer ordered government agents to arrest 3,000 purported members of the
Communist party, and then attempted to deport them. American attitudes toward
the seemed encapsulated in the comments of one minister who called for the
removal of communists in "ships of stone with sails of lead, with the wrath
of God for a breeze and with hell for their first port."
American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, in turn, reflected profound
concern about Soviet violation of human rights, democratic procedures, and
international rules of civility. With brutal force, Soviet leaders had
imposed from above a revolution of agricultural collectivization and
industrialization. Millions had died as a consequence of forced removal from
their lands. Anyone who protested was killed or sent to one of the hundreds
of prison camps which, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's words, stretched across
the Soviet Union like a giant archipelago. What kind of people were these,
one relative of a prisoner asked, "who first decreed and then carried out
this mass destruction of their own kind?" Furthermore, Soviet foreign policy
seemed committed to the spread of revolution to other countries, with
international coordination of subversive activities placed in the hands of
the Comintern. It was difficult to imagine two more different societies.
For a brief period after the United States granted diplomatic recognition to
the Soviet Union in 1933, a new spirit of cooperation prevailed. But by the
end of the 1930s suspicion and alienation had once again become dominant.
From a Soviet perspective, the United States seemed unwilling to join
collectively to oppose the Japanese and German menace. On two occasions, the
United States had refused to act in concert against Nazi Germany. When
Britain and France agreed at Munich to appease Adolph Hitler, the Soviets
gave up on any possibility of allied action against Germany and talked of a
capitalist effort to encircle and destroy the Soviet regime.
Yet from a Western perspective, there seemed little basis for distinguishing
between Soviet tyranny and Nazi totalitarianism. Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin
engaged in his own holocaust, sending up to 6 million Soviet citizens to
their deaths in massive purge trials. Stalin "saw enemies everywhere," his
daughter later recalled, and with a vengeance frightening in its
irrationality, sought to destroy them. It was an "orgy of terror," one
historian said. Diplomats saw high officials tapped on the shoulder in public
places, removed from circulation, and then executed. Foreigners were subject
to constant surveillance. It was as if, George Kennan noted, outsiders were
representatives of "the devil, evil and dangerous, and to be shunned."
On the basis of such experience, many Westerners concluded that Hitler and
Stalin were two of a kind, each reflecting a blood-thirsty obsession with
power no matter what the cost to human decency. "Nations, like individuals,"
Kennan said in 1938, "are largely the products of their environment." As
Kennan perceived it, the Soviet personality was neurotic, conspiratorial, and
untrustworthy. Such impressions were only reinforced when Stalin suddenly
announced a nonaggression treaty with Hitler in August 1939, and later that
year invaded the small, neutral state of Finland. It seemed that Stalin and
Hitler deserved each other. Hence, the reluctance of some to change their
attitudes toward the Soviet Union when suddenly, in June 1941, Germany
invaded Russia and Stalin became "Uncle Joe."
Compounding the problem of historical distrust was the different way in which
the two nations viewed foreign policy. Ever since John Winthrop had spoken of
Boston in 1630 as "a city upon a hill" that would serve as a beacon for the
world, Americans had tended to see themselves as a chosen people with a
distinctive mission to impart their faith and values to the rest of
humankind. Although all countries attempt to put the best face possible on
their military and diplomatic actions, Americans have seemed more committed
than most to describing their involvement in the world as pure and
altruistic. Hence, even ventures like the Mexican War of 1846 - 48 - clearly
provoked by the United States in an effort to secure huge land masses - were
defended publicly as the fulfillment of a divine mission to extend American
democracy to those deprived of it.
Reliance on the rhetoric of moralism was never more present than during
America's involvement in World War I. Despite its official posture of
neutrality, the United States had a vested interest in the victory of England
and France over Germany. America's own military security, her trade lines
with England and France, economic and political control over Latin America
and South America - all would best be preserved if Germany were defeated.
Moreover, American banks and munition makers had invested millions of dollars
in the allied cause. Nevertheless, the issue of national self-interest rarely
if ever surfaced in any presidential statement during the war. Instead, U.S.
rhetoric presented America's position as totally idealistic in nature. The
United States entered the war, President Wilson declared, not for reasons of
economic self-interest, but to "make the world safe for democracy." Our
purpose was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but to fight a war
that would "end all wars" and produce "a peace without victory." Rather than
seek a sphere of influence for American power, the United States instead
declared that it sought to establish a new form of internationalism based on
self-determination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, the end of all
economic barriers between nations, and development of a new international
order based on the principles of democracy.
America's historic reluctance to use arguments of self-interest as a basis
for foreign policy undoubtedly reflected a belief that, in a democracy,
people would not support foreign ventures inconsistent with their own sense
of themselves as a noble and just country. But the consequences were to
limit severely the flexibility necessary to a multifaceted and effective
diplomacy, and to force national leaders to invoke moral - even religious -
idealism as a basis for actions that might well fall short of the
expectations generated by moralistic visions.
The Soviet Union, by contrast, operated with few such constraints. Although
Soviet pronouncements on foreign policy tediously invoked the rhetoric of
capitalist imperialism, abstract principles meant far less than national
self-interest in arriving at foreign policy positions. Every action that the
Soviet Union had taken since the Bolshevik revolution, from the peace treaty
with the Kaiser to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact and Russian occupation of the
Baltic states reflected this policy of self-interest. As Stalin told British
Foreign Minister Anthony Eden during the war, "a declaration I regard as
algebra ... I prefer practical arithmetic." Or, as the Japanese ambassador to
Moscow later said, "the Soviet authorities are extremely realistic and it is
most difficult to persuade them with abstract arguments." Clearly, both the
United States and the Soviet Union saw foreign policy as involving a
combination of self-interest and ideological principle. Yet the history of
the two countries suggested that principle was far more a consideration in
the formulation of American foreign policy, while self-interest-purely
defined-controlled Soviet actions.
The difference became relevant during the 1930s as Franklin Roosevelt
attempted to find some way to move American public opinion back to a spirit
of internationalism. After World War I, Americans had felt betrayed by the
abandonment of Wilsonian principles. Persuaded that the war itself
represented a mischievous conspiracy by munitions makers and bankers to get
America involved, Americans had preferred to opt for isolation and "normalcy"
rather than participate in the ambiguities of what so clearly appeared to be
a corrupt international order. Now, Roosevelt set out to reverse those
perceptions. He understood the dire consequences of Nazi ambitions for world
hegemony. Yet to pose the issue strictly as one of self-interest offered
little chance of success given the depth of America's revulsion toward
internationalism. The task of education was immense. As time went on,
Roosevelt relied more and more on the traditional moral rhetoric of American
values as a means of justifying the international involvement that he knew
must inevitably lead to war. Thus, throughout the 1930s he repeatedly
discussed Nazi aggression as a direct threat to the most cherished American
beliefs in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of
occupational choice. When German actions corroborated the president's simple
words, the opportunity presented itself for carrying the nation toward
another great crusade on behalf of democracy, freedom, and peace. Roosevelt
wished to avoid the errors of Wilsonian overstatement, but he understood the
necessity of generating moral fervor as a means of moving the nation toward
the intervention he knew to be necessary if both America's self-interest-and
her moral principles-were to be preserved.
The Atlantic Charter represented the embodiment of Roosevelt's quest for
moral justification of American involvement. Presented to the world after the
president and Prime Minister Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland in
the summer of 1941, the Charter set forth the common goals that would guide
America over the next few years. There would be no secret commitments, the
President said. Britain and America sought no territorial aggrandizement.
They would oppose any violation of the right to self-government for all
peoples. They stood for open trade, free exchange of ideas, freedom of
worship and expression, and the creation of an international organization to
preserve and protect future peace. This would be a war fought for
freedom—freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of religion, freedom
from the old politics of balance-of-power diplomacy.
Roosevelt deeply believed in those ideals and saw no inconsistency between
the moral principles they represented and American self-interest. Yet these
very commitments threatened to generate misunderstanding and conflict with
the Soviet Union whose own priorities were much more directly expressed in
terms of "practical arithmetic." Russia wanted security. The Soviet Union
sought a sphere of influence over which it could have unrestricted control.
It wished territorial boundaries that would reflect the concessions won
through military conflict. All these objectives-potentially-ran counter to
the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt himself-never afraid of inconsistency-often
talked the same language. Frequently, he spoke of guaranteeing the USSR
"measures of legitimate security" on territorial questions, and he envisioned
a postwar world in which the "four policemen"-the superpowers-would manage
the world.
But Roosevelt also understood that the American public would not accept the
public embrace of such positions. A rationale of narrow self-interest was not
acceptable, especially if that self-interest led to abandoning the ideals of
the Atlantic Charter. In short, the different ways in which the Soviet Union
and the United States articulated their objectives for the war—and formulated
their foreign policy—threatened to compromise the prospect for long-term
cooperation. The language of universalism and the language of balance-of-
power politics were incompatible, at least in theory. Thus, the United States
and the Soviet Union entered the war burdened not only by their deep mistrust
of each other's motivations and systems of government, but also by a
significantly different emphasis on what should constitute the major
rationale for fighting the war.
1.2 Causes and Interpretations.
Any historian who studies the Cold War must come to grips with a series of
questions, which, even if unanswerable in a definitive fashion, nevertheless
compel examination. Was the Cold War inevitable? If not, how could it have
been avoided? What role did personalities play? Were there points at which
different courses of action might have been followed? What economic factors
were central? What ideological causes? Which historical forces? At what
juncture did alternative possibilities become invalid? When was the die cast?
Above all, what were the primary reasons for defining the world in such a
polarized and ideological framework?