Cold War in Soviet Union

[Name of the institute]Cold War in Soviet Union

Introduction

Traditional definitions of military history need to be redefined when it comes to the cold war. It was fought not only by generals and soldiers but also by diplomats and spies, dissidents and refugees. Its symbolic end was announced not by a defeated general standing before a surrender document but by citizens standing on the Berlin Wall. Its end could just as easily have been announced by the explosion of thermonuclear warheads over Moscow and Washington. Although a third world war did not follow the second, before the end of the cold war each superpower had waged war on proxies of the other, and there had even been numerous (if often secret) direct Soviet-American military clashes. Millions also died cold war related deaths at the hands of their own repressive internal regimes in such places as the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. The aim and objective of this paper is also to talk about this cold war in Soviet Union.

Beginning of the War

The roots of the cold war may be traced back at least as far as the November 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Marxist ideology predicted that the formation of a major communist state would be met with unremitting hostility from the capitalist powers, a belief seemingly borne out by the U.S. intervention in Russia following World War I. The increasingly repressive nature of the government established by Vladimir I. Lenin and his successor, Joseph Stalin, did little to decrease the isolation of the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1933 that the U.S. government formally recognized the USSR. Mutual distrust between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies turned to outright animosity following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent Soviet invasions of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic Republics.

After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, there was relatively close cooperation between the USSR and the other Allies for the balance of World War II. Even during this period, however, mutual distrust remained a significant factor, especially regarding what the Soviets perceived as Western foot-dragging on the opening of a second front in France. Whether or not the U.S. decision to employ the atomic bomb over Hiroshima was intended in part to intimidate the Soviet Union, it was probably interpreted that way by Stalin.

At the end of the war, only two nations remained with the potential to fill the power vacuums left in Europe and Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. Given this fact and the intense ideological differences between these two nations, some sort of postwar conflict seems in retrospect to have been likely, if not inevitable.

Crucial Movements of Soviet Union

The Soviet Union may have lost 27 million people during the war, and another 5 million in an immediate postwar famine. U.S. deaths in the war came to 292,131. Not only was two-thirds of Germany controlled by the West, but both of the other two Axis powers, ...