Hot answers tagged cold-war
11
In Greece in 1946-1949 there was a bloody civil war between the West-supported right-wing monarchist dictatorship and the Communist rebels of Democratic Army of Greece (DSE). The government won the war and harsh repressions followed. The Communist party was outlawed and Greece entered NATO.
It should be noted that due to Soviet-Western war-time agreements ...
11
India never joined the Soviet pole or the Soviet bloc though India and the Soviet Union (USSR) enjoyed a strong strategic, military, economic and diplomatic relationship.
After independence both India and Pakistan were backward and needed support from stronger nations. Pakistan joined the Western bloc by signing SEATO and CENTO. India developed closed ties ...
10
Sometimes it deliberately wasn't kept secret from the enemy. This is from William Taubman's Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, about the Cuban missile crisis in 1962:
At 10:00 A.M., Washington time, when the quarantine went into full
effect, the U.S. strategic Command moved from Defense Condition 3 to
DEFCON 2, one level below that of general war. For ...
9
Ballistic missile delivery depends very much on knowing exactly where you are launching from. Early SLBM launch platforms had typical positional uncertainties of 100's of metres. As the missile and any MIRV warheads were just unguided projectiles launch positional errors magnified and the resultant destination error could be very wide.
Land based missiles ...
8
The Panama Canal was closed to Soviet warships for the duration of the Cold War. On December 6, 2008, the destroyer *Admiral Chabanenko" became the first Russian or Soviet military vessel to transit the Canal since 1944.
Soviet-flagged civilian vessels seem to have been permitted, at least for a while. A Canberra Times article from 22 April 1948 reports ...
7
There were none. Likewise, the U.S. never scored any military victories over the Soviet Union.
The Cold War was war by proxy. One superpower was a combatant in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam, but the other did not send troops to the other side— partly out of fear of escalation into global conflict. Rather, they provided support to their allied local ...
7
The Review Article, Antony Kalashnikov (2012) "Differing Interpretations: Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union" Constellations:
"there is a correlation between mediums of writing and the "factor of collapse" they tend to espouse."
"that the historiography is best classified by "factors for collapse", and that these are: economic, nationalities, ...
7
First, I don't believe the text of Kennedy's original letter has ever been released. The original news story by Tim Sebastian (former Moscow correspondent for the BBC), published in The Sunday Times on 2 February 1992, covers a memo written in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the text of which is nowadays freely circulated, and available among other places in the ...
6
Part of the story is probably the Percentages agreement between Churchill and Stalin, from the Moscow Conference in 1944.
According to Wikipedia,
Churchill's account of the incident is the following: Churchill suggested that the Soviet Union should have 90 percent influence in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria; the United Kingdom should have 90 ...
6
The Indochine war began after negotiations were suspended between the Viet-Minh and the French Republic in 1946 (the date is often the insurecction on the 19th december, but in fact, the French bombed Haiphong on the 23th november, some even trace it to the leave of General Leclerc, the military administrator, in 1946).
The US involvement only began in 1954 ...
5
The obvious interpretation is your point that the position of Vienna was similar to that of Berlin: both were in the eastern part of the country, surrounded by the Soviet occupation zone, even if the position within the city itself was different.
So if you drew a line across Europe showing the areas controlled by the Soviet Red Army or by local ...
5
The IMF wasn't complicit in it at all, it merely lent Ceaușescu's government money to invest in industrialisation - the investment of which which was mismanaged. Did Ceaușescu have to continue austerity measures despite the loans having been repaid to the IMF? IF so how is the IMF complicit? For demanding those loans be repaid?
Look to Ceaușescu's ...
5
The cold war started even before the end of WW2, in fact the distrust between the USSR and the western powers predates WW2 and can be traced back to the Russian civil war where the western powers favoured the whites rather than the eventually victorious reds.
They were allies of necessity, not love, and even in the 1920s and '30s there was an active ...
5
It is clear that Stalin supported the creation of Israel. From the Wiki:
For Soviet foreign policy decision-makers, pragmatism took precedence over ideology. Without changing its official anti-Zionist stance, from late 1944, until 1948 and even later, Joseph Stalin adopted a pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be ...
5
Finland was kind of a special case. They weren't a Warsaw Pact country, but geography put them in a position where if their Russian neighbor wanted to invade, no power on earth would really be capable of stopping them.
Due to this reality, the country adopted a policy of not doing anything whatsoever that might prod the USSR in that direction. They signed a ...
5
The India-Bangladesh border is particularly bloody. A report by Human Rights Watch documents nearly 1,000 killings by the India's Border Security Force (BSF) over the last decade alone. Undoubtedly, there would be many undocumented cases that would make the count higher. Considering that this border has been in existence since 1947, it would not be ...
5
I don't think it is the sheer number of deaths that is the issue, but how they happened. That's just the way we think as humans.
For instance, far far more people die in car accidents than airplane accidents. Even accounting for deaths per-capita (or per-trip), car accidents are a far bigger problem. However, we put way more effort into preventing airline ...
4
The outcome of the Cold War would likely not have been different if the "Space Race" did not occur. To answer your question, the space race played a small role in the outcome of the Cold War.
The result of the Cold War was largely due to the inability of the USSR economy to ever takeoff. The failure of the Five Year Plans, the constant need to try and ...
4
See the description of the hashing applied to Finland "countries in the Soviet political economic and strategic block".
While nominally independent, Finland was economically subservient to the USSR because of their losing out in the wars between the countries which happened in parallel to WW2 (the Soviet invasion of Finland led to Finland aligning with ...
4
India didn't "officially" join the Soviet bloc in the sense of being a signatory to the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe.
India DID unofficially "align" with the Soviet Union in Asia.
This was to create a counterweight to the Chinese-Pakistani "understanding" that originated in 1962 over the Kashmir (China invaded India on Pakistan's behalf). The need for ...
3
For the USA, I guess the information is reasonably googlable. But as for the USSR, I wish to point out that the answer is: 0, both substantively and formally.
(1) Substantively: Clearly, no one who was really opposed to the CPSU was allowed to come within a shout of any political office.
(2) Formally: The "independent" candidates were actually running as ...
3
While the Vietnamese Communist Party had been involved in militant anti-French agitation from the early 1930s, and, while large number of Vientamese workers (including agricultural workers) and peasants had hungered for freedom from the French government—including its fish sauce tax—it was the elimination of the old party leadership by the Japanese in ...
3
The early Cold War period was the golden age of American capitalism because it co-incided with the rise of the so-called World War II generation, the cohort of then young men (and a few women) born between 1915-1925, that fought and won World War II.
A grateful American public passed the so-called GI Bill that paid these ex-soldiers' college tuitions. In ...
3
Forbes is owned by multi-milionarie Republican (demi-Libertarian) Steve Forbes. It is not a friend of Democrats in general, and Liberal Democratic icons like Ted Kennedy in particular. Still, it was restrained and friendly compared to some other right-wing sources.
The letter the article refers to did appear to happen. The hostile analysis you quoted ...
2
The first thing that came to my mind: Russia still holds a naval base located in Syria, which is of a special strategic value, as is Russia's the only one in the Mediterranean region. Well, how did Russians acquire it?
The desire for warm water ports, suggested by the commenters, dates back to Ivan the Terrible and Livonian War.
It was satisfied after ...
2
The Soviets only had a small presence in Yugoslavia, during the capture of Belgrade where they only had an assisting role - Tito's Partisans proved more than capable of defeating the Nazis on their own. The troops in Yugoslavia, the 2nd and 3rd Ukranian Front, were needed elsewhere, and so were redeployed to Hungary once it was clear the Yugoslavians had ...
2
First of all, I would challenge your statement that wars are bad for the economy. On the contrary, I believe history would inidcate that wars are actually very good for the economy. During periods of war there is higher employment, more manufacturing and exporting (especially of war materials), and usually more innovation.
After World War II, a lot of jobs ...
2
There were a couple reasons. The first was that Tito basically represented "a government of their [Soviet] choice." The second was that Tito showed that he could "take care of himself."
Tito had started with the Russian Communist Party as early as 1917. When "Russia" became the Soviet Union, he was a member of the Soviet Communist party and secret police, ...
2
The Wikipedia article says:
Although some PKI branches organised resistance and reprisal killings, most went passively to their deaths
Citing this reference I can not access:
McDonald (1980), p. 53; Friend (2003), p. 115.
McDonald, Hamish (1980). Suharto's Indonesia. Melbourne: Fontana Books. ISBN 0-00-635721-0.
Friend, T. (2003). ...
1
How much influence did the Soviet Union have over the other Warsaw Pact countries?
From complete to none, this was contested or accepted in varying periods by the parties and other social groups within the Warsaw Pact countries.
Did Moscow directly control them, and direct what they did?
No, and yes. Late in WWII there was a request from a ...
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