Following the end of World War II a deep diplomatic and political rift developed between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the USA plus western countries on the other. The rift became known as the Cold War. It lasted about fifty years. Political drama and defections, diplomatic intrigue, ambassadorial trickery, international spying and military tensions riddled the period, providing an abundance of material for writers of fiction or history. A writer who concentrates on this period is known as a Cold War author.
The Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany as an ally of the British-French-USA military axis during World War 2, In spite of that alliance, the relationship between the Soviet and western countries was very fragile and brittle. This is perhaps not surprising given the huge difference in the political ideology that divided the two sides at that time. After all, communism and capitalism are far from easy bedfellows.
During the war, Soviet Russia maintained some dialogue with western allies. However, once the war ended, it withdrew. It severely limited its diplomatic dialogue and established a deep and wide ideological gulf with the western countries.
Less than a year after the war ended, Sir Winston Churchill bemoaned Soviet detente in a speech he delivered at Westminster College in Missouri, in March 1946. Churchill described how isolationist Soviet foreign policy had brought down an Iron Curtain across Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, dividing western nations from those in the east.
Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia plus Romania were all under a high degree of Soviet influence if not control. They were puppets of the Soviet Union. Their communist parties were funded significantly by the Soviet Union.
Similarly, continual Soviet rebuffs towards establishing lasting friendship with western powers and its insistence instead on a policy of detente created deep doubts and uncertainties for many countries in Europe and around the world. Nobody knows, Churchill said, if Soviet Russia and its global communist organization has expansionist ambitions and, if so, what the limits of those ambitions were, if any.
Churchill titled his Westminster College talk the Sinews of Peace. However, commentators quickly dropped that banner in favor of the Iron Curtain speech. Many analysts now consider that speech to be one of the first indications signaling the start of the intense detente between Soviet Russia and the West that was the Cold War.
Limited information about conditions in the Soviet Union was available to western analysts. As a result, the Central Intelligence Agency and many other analysts in the West seriously overestimated the economic wealth and military power of Soviet Russia. That serious miscalculation persisted until the 1990s when Soviet President Gorbachev introduced a set of progressive policies known collectively as Perestroika. Those policies fundamentally changed the country. They opened up the economy, dismantled many of the old communist bureaucracies and constraints and introduced market mechanisms to determine prices and guide resource allocation by decision makers. In short, Perestroika marked the beginning of the end of the intense detente that provided so much literary fodder for a Cold War author.
The Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany as an ally of the British-French-USA military axis during World War 2, In spite of that alliance, the relationship between the Soviet and western countries was very fragile and brittle. This is perhaps not surprising given the huge difference in the political ideology that divided the two sides at that time. After all, communism and capitalism are far from easy bedfellows.
During the war, Soviet Russia maintained some dialogue with western allies. However, once the war ended, it withdrew. It severely limited its diplomatic dialogue and established a deep and wide ideological gulf with the western countries.
Less than a year after the war ended, Sir Winston Churchill bemoaned Soviet detente in a speech he delivered at Westminster College in Missouri, in March 1946. Churchill described how isolationist Soviet foreign policy had brought down an Iron Curtain across Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, dividing western nations from those in the east.
Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia plus Romania were all under a high degree of Soviet influence if not control. They were puppets of the Soviet Union. Their communist parties were funded significantly by the Soviet Union.
Similarly, continual Soviet rebuffs towards establishing lasting friendship with western powers and its insistence instead on a policy of detente created deep doubts and uncertainties for many countries in Europe and around the world. Nobody knows, Churchill said, if Soviet Russia and its global communist organization has expansionist ambitions and, if so, what the limits of those ambitions were, if any.
Churchill titled his Westminster College talk the Sinews of Peace. However, commentators quickly dropped that banner in favor of the Iron Curtain speech. Many analysts now consider that speech to be one of the first indications signaling the start of the intense detente between Soviet Russia and the West that was the Cold War.
Limited information about conditions in the Soviet Union was available to western analysts. As a result, the Central Intelligence Agency and many other analysts in the West seriously overestimated the economic wealth and military power of Soviet Russia. That serious miscalculation persisted until the 1990s when Soviet President Gorbachev introduced a set of progressive policies known collectively as Perestroika. Those policies fundamentally changed the country. They opened up the economy, dismantled many of the old communist bureaucracies and constraints and introduced market mechanisms to determine prices and guide resource allocation by decision makers. In short, Perestroika marked the beginning of the end of the intense detente that provided so much literary fodder for a Cold War author.
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