Two superpowers, a divided Europe, proxy wars, a nuclear standoff and a race to the Moon — until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
Stop 01 · March 1946
An Iron Curtain Descends
After 1945 the wartime allies split. At Potsdam that summer the victors divided Germany west of the Oder–Neisse line into four occupation zones, American, British, French and Soviet, and split Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, in the same way. Across Eastern Europe the Soviet Union installed communist governments. On 5 March 1946, speaking at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill warned that from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic an 'iron curtain' had descended across the continent. From 1948 the United States backed Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, which sent $13.3 billion to 17 countries; Moscow refused the aid and kept its satellites out of it.
Attlee, Truman and Stalin at PotsdamUnknown official photographer · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
After 1945 the wartime allies split. At Potsdam that summer the victors divided Germany west of the Oder–Neisse line into four occupation zones, American, British, French and Soviet, and split Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, in the same way. Across Eastern Europe the Soviet Union installed communist governments. On 5 March 1946, speaking at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill warned that from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic an 'iron curtain' had descended across the continent. From 1948 the United States backed Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, which sent $13.3 billion to 17 countries; Moscow refused the aid and kept its satellites out of it.
Berlin became the first test. When the Western powers brought a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, into their zones and West Berlin, Stalin had all rail, road and canal traffic into the city's western sectors stopped on 24 June 1948. The only access ever agreed in writing was by air, along three corridors from Hamburg, Bückeburg and Frankfurt, so the Americans and British flew supplies in. Their aircraft landed in Berlin more than 200,000 times, at the peak one every thirty seconds, and delivered about 2.3 million tons, nearly two-thirds of it coal. The Soviets lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949. The airlift cost 101 lives, mostly in accidents, and tied West Berlin firmly to the West.
1949 hardened the world into blocs. On 4 April twelve Western countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain and France, signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, founding NATO. On 29 August the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, ending the American monopoly; Washington answered with a crash programme to build the far more powerful hydrogen bomb. On 1 October Mao Zedong's Communists, having won the Chinese Civil War, proclaimed the People's Republic of China, and the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. On 25 June 1950 North Korea invaded the South. The Korean War (1950–1953) pulled in the United States and China and ended in a stalemate along roughly the old border.
On 23 October 1956 students in Budapest gathered at the parliament building to back sixteen demands for reform. That evening crowds tore down an eight-metre statue of Stalin, and the ÁVH secret police fired on protesters at the radio building. The protest turned into a national revolt. A new government under Imre Nagy disbanded the ÁVH, promised free elections and on 1 November declared that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. The West, divided by the Suez Crisis, offered no military help. On 4 November Soviet forces returned in strength. About 2,000 to 3,000 Hungarians and some 700 Soviet soldiers were killed, around 200,000 Hungarians fled, mostly to Austria, and Nagy was executed after a secret trial in 1958.
BattlesBudapest: the revolt begins, 23 October 1956
Europe's colonial empires dissolved in the same years. In April 1955 twenty-nine Asian and African states, most of them newly independent, met at Bandung in Indonesia to oppose colonialism. In 1960 alone, seventeen African countries became independent: fourteen from France, two from Britain, including populous Nigeria, and the Congo from Belgium. Both superpowers competed for influence in the new states. The Congo, independent on 30 June, slid into crisis within weeks; its prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed in September and later tortured and executed. Leaders such as India's Nehru and Egypt's Nasser, with Tito of Yugoslavia, Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia, founded the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961 to stay out of either bloc.
Before 1961 some 3.5 million East Germans, about a fifth of the population, had left for the West, many simply by walking into West Berlin. On orders signed by the East German leader Walter Ulbricht, police and soldiers sealed the border overnight, and by the morning of Sunday 13 August 1961 barbed wire and fences ran along the 156 km around the western sectors and the 43 km through the city. The wire grew into a concrete wall with a 'death strip'. More than 5,000 people escaped across it, but between 136 and over 200 were killed in and around Berlin. In June 1963 John F. Kennedy declared 'Ich bin ein Berliner' to a crowd of 450,000.
In July 1962 Khrushchev and Fidel Castro agreed to base Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, to deter another US invasion after the CIA's failed Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, and to answer US missiles in Italy and Turkey. On 14 October an American U-2 spy plane photographed a missile site at San Cristóbal, just 150 km from Florida. For thirteen days, from 16 to 28 October, the world came closer to nuclear war than ever before or since. Kennedy ordered a naval 'quarantine'; on 27 October a U-2 was shot down. Khrushchev then agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba — and the quiet removal of US missiles from Turkey.
The superpowers avoided fighting each other directly, but backed opposing sides in wars around the world, most devastatingly in Vietnam. Divided at the 17th parallel in 1954, it became a battleground between the communist North, supplied by the Soviet Union and China, and the American-backed South. The United States fought from 1965, with 536,000 troops there by 1969, until its withdrawal in 1973; the North took Saigon on 30 April 1975. Estimates of Vietnamese war dead run from about 800,000 to several million, and 58,220 Americans died. The rivalry also drove the Space Race, from Sputnik, launched from Kazakhstan on 4 October 1957, to the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 20 July 1969.
In late December 1979 Soviet special forces stormed the palace in Kabul and killed the Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin, while the 40th Army crossed the border from Termez to prop up a communist government against the rebel mujahideen. The invasion ended a brief thaw in US–Soviet relations. Carter imposed a grain embargo and led a 66-nation boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, while the United States, Pakistan, Britain, China and others armed the rebels. Soviet troops held the cities but never the countryside. When the last Soviet column crossed back into Uzbekistan on 15 February 1989, about 14,500 Soviet soldiers and between one and three million Afghans had died, and millions had fled abroad.
Poland's Solidarity, the Eastern Bloc's only independent trade union, had been born in strikes in 1980. In 1989 peaceful revolutions swept Eastern Europe. In June Solidarity won Poland's first partly free elections; Hungary began dismantling its fence on the Austrian border; in August over a quarter of the people of the Baltic states joined hands in a 675 km human chain. On 9 November the East German spokesman Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that new travel rules took effect at once; that night crowds breached the Berlin Wall. Only in Romania was the regime overthrown by force. Germany reunified on 3 October 1990, and on 26 December 1991 the Soviet Union formally dissolved into fifteen independent countries, ending the Cold War.