Conflict and Tension: East and West, 1945–1972

How this unit works

This is your Paper 1 Section B wider world depth study (option 1B/C): 44 marks — 40 content marks plus 4 SPaG marks on Question 4 — in about 60 minutes. Q1 — source inference (4); Q2 — how useful are two sources (12); Q3 — write an account (8); Q4 — how far do you agree (16 + 4 SPaG). The question methods live in the Exam Skills section; this unit supplies the knowledge. Two features shape your revision: 16 of the 40 content marks are source marks — and this option is unusually rich in usable material (speeches, cartoons, photographs, propaganda posters, reconnaissance images, memoirs), so the Source Workbench at the end sets out what each type can and cannot show. And Question 4 always names a “main reason” or “main cause” — so for every major development (the origins of the Cold War, the Berlin Blockade, the Wall, Cuba, détente) you need a ranked set of competing causes, supplied by the Factor Hierarchies at the end.

The questions historians genuinely argue over

Contested ground: the four debates

Timeline: the dates you must place

Learn the order before the detail — the sections explain each event.

Part one — origins, 1943–1949

Part two — development, 1949–1961

Part three — transformation, 1962–1972

Key people and organisations

The United States and the West

The Soviet Union and the East

Key vocabulary

The specialist terms that earn the SPaG marks on Question 4 — defined here once and used throughout.

Chapter 1 — The origins of the Cold War, 1943–1949

In May 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union had just won the largest war in history together. By April 1949 they headed rival alliances, faced each other across a divided Germany, and had spent a year in a confrontation over Berlin that might have led to shooting. Keep two explanations in play throughout this chapter: the alliance broke down because the two powers wanted incompatible things — and because each responded to the other's actions in ways that made matters worse. Both are true, and the argument is about which mattered more.

1.1 Two systems, two fears

The alliance was never a friendship. It came into being by accident — the USSR entered the war only when Germany invaded it (June 1941), the USA only after Pearl Harbor (December 1941) — between states with a history of hostility: Western troops had fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War; the USA did not recognise the Soviet government until 1933; and in August 1939 Stalin had signed a pact with Nazi Germany. During the war, resentments accumulated: Stalin pressed from 1942 for a second front in western Europe, which came only in June 1944 — by which time the USSR had borne the overwhelming share of the fighting — and the Western allies developed the atomic bomb without telling their Soviet partner.

The last row matters most: each side's ideology predicted the other's hostility, so any ambiguous action could be read as confirmation. Security fears were as important — and for the USSR probably more so. The Soviet Union had been invaded from the west through Poland twice in a generation (1914 and 1941); Soviet war dead are estimated at around 25–27 million (approximate, and still debated), and vast areas of the western USSR were destroyed. From Moscow, a friendly buffer between Germany and the Soviet border looked like an elementary requirement of survival. The American position was entirely different: around 400,000 dead, not one bomb on its territory, an undamaged economy producing roughly half the world's manufactured goods, and a monopoly on the atomic bomb — its fears were about a repetition of the 1930s (collapse, dictatorship, war), not invasion. Economic interests pulled in opposite directions: the USA wanted an open trading world (partly conviction, partly because its industry needed export markets); the USSR wanted reparations and a closed sphere. And the individuals mattered: Roosevelt believed a personal relationship with Stalin could work; Churchill was suspicious throughout; Stalin ran his own state by permanent suspicion and applied the same assumptions abroad.

1.2 Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam

Three conferences shaped the post-war world. The key to writing about them well: separate what was decided, what was merely promised or understood, and what was later disputed.

• Tehran (November–December 1943) — the high point of the alliance, held while the war's outcome was uncertain. Agreed: a second front in France for May 1944 (Stalin's principal demand); Soviet entry against Japan once Germany was defeated; Poland's borders moved westwards; a post-war international organisation in principle. Notice what was settled: military questions, not political ones.
• Yalta (February 1945) — Soviet forces now held eastern Europe. Decided: Germany and Berlin each divided into four occupation zones; war-crimes trials; the United Nations; Soviet entry against Japan within three months of Germany's surrender; Poland's eastern frontier on the Curzon Line. Promised but not defined: the Declaration on Liberated Europe committed the Allies to “free elections” — and Poland's Soviet-backed provisional government was to be “reorganised on a broader democratic basis”.
• Potsdam (July–August 1945) — after Germany's surrender, in a transformed atmosphere, with Attlee replacing Churchill mid-conference. Agreed: Germany to be demilitarised, denazified and democratised under an Allied Control Council; reparations to be taken by each power from its own zone (which meant each occupier could do as it liked in its own zone — this mattered enormously); Poland's western border on the Oder–Neisse line, provisionally. Disputed: the scale of reparations, the Polish government, and Soviet behaviour in the occupied countries.

Two changes between the conferences mattered enormously. Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 and Truman became President — Vice-President for under three months, excluded from wartime diplomacy, not told the atomic bomb existed, and more suspicious of Soviet intentions (his first meeting with Molotov was famously blunt). And the bomb entered the diplomacy at Potsdam: the first successful test came on 16 July 1945, during the conference; on 24 July Truman mentioned to Stalin that the USA had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. Stalin appeared unmoved — he already knew from Soviet intelligence, and immediately ordered the Soviet programme accelerated.

1.3 The German problem

Germany is where every general disagreement became concrete. Under Yalta and Potsdam, Germany was divided into four occupation zones governed jointly through the Allied Control Council — which required unanimity. Berlin lay roughly 100 miles inside the Soviet zone and was itself divided into four sectors, with Western access by agreed road, rail and air corridors. The disagreements were about what Germany was for. The Soviet view: Germany had invaded the USSR twice and devastated it — it should be kept weak permanently and should pay; reparations were the central Soviet objective, and the USSR dismantled entire factories in its zone and shipped them east. The Western view: a permanently ruined Germany was a permanent problem — its economy was the industrial heart of Europe, the Western zones were costing their occupiers enormous sums in food aid (the agricultural east was in the Soviet zone), and a desperate population was precisely the condition in which extremism had grown before. Both policies were rational, and they were incompatible.

The chain to the blockade: when the USSR continued removing industrial plant while sending little food westwards, the Americans halted reparations deliveries from their zone in 1946. The American and British zones merged economically as Bizonia (January 1947); the French zone joined in 1948 to make Trizonia — each step defensible as economic necessity, and each looking, from Moscow, like the construction of a separate West German state in breach of the agreement to treat Germany as one economic unit. The currency was the trigger: the occupation currency was worthless and no recovery was possible without stable money, so on 20 June 1948 the Western powers introduced a new Deutschmark in their zones — and on 23 June extended it to their sectors of Berlin. The Soviet authorities regarded this as the effective creation of a separate West German state — and they were not entirely wrong about that.

1.4 The atomic bomb and post-war relations

The Manhattan Project developed the weapon in secret, without informing the Soviet ally — though Soviet intelligence had penetrated the programme and Stalin knew well before Truman told him. The first test came at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945, during Potsdam; bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August), and Japan surrendered days later — with the USSR declaring war on Japan on 8 August, between the two bombs, in time to claim its promised gains. Why the bomb was used is itself disputed: the official justification was ending the war quickly and avoiding the enormous casualties of an invasion; some historians argue a further motive — or at least a welcome consequence — was demonstrating American power to the USSR. The evidence does not settle it: present it as contested. The effects on relations: it ended the American need for Soviet help against Japan; it created a monopoly the USA would not share (international-control proposals failed in 1946 over inspection — the Americans would not disarm before inspection existed, the Soviets would not accept inspection while the Americans held weapons); it accelerated the Soviet programme enormously — the first Soviet test came on 29 August 1949, years earlier than American estimates predicted; and it changed the psychology of the confrontation, since for four years one side held a weapon the other did not.

1.5 Soviet control of eastern Europe

Between 1945 and 1948 every country occupied by the Red Army acquired a communist government. The method — “salami tactics” (the Hungarian communist leader Rákosi's own term: opponents removed slice by slice, so no single step provoked general resistance): join a coalition; take the Ministry of the Interior (police and security); use it to intimidate and arrest opponents; split rival parties; absorb the social democrats; then hold an election whose outcome is no longer in doubt. Country by country: Poland — rigged elections (January 1947) after slight broadening of the Soviet-backed government; Romania — a Soviet-imposed government from February 1945; Bulgaria — the opposition leader tried and executed (1947); Hungary — the clearest case of a genuine result overturned: the Smallholders' Party won a majority in free elections in November 1945, and salami tactics produced a communist state by 1949; Czechoslovakia — the most shocking case in Western eyes: free elections (May 1946) made the communists the largest party with about 38%, and in February 1948 they seized full control in the Prague coup — the Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died days later in a fall from a window, murder or suicide never established. Yugoslavia was the exception: Tito's partisans had liberated the country largely themselves, so his communist government owed Moscow nothing (see 1.7).

The Western reaction. In February 1946 the American diplomat George Kennan sent the Long Telegram from Moscow: Soviet hostility was rooted in Russian history and communist ideology, could not be resolved by negotiation, and must be patiently contained. In March 1946 Churchill, out of office, declared at Fulton, Missouri that an “iron curtain” had descended across the continent — Stalin publicly called the speech a call to war, and the Soviet ambassador in Washington sent his own government a mirror-image analysis months later.

1.6 The American response: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan

The immediate trigger: in February 1947 Britain, financially exhausted, told Washington it could no longer support the Greek government against communist insurgents or underwrite Turkey against Soviet pressure. The Truman Doctrine (12 March 1947): addressing Congress, Truman asked for $400 million for Greece and Turkey — and framed the request far more broadly, declaring that the United States must support free peoples resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure. The sum was modest; the principle was enormous: a commitment, in advance and without geographical limit, to resisting communist expansion anywhere. This is containment turned into policy. The Marshall Plan (announced 5 June 1947): Marshall proposed that the USA fund European recovery — Europe's condition in 1947 was desperate, and hunger and hopelessness were the conditions in which communism grew. Congress approved the European Recovery Program in April 1948 (the Czechoslovak coup made the case urgent), and roughly $13 billion went to sixteen western European countries over four years. It was offered to everyone, including the USSR: Molotov attended the Paris conference in July 1947 and walked out, objecting that the conditions amounted to interference; the USSR then forbade its satellites to take part — Czechoslovakia, still a coalition, initially accepted and was summoned to Moscow and made to withdraw. Whether the offer to the Soviet bloc was genuine, or made in confident expectation of refusal, is disputed. Motives (not exclusive): humanitarian and economic; commercial (dollars given to Europe would be spent on American goods); and political (communist parties were strong in France and Italy). Stalin's name for it: “dollar imperialism”.

1.7 Sealing the bloc: Cominform, Comecon and Yugoslavia

Cominform (September 1947) brought together the communist parties of the USSR, eastern Europe, France and Italy. Its stated purpose was to share information; its actual function was to coordinate and discipline — ensuring every party followed the Moscow line. Its founding meeting proclaimed the “two camps” doctrine: an imperialist camp led by the USA against a democratic camp led by the USSR, with no middle ground — a direct answer to the Truman Doctrine, and the end of any “national roads to socialism”. Comecon (January 1949) was presented as the socialist Marshall Plan — but the comparison is unflattering: Marshall Aid transferred American resources to Europe; Comecon largely directed satellite economies towards Soviet needs, at prices set to Soviet advantage. The USSR, itself devastated, was in no position to give away $13 billion — Comecon coordinated scarcity rather than distributing wealth. Yugoslavia broke away: Tito refused to subordinate Yugoslav policy to Moscow's and was expelled from Cominform in June 1948. Stalin expected the Yugoslav party to remove him; it did not. Yugoslavia survived, took Western aid, and pursued an independent course — and Tito's survival demonstrated that Soviet control depended on the presence of the Red Army, not the appeal of the Soviet model. It also produced purges against “Titoism” across the bloc, tightening control everywhere else — and showed that communism was not the monolith the two-camps doctrine claimed (a point that returns with China, see 3.5).

1.8 The Berlin Blockade and Airlift

The cause: the Deutschmark (see 1.3). From the Soviet point of view the new currency created a separate West German state in breach of four-power agreement — so Stalin squeezed the one place where the West was vulnerable. From 24 June 1948 the Soviet authorities cut all road, rail and canal links to West Berlin and stopped electricity from the Soviet sector, leaving roughly 2.5 million West Berliners with a few weeks' stocks. Stalin's calculation: the West must either abandon Berlin (destroying its credibility across Europe) or force its way through (putting itself in the wrong). Why the West did not fight: an armed convoy meant a shooting war against overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority; abandoning Berlin meant Western guarantees were worthless. The airlift was the third option — neither surrender nor a shot fired — exploiting the one access route the Soviets had not blocked: the air corridors, agreed in writing in 1945. From 26 June 1948 American and British aircraft flew coal, food, medicine and machinery into Tempelhof, Gatow and later Tegel: roughly 275,000 flights delivering on the order of 2.3 million tonnes (figures vary between accounts — give as approximations), with aircraft landing every few minutes at the peak. About 100 people died, mostly in accidents; pilots dropping sweets by handkerchief parachute became a propaganda asset of very considerable value. Stalin lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949, having achieved nothing. Why it failed is genuinely disputed — three explanations compete: airlift capacity (the West proved a city could be supplied by air, which almost nobody had thought possible); Western resolve (B-29 bombers — publicly associated with atomic weapons, though those deployed were not equipped for them — were stationed in Britain as a signal); and Stalin's caution (he never authorised interference with the aircraft, suggesting he was probing rather than committed).

Chapter 2 — The development of the Cold War, 1949–1961

By 1949 Europe was divided and both superpowers had nuclear weapons, and the confrontation acquired three new characteristics. It became global, as communism triumphed in China and fighting broke out in Asia. It became militarised, through rival alliances and an arms race neither side could afford to lose. And it became unstable in a new way, because Stalin's death produced a Soviet leader who talked of peaceful coexistence while crushing a rebellion and threatening war over Berlin. This chapter explains how the Cold War changed — and, through Hungary, what did not change at all.

2.1 China turns communist

China's civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists (substantially American-backed, but corrupt, inflation-ridden and losing peasant support) and the Communists under Mao Zedong ended with Mao proclaiming the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. Chiang withdrew to Taiwan — where the USA continued to recognise his government as China's legitimate one, including in the UN Security Council, for more than two decades. In February 1950 China and the USSR signed a Treaty of Friendship — to Western observers, a single communist bloc from the Elbe to the Pacific containing around a third of humanity. The American reaction was disproportionate and consequential: the “loss of China” was experienced as a defeat, fed the anti-communist scare in domestic politics, and changed strategy — NSC-68 (April 1950) argued that the USSR sought world domination and that containment required military means and enormously increased defence spending. A caution worth carrying: the assumption that Beijing took orders from Moscow was mistaken — Mao had won without Soviet military help (Stalin had counselled caution), and the two states quarrelled seriously within a decade (see 3.5). Treating communism as monolithic was one of the most consequential Western misjudgements of the period.

2.2 Korea and the superpowers

Korea, a Japanese colony since 1910, was divided at the 38th parallel in 1945 as an administrative convenience between Soviet and American occupation zones — and the line became a frontier: by 1948, a communist north under Kim Il Sung and an authoritarian anti-communist south under Syngman Rhee, each claiming the whole country. On 25 June 1950 North Korean forces invaded the south. The USA took the matter to the UN Security Council, whose resolutions passed only because the USSR was boycotting the Council — in protest at the refusal to give China's seat to Beijing — and so could not veto. A serious Soviet error. A UN force under American command (roughly nine-tenths of the non-Korean troops American) was pushed into a corner, reversed the position at Inchon, advanced towards the Chinese border — at which point China intervened in force — and the war settled into stalemate near the original line. An armistice was signed on 27 July 1953; no peace treaty was ever concluded. What it meant for the superpowers (which is what this option asks): containment became military — NSC-68 was adopted and American defence spending rose several times over; NATO became a real military organisation — integrated command, permanent forces, and in 1955 West German rearmament and membership, which produced the Warsaw Pact (2.5); Sino-American hostility was fixed for two decades; and the USSR avoided direct involvement — mostly: Stalin supplied equipment, and Soviet pilots flew combat missions covertly, but Soviet ground forces stayed out.

2.3 Indochina and the superpowers

After 1945 France tried to restore colonial rule in Vietnam and was resisted by the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh — a nationalist and communist movement. The USA, initially unsympathetic to colonialism, came to fund the great majority of the French war's cost, because the enemy was communist. The French were decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu (May 1954); the Geneva Accords (July 1954) divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel pending nationwide elections in 1956 — elections that were never held, because the American-backed southern government refused to take part, on the reasonable expectation that Ho Chi Minh would win. The Domino Theory (Eisenhower, April 1954) shaped the next twenty years: if one country fell to communism, its neighbours would topple in sequence. American involvement grew — advisers under Eisenhower and Kennedy, large-scale combat forces under Johnson from 1965 — against the Vietcong, the communist-led guerrillas in the south. The USSR and China supplied North Vietnam without committing their own troops, exactly as in Korea. Why it matters here: it was the largest proxy war of the period; it demonstrated the limits of superpower power (the USA could not impose an outcome despite overwhelming superiority); and by the late 1960s its cost gave Washington a strong incentive to reach accommodation with Moscow and Beijing — one of the direct causes of détente (3.6).

2.4 The arms race

The hydrogen bomb was a step change, not an improvement: atomic weapons destroyed cities; thermonuclear weapons were hundreds of times more powerful. Delivery mattered as much as warheads: bombers could be intercepted; ICBMs could not realistically be stopped and cut warning time to minutes; submarine-launched missiles could not be found and destroyed first, so a retaliatory capability would always survive. The numbers were not equal, and this matters: through the 1950s and into the early 1960s the USA held a very substantial lead in deliverable strategic weapons — concealed at the time by an American political scare about a supposed “missile gap” in the Soviet favour, which the U-2 flights (2.8) and satellite reconnaissance disproved. (Warhead counts for this period vary between sources; give them as approximations.) The imbalance is central to understanding Soviet behaviour over Cuba (3.2). The doctrines: massive retaliation (Dulles, from 1954) — any significant communist aggression answered with full nuclear force: cheap, and incredible in both senses; brinkmanship — pushing a confrontation to the edge expecting the other side to step back; mutually assured destruction — once both sides had survivable retaliatory forces, neither could rationally attack, so the weapons' purpose became deterrence; and flexible response (Kennedy) — adding conventional and limited options, because a doctrine offering only surrender or annihilation gave a president no usable choices.

2.5 NATO and the Warsaw Pact

NATO (4 April 1949) was founded during the Berlin Airlift by twelve states; Article 5 made an armed attack on one an attack on all. Its purposes were summarised with unusual candour by its first Secretary-General: to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down — and each element was real: it deterred Soviet attack by committing the USA in advance; it anchored American power in Europe, reversing the withdrawal of 1919; and it contained Germany by embedding German forces inside a multinational structure. Korea transformed it: before 1950 a treaty with little machinery, afterwards an integrated command, permanent forces and an American Supreme Commander. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, West Germany in 1955. The Warsaw Pact (14 May 1955) — the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania — was signed days after West Germany joined NATO and was permitted to rearm: German soldiers in a Western alliance ten years after the war was, from Moscow, precisely what the whole post-war settlement had been designed to prevent. Its formal purpose was collective defence; its practical functions were to provide a legal framework for stationing Soviet forces in eastern Europe, and to place satellite armies under a unified command headed by a Soviet officer. (Albania stopped participating and formally left in 1968.)

2.6 The space race

On 4 October 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite; a month later Sputnik 2 carried the dog Laika. The USA, which had assumed comfortable superiority, was stunned — its first response failed publicly on the launch pad, Explorer 1 reached orbit only in January 1958, and NASA was created that year. The Soviet lead continued: on 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. The American answer: in May 1961 — weeks after Gagarin and the Bay of Pigs — Kennedy committed the USA to landing a man on the Moon within the decade, an objective chosen partly because it was far enough away for American industrial resources to overtake the Soviet head start. Apollo 11 landed on 20 July 1969. The military dimension: a rocket that can orbit a satellite can deliver a warhead to another continent — Sputnik was launched by a modified R-7, the first ICBM, so its success appeared to show the USSR could strike the USA directly. That produced the “missile gap” panic — mistaken, but it drove enormous spending and helped elect Kennedy. And space technology supplied reconnaissance satellites from 1960, which gave both sides reliable information about the other's forces — making arms control possible, because agreements could be verified.

2.7 The Thaw and the Hungarian Uprising, 1956

Stalin died on 5 March 1953 and Khrushchev emerged as the dominant figure. The changes were real: political prisoners released, censorship relaxed, the four-power occupation of Austria ended in 1955 in exchange for Austrian neutrality, a summit at Geneva in 1955 — and the doctrine of peaceful coexistence: war between the systems was not inevitable, and communism would prevail by out-performing capitalism. Then the Secret Speech (25 February 1956): to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev denounced Stalin — his purges, his cult, his errors. It was supposed to be secret and was circulating in the West within weeks; across eastern Europe its effect was electric, because it implied that the Stalinist leaders installed across the bloc might themselves be illegitimate. (Cominform was dissolved in April 1956.) Poland first: after the Poznań riots (June 1956), the Polish party appointed Gomułka — imprisoned under Stalin — without Soviet approval; Khrushchev flew to Warsaw, confronted him, and accepted the appointment in exchange for Poland's commitment to the Warsaw Pact. A compromise was possible where the essentials were not challenged — and that is exactly the point Hungary tested.

Hungary. Rákosi's regime — secret police, show trials, forced collectivisation, a falling standard of living, resentment at Soviet extraction — was undermined by the Secret Speech. On 23 October 1956 a student demonstration in Budapest grew into mass protest: the Stalin statue was pulled down, shots were fired at the radio building, and the rising spread. Soviet troops intervened, met armed resistance, and withdrew from Budapest on 30 October. Imre Nagy, a reform communist, became Prime Minister, and his programme escalated rapidly — the release of political prisoners, promised free elections, the end of one-party rule — and then, on 1 November, the announcement that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral. That announcement is the hinge of the whole episode: reform inside the bloc was arguable, as Poland had just shown; leaving the alliance was not, because it would open a hole in the Soviet defensive system and invite every other satellite to follow. On 4 November 1956 Soviet forces returned with well over a thousand tanks and crushed the rising in about a week: roughly 2,500–3,000 Hungarian dead and several hundred Soviet (estimates), around 200,000 refugees. Nagy was promised safe conduct, seized, and secretly tried and executed in June 1958; Kádár was installed for the next three decades. The Western response was nothing: intervention meant war with a nuclear superpower inside its acknowledged sphere — and Britain and France were simultaneously engaged in the Suez Crisis, which divided the Western allies and gave Moscow an unanswerable retort about invading other countries. (American broadcasts had encouraged Hungarians to expect help that never came.)

2.8 Berlin, the ultimatum and the U-2, 1958–1960

The refugee problem. West Berlin was an anomaly: a prosperous Western enclave inside East Germany, from which anyone could walk into the West by crossing a street. Between 1949 and 1961 something in the order of 2.7–3 million people left East Germany (estimates vary), most via Berlin — and the composition mattered more than the number: disproportionately young, educated and skilled. It was simultaneously an economic haemorrhage and a permanent, visible propaganda defeat. The ultimatum (27 November 1958): Khrushchev demanded Western withdrawal from West Berlin within six months, making it a demilitarised “free city” — otherwise the USSR would hand control of the access routes to East Germany, which the West did not recognise. The demand was serious; the deadline was not — it passed in May 1959 without action and was repeatedly renewed. (Whether he sought a German settlement, was answering East German pressure, or needed a success at home is debated — very probably all three.) The Paris Summit and the U-2: a four-power summit was arranged for May 1960 with real expectations. On 1 May 1960 a Soviet missile brought down an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft deep inside the USSR. The USA, assuming the pilot dead, announced that a weather research plane had strayed off course — and Khrushchev then revealed that Gary Powers was alive and in custody, with wreckage and photographic equipment. At Paris (16–17 May 1960) Khrushchev demanded an apology; Eisenhower halted the flights but refused to apologise; Khrushchev walked out and the summit collapsed on its first day. (Powers was sentenced to ten years and exchanged in 1962.) At Vienna (June 1961) Khrushchev renewed the Berlin ultimatum aggressively to a Kennedy freshly damaged by the Bay of Pigs — and appears to have concluded that the new president could be pushed, a judgement that helps explain both the Wall and Cuba.

Chapter 3 — Transformation of the Cold War, 1961–1972

Within thirteen months the superpowers divided a city with concrete and then came nearer to nuclear war than at any point before or since. What followed was not friendship but something more interesting: a deliberate attempt to make the rivalry survivable. This chapter covers the Wall, Cuba, the crushing of reform in Czechoslovakia, and détente — asking throughout whether those arrangements changed the Cold War or merely managed it.

3.1 The Berlin Wall

The refugee flow (2.8) accelerated sharply through 1961 — thousands leaving daily in early August as rumours spread that the border would close. Ulbricht pressed Moscow repeatedly for permission to seal the boundary, arguing correctly that his state could not survive the losses; Khrushchev's ultimatums had failed to remove the Western presence, and Vienna had produced no settlement. In the early hours of 13 August 1961 East German troops and police sealed the boundary between East and West Berlin with barbed wire and roadblocks; concrete followed within days. The barrier eventually ran around 155 km in total, roughly 43 km dividing the city itself, with watchtowers, a cleared strip and orders to shoot. The Western response was protest and acceptance, for three reasons: the barrier was built on East German territory, so removing it meant crossing the boundary and starting a war; Western rights in West Berlin — the garrisons and access from the west — were not infringed, and those were what the West had said it would defend; and the alternative was a shooting war over a wall. Kennedy's private assessment was blunt: a wall was a great deal better than a war. In October 1961 American and Soviet tanks faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie for several days before both withdrew. The propaganda dimension: Kennedy visited in June 1963 — the “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech — and the Wall became the Cold War's defining image: a state that had to imprison its own population. The human cost: at least 140 people are known to have died at the Wall (figures vary with the criteria used); families were separated overnight, in some cases for twenty-eight years.

3.2 Cuba before the crisis: Castro and the Bay of Pigs

Cuba lies about 90 miles from Florida and had been within the American economic orbit for half a century — American companies owned a very large share of its sugar, utilities, mines and telephones, and its ruler Batista was a corrupt dictator supported because he was reliably anti-communist. Castro took power on 1 January 1959 — not, at that point, a declared communist, but unambiguously determined to end American control of the Cuban economy. The break with Washington is a textbook case of action and reaction: Castro nationalised American-owned land and businesses; the USA cut Cuba's sugar quota; Cuba turned to the USSR, which agreed in February 1960 to buy Cuban sugar and supply oil; when American-owned refineries refused to process Soviet crude, Castro nationalised them; the USA imposed an embargo (October 1960) and broke diplomatic relations (January 1961). Whether Castro was a communist who concealed it, or a nationalist driven into Soviet arms by American hostility, is disputed — present it as such. The Bay of Pigs (17 April 1961): the CIA had trained around 1,400 Cuban exiles to land and trigger a rising. Kennedy, three months into his presidency, let the operation proceed but withheld the further American air support that had been assumed. It was a total failure: no rising, quick reaction by Castro's forces, and within three days the invaders were dead or captured (roughly 1,200 prisoners, later ransomed). Its consequences were all bad for the United States: Kennedy was humiliated at the outset of his presidency; Castro was strengthened enormously and declared the revolution socialist, seeking Soviet protection openly; continued American covert operations gave Havana and Moscow a well-founded expectation of another attempt; and Khrushchev drew a conclusion about Kennedy — reinforced at Vienna — that the young president could be pressed.

3.3 The Cuban Missile Crisis

Why the missiles were sent — four motives, not exclusive: to defend Cuba against the invasion the Bay of Pigs made plausible; to redress the strategic balance (medium-range missiles in Cuba could reach much of the USA, partly offsetting the American lead and the Jupiters in Turkey); as a bargaining counter, possibly over Berlin; and for prestige, against both the USA and a Chinese leadership that accused Khrushchev of being soft. Discovery: a U-2 flight photographed missile sites under construction on 14 October 1962; Kennedy was informed on the 16th. The sites were not yet operational — which gave him time, and an incentive to act before they were. The options: Kennedy's advisory group, ExComm, considered five — do nothing; approach Khrushchev diplomatically; a naval blockade; air strikes; invasion. The blockade was chosen because it was firm, reversible and left the next move to Khrushchev — announced as a “quarantine”, because a blockade is technically an act of war.

Castro's role: he was consulted neither about the deployment's handling nor its ending, and was furious at both — Cuba was the subject of the confrontation and had almost no say in it, which tells you something about how superpowers treated allies. How dangerous was it? More dangerous than either leader knew: Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and local commanders had a degree of discretion Washington did not suspect; the U-2 shootdown on 27 October was not authorised by Moscow; and a Soviet submarine under depth-charge pressure came close to launching a nuclear torpedo. The crisis was resolved partly by judgement and partly by luck.

3.4 Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring

The causes: Czechoslovakia under Novotný was economically stagnant — an advanced industrial country whose planned economy was underperforming — with resentment at Slovak subordination, at continued repression long after de-Stalinisation elsewhere, and at censorship. Dubček became First Secretary on 5 January 1968 — a lifelong communist and Soviet loyalist, which is precisely why the party chose him and Moscow initially accepted him. His Action Programme (April 1968) proposed “socialism with a human face”: censorship abolished (producing an immediate flowering of newspapers and debate); freedom of speech, assembly and travel; rehabilitation of the 1950s trial victims; economic decentralisation; Slovak equality; more democracy within the party. What Dubček did NOT propose is decisive: he explicitly maintained that Czechoslovakia would remain communist, would remain in the Warsaw Pact, and would stay allied to the USSR — he had learned the lesson of Hungary and had no intention of repeating Nagy's fatal step. Why Moscow acted anyway — three anxieties: contagion (if Czechoslovakia could abolish censorship and remain socialist, Poles, Hungarians and East Germans would ask why they could not); loss of control (a free press inside the bloc — the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto of June, urging faster change, alarmed Moscow considerably); and strategic position (Czechoslovakia bordered West Germany and was central to Pact planning). On the night of 20–21 August 1968 Warsaw Pact forces invaded — Soviet troops with Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian contingents, several hundred thousand committed over the following weeks; Romania refused to participate. Resistance was almost entirely non-violent and devastating as propaganda — street signs turned around, crowds arguing with tank crews, clandestine radio. Around a hundred Czechoslovaks were killed (estimates vary). Dubček was arrested, flown to Moscow, and compelled to sign; he was replaced in April 1969 by Husák, who reversed the reforms (“normalisation”). In January 1969 the student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague in protest. The Brezhnev Doctrine followed in the autumn of 1968: where socialism was threatened in any socialist country, it became the concern of all socialist countries — in practice, a Soviet claim to the right to intervene in any Warsaw Pact state, which remained doctrine until 1989.

3.5 Sources of continuing tension

Détente was not peace. Human rights: the USSR guaranteed extensive rights on paper and did not deliver them — dissent punished by imprisonment, internal exile, loss of employment or psychiatric confinement; banned material circulated as samizdat (the physicist Sakharov and the writer Solzhenitsyn the best-known dissidents); emigration restricted, including for Jewish citizens seeking to leave for Israel; censorship comprehensive. Human rights mattered to the rivalry for a specific reason: they were the one area where Western governments could criticise the USSR without hypocrisy, and they became a formal part of East–West negotiation in the 1970s. The Brezhnev Doctrine remained in force — the eastern European settlement was maintained by the same threat throughout the period of improving relations. Berlin and Germany remained unresolved in principle — the Wall stood, and no German peace treaty existed. Proxy conflicts continued — Vietnam was at its height through early détente, with Soviet and Chinese weapons killing American soldiers and American bombs falling on a Soviet ally. The Sino-Soviet split changed everything and is easily missed: relations between Moscow and Beijing deteriorated through the 1960s — over ideology, over Soviet refusal to share nuclear technology, over peaceful coexistence, over Chinese resentment at junior-partner treatment — and in March 1969 Soviet and Chinese forces fought on the Ussuri River, with deaths on both sides. The “monolith” was now two hostile nuclear powers sharing a very long frontier. And the arms race continued underneath the negotiations: both sides developed MIRVs — several independently targeted warheads on a single missile — so limiting missiles did nothing to limit warheads.

3.6 Détente

What détente means: a deliberate relaxation of tension between states that remain rivals — not friendship, not alliance, not the end of a conflict, but an agreement about how to conduct one. Why it happened — six reasons: cost (the arms race consumed enormous resources — proportionally far heavier for the smaller Soviet economy, and competing in America with Vietnam and domestic programmes); parity (by around 1970 the USSR had reached rough equality in strategic weapons — paradoxically making agreement easier, since two equal powers can freeze a balance); the lesson of Cuba (both governments had been genuinely frightened in 1962); the Sino-Soviet split (Moscow, facing a hostile China across an enormous frontier, wanted stability in Europe; Washington could now improve relations with both communist powers and use each to influence the other — the strategy behind Nixon's visit to China in February 1972, the first by an American president); Vietnam (the USA wanted a way out, and Soviet influence in Hanoi was worth cultivating); and Europe pushed — Brandt's Ostpolitik from 1969: treaties with the USSR and Poland accepting the post-war frontiers (1970), the Four Power Agreement on Berlin (September 1971) regularising Western access, and a Basic Treaty with East Germany (December 1972). Twenty-five years after the division, Germany's own government accepted it — removing the most dangerous unresolved question in Europe.

The Helsinki process — a wider European negotiation on security and cooperation, long sought by the USSR — opened preparatory talks in November 1972. Its Final Act (accepting existing frontiers in exchange for human-rights commitments) was signed in 1975, outside this option's period — know that the process opened in 1972 and that its outcome lies beyond your dates.

Pulling it together, 1945–1972

Change over time

Factor hierarchies for the main-reason essay

Question 4 names a “main reason” or “main cause”. These are ranked argument frames — choose your own ranking and defend it with a named criterion.

Outcome A — Why the wartime alliance broke down

Suggested criterion: enabling power — ideological hostility set the conditions in which every action was read as hostile; the German question supplied the occasion. And handle with care: whether Soviet policy in eastern Europe was defensive or expansionist is genuinely disputed — do not assert either as settled.

Outcome B — Why the Berlin Blockade ended in Soviet failure

• The airlift's scale and endurance — it did what Stalin had assumed impossible, through a winter (1.8).
• Western resolve and the political cost of escalation — stopping the airlift meant firing first, which Stalin would not do.
• American nuclear advantage at that date — the monopoly had not yet been broken (1.4).
• The blockade's own propaganda cost — it converted the occupiers of West Berlin into its protectors.
• Suggested criterion: counterfactual — ask what would have had to be different for the blockade to succeed, and note that the answer is mostly about what Stalin was unwilling to do rather than what the West achieved.

Outcome C — Who was responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis

Suggested criterion: sufficiency, applied honestly in both directions — without the deployment there is no crisis; without the invasion attempt there is probably no deployment. An answer that picks one side and ignores the other cannot reach the top band.

Outcome D — Why the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968

• Fear of contagion — if reform succeeded there, other satellites would demand the same (3.4).
• Loss of control over information — abolished censorship meant a free press inside the Warsaw Pact.
• Strategic position — Czechoslovakia bordered West Germany and was central to Pact planning (2.5).
• The precedent of 1956 — Hungary had established that force worked and carried no Western cost (2.7).
• Suggested criterion: counterfactual, sharpened by comparison — Dubček promised to stay in the Warsaw Pact and was invaded anyway, whereas Nagy proposed leaving and was invaded. Loyalty was not the operative test — which points the ranking towards contagion.

Outcome E — Why détente developed

• Cost — proportionally far heavier for the Soviet economy; competing with Vietnam and domestic programmes in the USA (2.4, 3.6).
• Strategic parity by around 1970 — made a negotiated freeze possible for the first time (3.3, 3.6).
• The lesson of Cuba — both governments wanted mechanisms against a recurrence (3.3).
• The Sino-Soviet split — gave Moscow a reason to want European stability and Washington a triangular advantage (3.5, 3.6).
• Vietnam — the USA wanted a way out and valued Soviet influence in Hanoi (2.3).
• European initiative — Ostpolitik settled the German question the superpowers had not (3.6).
• Suggested criterion: enabling power for parity, sufficiency for cost. Parity made agreement technically possible; cost made it attractive; Cuba made it urgent. Rank them and say why.

Outcome F — How far relations had improved by 1972

Suggested criterion: depth — the defensible formulation is that the conduct of the rivalry changed and its content did not. Both answers can reach the top band if the criterion is stated and held.

Source workbench

Questions 1 and 2 are worth 16 of this section's 40 marks. Two principles govern everything below: a limitation is not uselessness — a Soviet propaganda poster is weak evidence of what was happening and strong evidence of what Soviet citizens were being told; say what a source is useful for. And match the source to the enquiry — examiners reward candidates who identify what a source is good for, not generic strengths and weaknesses.

Quick self-test

Cover the answers and check yourself. Each answer names the section where the full evidence lives.