Britain, and Josef Stalin, leader of Soviet Union, met in Yalta, which is the place where the
conflict began, to determine how the war should be finished. The main purpose of Yalta was
the re-establishment of the nations conquered and destroyed by Germany, who had lost
World War II. Secondly, the Yalta conference agreed to divide Germany into zones controlled
by each of the three nations. Russia would take Berlin and control the Eastern half of
Germany. America, Britain and France got West Part of Germany. Russia got the biggest part
of Germany because of the immense size of Stalin’s army. Britain, France and the USA ran
their zones on similar lines so that Germany could recover. The USSR however took away
equipment (e.g. they dismantled factories and other buildings for their building material) as
reparations in kind. Stalin’s aim was for the people to accept communis. He did this through
holing elections with only one party, the communist party, standy.Roosevelt was harshly
criticized when he conference became public information because he was said to have given
away Eastern Europe through blind trust in Stalin.
After 1948 the Red Army had complete control of Eastern Europe, apart
from Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania, but the two latter were in the hands of communist
partisans. The presence of the Red Army and local communist parties supported by Moscow
was to extend soviet influence into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Albania,
Bulgaria and the soviet zone of Germany, an area of 393.500 square miles with a population
of nearly 92milion. In May of 1945 in the telegram of Churchill to Truman he stated that an
iron curtain was drawn down, and they did not know what was happening on the other side.
Even though Stalin agreed in the treaty of Yalta to hold free elections in Poland he set up a
communist government, which was against Yalta. The western nations felt necessary that the
liberated states of Eastern Europe should be re-established with a democracy and a capitalist
economy. They believed that these systems were more civilized and less violent. This resulted
in a clash of the two ideologies.
The most visible part of the Cold war was the arms race. On July 24 1945 at
the Potsdam Conference Truman told Stalin that they had a new weapon of unusual
destructive force. Officially Stalin said that he was glad to hear it and hoped America would
make “good use of it against the Japanese”(Harry Truman’s version, 1955). Only a few days
after Truman’s announcement Hiroshima were destroyed by the atomic bomb on 8 September
1945. Two days later America dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. The war against Japan
was ended without the need of Russia and so they did not take part in the occupation of Japan.
The political demonstration of the superiority of the American military created fear in the
Russian government. Also the fact that America had more than one bomb scared the world.
To the world it seemed that America may have had hundred of atomic bombs because they
drooped two bombs in two days, but in fact the Americans had only two bombs. Because
Russia did not have an atomic bomb they employed scientist from Europe to make any other
chemical weapon. The two sides entered into an arms race to try to determine who would be
the most powerful. This arms race went on till Truman proposed cease of development of
atomic bombs in his “Baruch Plan for the control of atomic bomb”. It shows that the two
nations were always working against each other even though they were on the same side
officially. Also the fact that they didn’t trust each other was a factor in the cause of the Cold
War.
Besides these ideological problems, another problem such as the economic
imbalance in Russia after the second World War also contributed to the Cold War. The United
States knew that the Soviet economy was near collapse. The Soviet Union had lost at least 20
million souls during the war alone. Thousand of factories and miles of railroad tracks had
been destroyed. All the industrialization that Stalin had promised to his people had been lost.
Truman realized this and remained confident that the United States was in a stronger position.
Already in 1944, the USSR had raised the issue of a US loan, and in January of 1945,
proposed 6 billion dollars. When talks eventually began, Truman and Byrnes (Secretary of
State) tied the question of a loan to other questions such as an "open door" for US trade in
Eastern Europe and free elections in Eastern Europe and demanded Soviet disclosure of
production figures, and control of what the loans were spent on. The USSR was ready for
some concessions, but the US made no real effort and by June 1946, the talks had ended. The
absence of a US loan made the USSR more interested in reparations. In the treaty of Potsdam
each country was permitted to extract reparations from its zone, but only the USSR did so.
In light of these facts, the Cold War was caused by irreconcilable ideologies
and differences between the leaders of the two ideologies, capitalism and communism. This
was mirrored in the treatment and division of Germany, which was discussed in Yalta.The
two countries, Russia and America, had so many ideological differences that they were bound
not to get along. America wanted equal rights, freedom etc but Russia wanted dictatorship
with no individual rights or freedom - both totally different. The battleground was created and
tensions ran high. For the next 46 years, the United States and Russia would fight a war of
nerves without any casualties. The Cold War had begin.
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