The cold war - the conferences and the start of the cCold War

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The Cold War

The Yalta Conference

  • Introduction: by February 1945, it was clear that Hitler was going to be defeated. It also seemed that it would take longer to defeat Japan. One of the key American aims at Yalta was to get a Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan. This puts Stalin in a strong bargaining position.  Yalta is in the Crimea and both Churchill and Roosevelt travel to Yalta for the conference, Stalin was the host. It was clear even at Yalta that Roosevelt’s health was weak. The second front had been opened by the British Americans and others in June 1944, the second front which Stalin had been calling for, for so long. Therefore, the most important question facing the personalities of Yalta was the future of Germany. The Yalta Conference lasts only for one week; February 4 - 11
  • Decisions taken at Yalta;
  1. Stalin agreed that once Germany surrendered after 90 days, the Soviet Union would declare war upon Japan. As a precondition, Stalin wanted Mongolian independence from China and a recognition of Soviet interests on the Manchurian railway and at Port Arthur
  2. These terms were agreed without China even being consulted. Roosevelt was also hoping that when it was formed, the United Nations could deal with this problem
  3. Clearly, the biggest problem facing the Big Three was the future of Germany;
  1. Germany would be divided into four zones and placed under military occupation; France, Britain, America and Russia
  2. As the German capital, Berlin was deep in the Soviet zone, there was also be four- power occupation of Berlin. At Yalta, provisional lines of advance were agreed between the Soviet Union and the Western powers
  1. Declaration on Liberated Europe; Peoples liberated from the Germans would have free elections to choose their own governments
  2. The setting up of a new world organization, the United Nations Organization, which replaced the League of Nations
  3. Eastern Europe was to be recognized as a Soviet Sphere of Influence, this was done to create a safety zone for Russia, which had lost 20 million Russians in World War II
  4. As the Allies in 1945 were marching into Germany from the west and the east, they were finding concentration camps; the Big Three agreed to hunt down and punish Nazi War Criminals responsible for the genocide
  • Disagreements behind the scenes;
  1. Churchill, even at this stage, was suspicious of Russian Communism
  2. On one hand, Britain had gone to war to defend the independence of Poland (to uphold her guarantee of Poland). On the other hand, Stalin wanted to move Polish borders westwards, taking some German territory (for security reasons). The difficulty was that Red Army troops controlled both Poland and Eastern Germany. In practice, Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to accept these new Polish borders as long as the USSR agreed not to intervene in Greece, where the British were fighting the Communists
  3. In October 1944, at their Moscow meeting, there was the famous occasion when Churchill and Stalin tried to drink each other under the table and they reached the famous “Percentage Agreements”. For most of Eastern Europe, the percentages favored Soviet influence, but the west (Britain) was given a majority percentage in Greece
  4. Roosevelt and Stalin seemed to get on well and the jokes seemed to be at the expense of Churchill

The Potsdam Conference

  • Introduction: by the time of the Potsdam Conference, which began July 7, 1945, the war in Europe had ended and Hitler had been defeated. British and American troops had met Soviet troops along agreed demarcation lines in April 1945. When the lines had been drawn up at Yalta, they seemed to favor the Western Allies, but in practice American and British troops had to withdraw from territory they had occupied in accordance with the agreement. After the war, many strategists, military experts and historians such as Chester Wilmot argued that the Western Allies should have put more effort into marching east and seizing Berlin. However, the counter- argument is that the British and American zones included the Ruhr (Germany’s industrial heartland), and that the Capital Berlin was more of symbolic value than strategic importance. It was decided to hold the conference at Potsdam because this had been Germany’s great military academy; they were making the point that Prussian militarism had been defeated, and that Prussia as a state was abolished. The war ended in a completely different way than that of World War I because Germany was defeated and under military occupation. In April 1945, President Roosevelt had died and was succeeded by his Vice President, Harry Truman. Truman was more anti- communist and much more suspicious of Soviet intentions
  • Two features in particular influenced the mood of the conference, even before it began:
  1. Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe had been liberated, mainly by Soviet troops. By July 1945, Soviet troops were in the Baltic States, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The Soviet troops remained in these countries. Stalin had established a Communist government in Poland and Britain and the USA had protested against this. The Polish government in London was not allowed to strongly influence events in Poland and it was the Lublin Polish Government, a Soviet puppet, which tended to produce the members of the Polish government. To Churchill and the British, Poland was of great importance (that was why they went into war), but it wasn’t that important to Truman and the Americans. It seemed that the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was in contravention of the Declaration on Liberated Europe, which was issued at Yalta
  2. The USA tested an atomic bomb in a desert in the USA on July 16, 1945. At the beginning of the conference, Truman informed Stalin about the existence of this atomic bomb
  • Half way through the conference, Churchill was defeated in a general election and he was replaced at the conference by the new British Prime Minister, the Labor Party Leader Clement Attlee

Yalta: Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt

Potsdam: Stalin, Churchill, Truman  Stalin, Attlee, Truman

  • Unlike at Yalta, the United States made little attempt to form a good relationship with Stalin. There was very little progress at the conference and two issues above all produced a deadlock:
  1. Germany.  Stalin wanted to cripple German power. There was a program of dismantling, where factories and industrial units were dismantled and taken to the Soviet Union. To the Americans, this was simply delaying the rebuilding of Germany and the reconstruction of a prosperous Europe. Stalin wanted high reparations from Germany; however, the Americans do not want to repeat the same mistakes made at the end of the WWI. Truman was now very suspicious of Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe. Stalin believed that the Soviet was entitled to dominate Eastern Europe because of her suffering the Second World War
  2. A program of the three D’s was established for Germany; Demilitarization, Democratization, Denazification. Making Russia democratic meant making it Communist; there would clearly be a disagreement over what democracy meant. There was agreement that German industry could be dismantled and again, there were going to be differences of interpretation of this. There was to be an allied controlled commission for Germany and Germany was to be put under military occupation. There was to be a series of meetings for the foreign ministers  Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM), where America, Britain,, the Soviet Union and France were to attend
  • Generally, Potsdam produced few decisions of importance
  • The question of Germany was clearly all important. Final decisions upon Germany would depend upon a final peace agreement. In the event, this peace treaty never came about; there was no peace treaty with Germany at the end of the Second World War. It was the onset of the Cold War which made the agreement of such a treaty impossible. In theory, the agreements at Yalta and Potsdam maintained that there must be eventually an all German government with which a treaty could be signed. Stalin repeatedly, and especially in 1948, reminded the allies of the commitment to an all German government. Stalin clearly believed that it would be possible to achieve a pro- Soviet or Communist all German government. This was the greatest fear of the Americans and the British. America would favor a pro- Western and Capitalist government. The distrust on both sides meant that in practice, the system of military occupation in four zones continued indefinitely. The allied powers were obviously highly suspicious of the German – Nazi past; Germany could not be trusted. Potsdam was a step further than Yalta in the beginning of the Cold War

Suspicions and Historical Animosities

  1. There is the view that Cold War was the normal state of affairs between the USSR and the West. America, Britain and France had sent troops to put down the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russians never forgot this and probably never forgave it either. In the 1920s, Britain and America did not fund Russian economic recovery and the appeasement policy of the 1930s was conducted separately from the USSR and perhaps, partly due to fear of Soviet Power
  2. Stalin claimed that the Western powers had been too slow in opening the Second Front and this had put great strain on Russia
  3. Firstly the allies did open a Second Front in Italy. Secondly, they opened the Second Front in France when there was a strong possibility of success. The allied response to this was to refer to the Nazi- Soviet pact and the fact that the Soviet Union had actually allied with Nazi Germany, divided up Poland between the Soviet and Nazi Germany and left Britain and France to fight Hitler alone
  4. The claims that the allies gave little or no material help to the Soviet Union. Firstly, the British sent many supplies through the Arctic Convoys. But secondly, the Americans provided the Soviet Union with massive supplies of military hardware, weapons, ammunition, food and equipment. Thirdly, by the end of the war, the Americans had believed that they deserved a large quid pro quo from the Russians
  5. The Russians claimed that the Americans opposed them over dismantling and other issues , but the American view point was that the economies of Europe needed to be built up so that war debts could be repaid
  6. The Potsdam Conference ended on August 2, 1945. At the conference, Truman informed Stalin of the possession of the atomic bomb. Four days after the conference, an atom bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, and August 9, Nagasaki was bombed. On this view, Stalin felt that he had not been fully informed on nuclear developments. It could be argued that the dropping of the atom bomb was a means of exhibiting American power to the Russians. Moreover, it could be viewed as an American plot to win the war against Japan without Russian help. Stalin declared war on Japan, and Russia received the territorial rewards promised at Yalta, without Soviet forces having to fight
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The Cold War and Ideology

  • Ideologies are beliefs of belief systems, more specifically political and social ideas; how a state and society are organized
  • Religion. America believed in the freedom of religion or conscience; America was mainly founded by Protestants, Catholics were traditionally very important in America, Jews, Jehovah’s witnesses, Mormons, TV Evangelists, Muslims, etc… “In God we trust”. The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was an atheist state which banned religion; Marxism dialectical material  avowedly materialist doctrine (there is no place for Religion here)

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