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Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution took place in 1917 when the peasants and working class people of Russia revolted against the Tsar Nicholas II's government. They were led by Vladimir Lenin and a group of revolutionaries called the Bolsheviks. The new communist government created the country of the Soviet Union. -
Iron Curtain
The name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolizes the efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West and non-Soviet-controlled areas. Separate international economic and military alliances were developed on each side of the Iron Curtain. -
Postdam Conference
The Big Three—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Harry Truman—met in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to negotiate terms for the end of World War II. It was the last of the Big Three meetings during World War II. The leaders arrived at various agreements on the German economy, punishment for war criminals, land boundaries and reparations. -
Atomic bomb - Hiroshima/Nagasaki description
The US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan, it was the first time nuclear weapons had ever been used in war. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The explosion over Hiroshima wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more later died of radiation exposure. -
Hollywood 10
10 members of the Hollywood film industry publicly denounced the tactics employed by the House Un-American Activities Committee during its probe of alleged communist influence in the American motion picture business. These prominent screenwriters and directors received jail sentences and were banned from working for the major Hollywood studios. Their defiant stands also placed them in a national debate over the controversial anti-communist crackdown that swept through the United States. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman to provide economic and military aid to any country threatened by communism. It enabled the USA to get involved with European affairs. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was an American initiative to aid Western Europe. The United States gave over $13 billion in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
Berlin Blockade and Airlift
International crisis arose from an attempt by the Soviet Union to force the Western Allied powers to abandon their post-World War II jurisdictions in West Berlin. The Allies decided to unite their different occupation zones of Germany which the Soviets thought of as a violation of agreements with the Allies, so the Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany began a blockade of all rail, road, and water communications between Berlin and the West. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European countries. -
Soviet Bomb Test
At a remote test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name “First Lightning.” This was significant to the Cold War -
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea, the war began when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. -
Khruschev Takes over
Khrushchev had a complicated relationship with the West. A fervent believer in communism, he nonetheless preferred peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. -
Army-McCarthy hearings
Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy earned notoriety via televised Congressional hearings. McCarthy had turned his investigations to army security, but the army in turn charged him with using improper influence to win preferential treatment for a former staff member, Pvt. G. David Schine. The Army-McCarthy hearings dominated national television. -
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. -
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 Warsaw Pact, so named because the treaty was signed in Warsaw, included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. The treaty called on the member states to come to the defense of any member attacked by an outside force. -
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 principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution was a nationwide revolt against the communist government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies. It was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR's forces drove Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of World War II. -
U2 Incident
The U-2 became the United States’ most effective tool for peering behind the Iron Curtain. The top-secret spy plane was capable of skating along the edge of the atmosphere at altitudes in excess of 70,000 feet—higher than any aircraft then in existence. From this lofty vantage point, it could slip into Soviet airspace and use sophisticated cameras to take photos of military installations on the ground. -
Bay of Pigs invasion
A group of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by the CIA launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs. The plan was to overthrow Fidel Castro and his revolution. -
Berlin Wall
The Communist government of the German Democratic Republic began to build a barbed wire and concrete 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. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address, President John Kennedy notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. -
Detente under Nixon
Détente (a French word meaning release from tension) is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when President Richard M. Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in Moscow, May 1972. -
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 designed to diminish Soviet influence in Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as part of the administration's overall strategy to end the Cold War. -
Reagan’s Berlin Wall Speech
"Tear down this wall!" is a line from a speech made by US President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, calling for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open up the barrier which had divided West and East Berlin since 1961. The speech received relatively little coverage from the media at the time and wasn't really known until 1989, after the wall came down. There is debate as to how much, if any, effect the speech had in the wall coming down. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall stood until the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.
