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Russian Revoution
The Russian Revolutions were two revolutions in February and October of 1917. Participants were russian society, bolsheviks, mensheviks, and SRs.The wars led to the rise of the Soviet Union and ended the tradition of czarist rule. -
Iron Cutrain
The Iron Curtain was the name for a boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas in order to separate the Soviet Union from the West. The Iron Curtain lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. -
The Postdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference was the last of the world war meetings (July 17-August 2, 1945). It was held at the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm, Cecilienhof, in Potsdam. On July 26, the leaders agreed to let Japan keep its emperor but kept it a secret and demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ from Japan. -
Atomic Bomb-Hiroshima/Nagasaki
The United States dropped atomic bombs on two japanese cities, Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). About 80,000 Japanese people were killed immediately at Hiroshima, and 40,000 at Nagasaki. This lead to Japan surrendering. -
Hollywood 10
The Hollywood Ten is a 1950 American short documentary film directed by John Berry. Each member of the Hollywood 10 publicly denounced McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklisting. -
Truman Doctrine
With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine's aim was to avoid the spread of communism by the Soviet Union. -
Berlin Blockade and Airlift
The Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany began a blockade of all rail, road, and water communications between Berlin and the West because they wanted to protest the allied powers uniting their different zones of Germany into a single economic unit. On June 26 the US and Britain began to supply the city with vital supplies by air. Berlin became a symbol of the Allies’ willingness to oppose further Soviet expansion in Europe. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to provide economic assistance to Western Europe, the United States gave them over $13 billion to help rebuild their economies after the end of World War II. The goals of the United States were to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, improve European prosperity, and prevent the spread of Communism. -
Soviet Bomb Test
The Soviet atomic bomb project, was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during World War II.On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first successful weapon test, based on the U.S. design at the Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. -
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization also called the North Atlantic Alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on April 4, 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party. -
Eisenhower’s Massive Retaliation Policy
Massive Retaliation is a military doctrine and nuclear strategy in which a state commits itself to retaliate in much greater force in the event of an attack. By relying on a large nuclear arsenal for deterrence, President Eisenhower believed that conventional forces could be reduced while still maintaining military prestige and power and the capability to defend the western bloc. -
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North and South Korea. The Korean War was the first military action of the Cold War, it began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. By July, American troops had entered the war to defend South Korea’s and fight against the forces of communism. The war ended in July 1953, about 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives and there is still a national divide today. -
Khrushchev Takes Over
By the time Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev had positioned himself as a possible successor. Six months later, he became head of the Communist Party and one of the most powerful people in the USSR. -
Army-McCarthy hearings
The Army–McCarthy hearings were a series of hearings held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations to investigate conflicting accusations between the United States Army and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. The word McCarthyism has become synonymous with the practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty with insufficient evidence. -
Warsaw Pact
The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states.The treaty called on the member states to come to the defense of any member attacked by an outside force and it set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. -
Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a nationwide revolt against the communist government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. The revolt began as a student demonstration, but when the delegation's release was demanded by the demonstrators outside, they were fired upon by the State Security Police and one student died and was wrapped in a flag and held above the crowd. The revolution spread and government collapsed. -
U-2 Incident
In May 1960 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics shot down an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet air space and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Confronted with the evidence of his nation’s espionage, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to admit to the Soviets that the U.S. CIA had been flying spy missions over the USSR for several years. The U-2 spy plane incident raised tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets during the Cold War. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
In April 1961, the CIA launched what its leaders believed would be the definitive strike: a full-scale invasion of Cuba by 1,400 American-trained Cubans who had fled their homes when Castro took over. The invaders were badly outnumbered by Castro’s troops, and they surrendered after less than 24 hours of fighting. -
Berlin Wall
On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of East Germany began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. It stood until November 9, 1989 -
Cuban Missile Crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. Disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. -
Detente under Nixon
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation. The lessening of tensions between the East and West, along with domestic reform in the Soviet Union, worked together to achieve the end of communism in Eastern Europe and eventually the Soviet Union altogether. -
The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its ally, the United States. More than 3 million people were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half were Vietnamese civilians.Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam in 1975. -
The Reagan Doctrine
The Reagan Doctrine was a strategy orchestrated and implemented by the United States under the Reagan Administration to overwhelm the global influence of the Soviet Union in an attempt to end the Cold War. The doctrine was the centerpiece of United States foreign policy from the early 1980's until the end of the Cold War in 1991. -
Reagan’s Berlin Wall Speech
US President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, gave a speech calling for the leader of the Soviet Union to open up the barrier which had divided West and East Berlin.There is debate as to how much, if any, effect the speech had in the wall coming down. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders.
