V o L u m e I : a d

nations as Australia, Austria, the People’s Republic of China, Egypt, France,

Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Poland, South

Africa, Turkey, and the United States.

I am especially pleased to work again with Dr. Roberts on the docu-

ments volume. We have been associated with a number of encyclopedia

projects, and there is simply no more professional, reliable associate than Dr.

Roberts. Her specialty is the Cold War, and she has an amazing grasp of its

documents.

I am, as always, indebted to my wife Beverly for her patience and her

unfailing support.

S

PENCER

C. T

UCKER

xxviii

Preface

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General 

Maps

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xxxviii

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General 

Essays

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It seems paradoxical when we stop to consider how rapidly the period we call

the Cold War, the forty-five years during which the United States and the

Soviet Union faced each other in a potentially deadly standoff, has nearly

faded from our memories. Although the two nations were officially at peace

during that time, their very survival was in peril of nuclear destruction. That

fact was well known in all circles. “Don’t talk to me about restoring the dol-

lar after a nuclear exchange,” I once heard President Dwight “Ike” Eisen-

hower say in a cabinet meeting. “We’ll be grubbing for worms.” Yet today the

Cold War is hardly mentioned.

It is difficult to identify exactly when the demise of the Cold War occurred

because it came in steps. The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 sig-

naled that the Soviet Union was willing to relax its control over Eastern

Europe, but it was not until the USSR as an empire collapsed in 1991 that

the transformation from Cold War to uneasy peace was complete.

It is also difficult to pinpoint exactly when it began. Some place the date

as early as August 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, acts that the Soviets supposedly interpreted as a

threat to them. The adherents of that theory underrate the extent of the

American determination to end the long and bitter struggle they had waged

against their Japanese enemies. The possible effect on the Soviets was not

part of the decision to drop the bomb. A Russian friend whom I highly respect

has given a more plausible theory. The Soviets, he says, viewed the Cold War

as beginning with Sir Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton,

Missouri, in 1946. It was at that time, my friend says, that the Soviets began

to feel threatened by the West. Up to that time, he says, the tight control that

the USSR exercised over Eastern Europe was seen by the Soviets as an in-

evitable sequel to the end of the war in Europe.

Relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union had

always been shaky. Admittedly, the Russian Revolution that overthrew

Nicholas II in March 1917 was at first viewed favorably by Americans, who

bore no love for any absolute monarch. But the moderates who took power

were soon themselves toppled by the Bolsheviks in a second revolution. The

A Personal Perspective

3

A Personal Perspective

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Bolsheviks withdrew Russia from the war with Germany and threatened to

spread their communist doctrine to other countries. At that point, all the West

became alarmed. When the German emissaries met with the Allies at Com-

piègne in November 1918 to conclude the armistice that ended World War I,

they warned Marshal Ferdinand Foch, obviously as a ploy, of possible Bolshe-

vik revolutions in France and Britain if the terms were too harsh on Germany.

The Americans shared the distrust of Bolshevism so prevalent in France

and Britain, but to a lesser degree. The United States supplied troops to the

ill-fated Allied occupations of Vladivostok, Archangel, and Murmansk in the

later days of World War I, but we got out as soon as possible. Yet it was an

astonishing fifteen years after 1918 before the United States, under the newly

inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt, recognized the Soviet govern-

ment. The general Western mistrust of the Bolsheviks did much to engender

suspicion of continued Soviet hostility.

During the six years after extending diplomatic recognition the Ameri-

cans paid little attention to the Soviet Union, principally because of the expan-

sionist policies of Adolf Hitler. In late August 1939, however, Germany and

the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression treaty that gave Hitler free rein to

launch an attack on Poland. A week after that pact was signed, Hitler sent

German troops into Poland, and on 3 September 1939 France and Britain

declared war. On 16 September, acting under secret terms of the nonaggres-

sion pact, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. Hitler and Josef Stalin

then divided the country between them.

Eight months later, freed by the pact with the USSR from the danger

of a two-front war, German troops overran Norway and Denmark and then

France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, thus occupying most of Western

Europe. The Americans, who viewed this with dismay, blamed Hitler above

all but also blamed Stalin, as Hitler’s accomplice, almost as much.

World War II (1939–1945)

The German-Soviet alliance did not last. In mid-1941, Stalin was suddenly

thrust into the position of a hero in the United States. His newfound popu-

larity did not stem from any virtuous action on his part but rather on the fact

that in late June, Hitler’s massed armies crossed the border into Belarus, the

Ukraine, and Russia in an unprovoked attack. Stalin was caught much by

surprise, but the Soviet people sprang to the defense of Mother Russia and

put up stiff resistance, paying dearly in the process. Americans watched the

heroic Soviet performance of the Red Army and Soviet peasants with pro-

found admiration. Stalin appeared twice on the front of Time magazine as

“Man of the Year.”

Six months later, in December 1941, the United States found itself the

Soviet Union’s actual ally in the war against Hitler. Japanese carriers attacked

Pearl Harbor on 7 December, and Hitler declared war against the United

States a few days later. We were all in the same boat, to quote Roosevelt:

Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States fighting a common enemy.

It was and remained an uneasy alliance. The Soviets could never quite

accept the idea that the West was attempting to aid them in their struggle for

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A Personal Perspective

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