What Was the Cold War? The tense relationship that developed primarily between the USA, with its allies, and the USSR, with its satellites, was to dominate international affairs for decades and many major crises occurred – The Cuban Missile Crisis , the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam –to name just a few. For many the growth in atomic weapons was the most worrying issue. The Cold War is usually considered to have ended with the “Fall of the wall” in 1989 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Why did the USA and USSR become rivals in the period 1945 to 1949? Historians have disagreed over the answer to this question for decades. However, the answers given can generally be placed into 4 groups. The Traditionalists The Revisionists The Post Revisionists The Post-1991 school

The Traditionalists The Soviets were to blame for the Cold War The Cold War was the direct result of Stalin's aggressive Soviet expansionism. This view is the traditional view of American and British Historians – particularly before 1960

George Kennan, “X”, “Sources of Soviet Conduct” The Soviets perceived themselves to be in a state of perpetual war with capitalism; The Soviets would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies; Soviet aggression was not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but with historic Russian xenophobia and paranoia; The Soviet government's structure prevented objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.

Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, addressing the Ninety-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Jewish Committee 2001 “International conflicts are often caused by the character of national regimes, not by any kind of international misunderstanding. The cold war was caused by the evil regime in the Soviet Union , not by a failure of diplomacy. In a similar way, Slobodan Milosevic and his evil cronies were responsible for the tragedies and suffering in the Balkans... The American Jewish Committee worked for years against Milosevic, speaking out forcefully on behalf of his victims, especially the Bosnian Muslims.”

Christopher Andrew Professor of Modern and Contemporary History Corpus Christi College Cambridge “The Cold War was caused by the Soviet Union , was sustained by the Soviet Union , and was ended by the Soviet Union when it collapsed,” …..“It was—and is—as simple as that.”

The Revisionists The US were to blame for the Cold War. The Cold War was caused by the US trying to keep countries capitalist for trade purposes The USA deliberately intimidated the Soviets e.g. the dropping of the Atomic bomb

1959 ~ William Appleman Williams The Tragedy of American Diplomacy Williams argued that America’s chief aim in the years after the war was to make sure that there was an "open door" for American trade, and that this led the American government to try to make sure that countries remained capitalist countries.   This ‘revisionist’ approach reached its height during the Vietnam War when many people suggested that America was as bad as Russia. 

Gar Alperovitz Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam(1965) Cold War was the fault of Americans for our use of the atomic bomb – he contended that Truman decided to drop the bomb as a means to intimidate the Soviet Union.  

Gabriel Kolko ~1972 The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy One reviewer said that Kolko “devoted his entire professional life to blaming the United States for the Cold War”. Kolko suggested that Truman should have given Stalin the atomic bomb in 1945, claimed that Russia treated Poland well in 1945, and blamed South Korea for the Korean War of 1950-3

The Post-Revisionists The Cold War was neither the USA’s nor the USSR’s fault The cause was a mutual misunderstanding of each other’s motives The Cold War was an inevitable result of the situation at the time as the superpowers tried to settle the ‘German Question’

Martin P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security (1992) Cold War was a clash of two military establishments both seeking world domination.

Marc Trachtenberg ~ 1999 A Contested Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 The Cold War was really about settling the German question in the aftermath of World War II

John Lewis Gaddis~ 1972 The United States and the Origins of the Cold War Both America and Russia wanted to keep the peace after the war but that conflict was caused by mutual misunderstanding, reactivity, and above all the American inability to understand Stalin's fears and need to defend himself after the war.  Gaddis has had considerable involvement in the new Cold War Research, so he really belongs in the next category as well.  

The Post-1991 school Inspired by secret documents uncovered after the collapse of communism is Russia The Cold War was the result of the leaders’ personal faults and fanatical beliefs The Cold War was a Clash of ideologies – a clash between Capitalism and Communism

States in the Korean War, Stalin "deliberately abstained from the crucial vote at the United Nations that proclaimed North Korea an aggressor state" -- a far more satisfactory explanation than the longstanding claim that he Soviet ambassador unintentionally missed the vote. Zubok demonstrates that the Berlin Blockade of 1948, when the United States and Britain supplied the people of the western zones of Berlin with food and coal by air after Stalin cut off road and rail access, "became a propaganda fiasco and a strategic failure" for the Soviet dictator that led directly to the formation of NATO and the creation of West Germany. Stalin's "way of getting back at the arrogant Americans," Zubok reports, "was to support Kim Il Sung's plan to annex South Korea." To involve the United States in the Korean War, Stalin "deliberately abstained from the crucial vote at the United Nations that proclaimed North Korea an aggressor state" -- a far more satisfactory explanation than the longstanding claim that the Soviet ambassador unintentionally missed the vote. Vladislav Zubok ~ 2008 Reveals the full extent of Stalin's brutal post-World War II suppression of the Soviet people, including withholding strategic grain reserves to induce an artificial famine (similar to the Terror Famine of the 1930s) while increasing taxes on farmers by 150 percent.

CCCP Didn’t Really have Nuclear Capacity Contrary to the claims of the founding document of the Cold War, NSC-68, the 1950 National Security Council report that said the Soviet Union was "implacable in its purpose to destroy [us]" and could "seriously damage this country," Zubok confirms the Soviet lack of any nuclear retaliatory capacity in the mid-1950s, when the United States could field more than 1,400 strategic weapons. During this era the Soviet leadership nevertheless proliferated nuclear weapons technology to China, even preparing to ship the Chinese "a working sample of the atomic bomb." After Mao responded to Nikita Khrushchev's drive toward peaceful coexistence with the West by insulting and humiliating the Soviet leader when he visited Beijing in 1959 to mend fences, Khrushchev cancelled those preparations.

  While scholars may have been blinded by loyalty and guilt in examining the evidence regarding the origins of the Cold War in the past, increasingly, scholars with greater access to archival evidence on all sides have come to the conclusion that the conflicting and unyielding ideological ambitions were the source of the complicated and historic tale that was the Cold War. ~Timothy White, Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies (2000) Secret Texts of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, 1939 September 01 1939 - Secret Texts of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, 1939   Memorandum to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on Troop Strength Orders for the Red Army, 9 May 1940 May 09 1940 - Memorandum to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU on Troop strength orders for the Red Army, May 9, 1940. Proposals for strengthening of Soviet armed forces.   Notes from the Meeting between Comrade Stalin and Economists Concerning Questions in Political Economy, 29 January 1941 January 29 1941 - Notes from the meeting between Comrade Stalin and economists concerning questions on political economy, 29 January 1941

Center for Cold War Studies and International History UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA 

The Future of our Understanding of the Cold War In the future both Russians and Americans will look back at the Cold War with mixed emotions. For Russians, an honest examination of their past will be an important part of their attempt to move beyond the confines of a closed and authoritarian political system, but reminiscing about the Cold War will also allow Russians to Soviet power in this era of superpower rivalry. For Americans, the Cold War will be a source of pride and regret as they honor the achievements of Containment but learn of the mistakes made due to an excessive ideological zeal that could never be fully satisfied. As with all of history, the history of the Cold War will continue to be revised and retold to fit the need and interests of future generations.