The Second World War ended in the year 1945 with the fall of Berlin to the Soviet Red Army, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American forces and Hitler’s death. This marked the end of the Nazi Party and National Socialism in Germany. During the period of this war, the USA and the Soviet Union fought together side-by-side, as unlikely allies, against the Axis powers. However, this alliance was a shaky one at best. Both countries were wary of the other’s power, armed capabilities and political, social and economic ideologies. The Americans distrusted the communist ideology and Joseph Stalin’s rule of tyranny. The Russians on the other hand, resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. With the end of the war, these feelings of distrust and resentment only heightened further, especially with the formation of the Eastern and the Western Blocs of power.
THE END OF WORLD WAR II
The end of the war also marked the end of the uneasy alliance between the Americans and Soviets. The Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), officially the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, commonly known as the Warsaw Pact (WP), was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CoMEcon), the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955 per the London and Paris Conferences of 1954, but it is also considered to have been motivated by Soviet desires to maintain control over military forces in Central and Eastern Europe. The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc, the Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia under the hegemony of the Soviet Union (USSR) that existed during the Cold War. The Western Bloc, also known as the Capitalist Bloc, was a coalition of countries that were allied with the United States, a member of NATO, and/or opposed the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.
The end of the war also marked the beginning of an aggressive expansionist strategy by the Russians in Eastern Europe. This fueled a fear among the Americans that the soviet Union was out for world domination. It also spread a profound paranoia about the spread of communism in the Western countries. On the other hand, Soviet powers were disdainful of Western liberalism and interventionist strategies to international conflict resolution, and associated Western capitalism and consumerism with greed and laziness, holding Western countries in contempt. As tensions between the two blocs rose heightened quickly, it was a mutual distrust and contempt that ultimately triggered the cold war, that would last for nearly half a century and claim countless lives. As a matter of fact, some historians claim that the cold war was inevitable.
THE COLD WAR AND THE DEATH OF COMMUNISM
In his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi.” As a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the duration of the cold war.
In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending. In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly race for superiority in the ownership and operation of a nuclear-capable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961. That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.
But the war was not just fought on the home turf of the Americans and the Russians. Smaller countries, and countries belonging to the so-called Third World, also became involved. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, post-colonial Third World. This was also evidenced by the futile Vietnam war that was fought for almost a decade, and which ultimately ended with an embarrassing defeat for the Americans.
The next chapter in this seemingly unending war came with efforts to end hostilities via peaceful mediation and diplomatic resolutions. Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”–”relaxation”–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war. Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan. Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world.
Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political unrest in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s relationship to the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and “perestroika,” or economic reform. Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned rapidly during these twilight years of Communist Russia. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a non-communist regime. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The nuclear explosion and fallout at Chernobyl in 1986 was the final nail in the coffin of the already dying Communist regime. This incident shattered whatever vestiges of faith people had left in Communism. By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.
President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev after signing the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.
AFTERMATH OF THE COLD WAR AND THE NEW MILLENIUM
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia drastically cut military spending, and restructuring the economy left millions unemployed. The capitalist reforms culminated in a recession in the early 1990s more severe than the Great Depression as experienced by the United States and Germany. In the 25 years following the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-socialist states are on a path to joining the rich and capitalist world while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take several decades to catch up to where they were before the collapse of communism.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the de facto death of communism in Eastern Europe, the political boundaries shifted and shrank, leaving the Russia smaller than before and leading to the emergence of several new non-communist nation states in this region.
The United States became the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The US Dollar became the standard for international currency. American economic, military and diplomatic policies now began to shape the policies of not just the USA, but dozens of countries worldwide. Today, the United States maintains a military presence in more than two-thirds of countries around the world.
IN CONCLUSION…
Communism, as an idea, was never meant to succeed. It is based on shared ownership and equality of everything. The state owned and sponsored everything and nobody was supposed to be richer than the other. The very principle goes against the basic human nature of having ambition and wanting to have a comfortable life. So instead of a utopic society that thrives on equality, it spawned a society built on hypocrisy and lies, one that was more concerned with the appearance of equality than equality itself. The top government officials enjoyed excessive power and money, while the common working class suffered under a negligent government. People lost faith in the idea of communism and their government. The American Dream, on the other hand, promises to reward hard work and talent, offering a life of riches and comfort to those with ambition. Everyone wants to be rewarded for their labor and live a life of ease. Which is why capitalism was always destined to triumph over communism, and will continue to triumph in the future as well.
