How did the Cold War start?

Two allies, two fears

In early 1945 the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union were still allies. They came out of the war with very different scars: about 27 million Soviet dead, about 400,000 American. Moscow’s lesson was geographic. Germany had invaded through Poland twice in thirty years, so Stalin wanted governments he could trust on his western border. Washington’s lesson came from the 1930s: closed spheres of influence bred war, and dictators who swallowed their neighbors had to be stopped early. Each side’s idea of safety looked like expansion to the other.

The chain, 1945 to 1949

1. Yalta, February 1945. The Big Three promise Poland “free and unfettered elections” while the Red Army already holds it, and each capital reads the deal its own way (what was decided at Yalta).
2. The Bomb, summer 1945. Trinity works on July 16. At Potsdam Truman hints at a new weapon; Stalin, already briefed by his spy Klaus Fuchs, orders a Soviet bomb at any cost (Oppenheimer and Trinity).
3. A name, October 1945. George Orwell imagines atomic super-states locked in a “cold war” (where the name comes from).
4. Two telegrams, 1946. In February Kennan tells Washington that Soviet power gives way before firm pressure; in September Novikov tells Moscow that America is striving for world supremacy (the Long Telegram).
5. Fulton, March 1946. Churchill says an iron curtain has come down across Europe; Stalin answers in Pravda that Moscow wants loyal neighbors after Germany’s invasion (the Iron Curtain).
6. The Truman Doctrine, March 1947. Truman requests 400 million dollars to keep Greece and Turkey afloat and frames the choice as a global one (the Truman Doctrine).
7. The Marshall Plan, 1947. Aid is offered to all of Europe. Molotov walks out of the Paris talks, Moscow’s neighbors stay away, and in September Andrei Zhdanov declares the world split into “two major camps” (the Marshall Plan).
8. Berlin, 1948 and 1949. After the West launches a new currency, Moscow blockades West Berlin, which is fed by air for eleven months (the Berlin Airlift).
9. 1949. NATO is signed in April, two German states are founded, the Soviet Union tests its own bomb on August 29 and Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China on October 1 (why the Doomsday Clock jumped).

Who started it?

Historians still argue, and the answer has shifted as archives opened. The first Western school, in the 1950s, blamed Soviet expansion: Stalin broke the Yalta pledge on elections and imposed Communist rule on his neighbors. The revisionists of the 1960s, such as William Appleman Williams, blamed America’s atomic monopoly and its push for open markets, which left Moscow feeling encircled, as Soviet official history had always said. Since the Soviet archives opened in the 1990s, many historians, John Lewis Gaddis among them, give more weight to Stalin’s suspicion, while others, like Melvyn Leffler, stress how each side’s search for security looked like aggression to the other.

When did it begin?

There is no declaration of war to point to. A common convention runs from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the end of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991; some historians start with Poland in 1945 or Fulton in 1946, and a few with 1918, when Western troops landed in revolutionary Russia. By the end of 1949 the shape was set: two Germanys, a Western alliance and the Bomb on both sides. It stayed cold in one precise sense: the two superpowers never sent their armies against each other.