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Yalta Conference
In February 1945 the Yalta Conference was the second wartime meeting of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the conference, the three leaders agreed to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender and began plans for a post-war world -
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States, an American politician of the Democratic Party -
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese Communist revolutionary leader who was prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam -
VE Day
to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces. -
Potsdam Conference
The Big Three—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced on July 26 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee), 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. -
VJ Day
News of the surrender was announced to the world. This sparked spontaneous celebrations over the final ending of World War II. On September 2, 1945, a formal surrender ceremony was held in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri. At the time, President Truman declared September 2 -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave $13 billion (approximately $130 billion in current dollar value as of March 2016) in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War 2 -
Churchill’s iron Curtain Speech
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemns the Soviet Union’s policies in Europe and declares, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s speech is considered one of the opening volleys announcing the beginning of the Cold War -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty among the Soviet Union and seven other Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe in existence during the Cold War. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy created to counter Soviet geopolitical hegemony during the Cold War. It was first announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947 and further developed on July 12, 1948 when he pledged to contain Soviet threats to Greece and Turkey. -
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of France, Great Britain and the United States to travel to their sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. -
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949. At the end of the Second World War, U.S., British, and Soviet military forces divided and occupied Germany. Also divided into occupation zones, Berlin was located far inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. -
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong was a Chinese communist revolutionary and founding father of the People's Republic of China -
Korean War
The Korean War was started when North Korea invaded South Korea. The United Nations, with United States as the principal force, came to aid of South Korea. China, along with assistance from Soviet Union, came to aid of North Korea -
Start of Arms Race
Initially, only the United States possessed atomic weapons, but in 1949 the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and the arms race began. Both countries continued building more and bigger bombs. In 1952, the United States tested a new and more powerful weapon: the hydrogen bomb. -
Josef Stalin
The leader of the Soviet Union dies, he started the cold war -
Nikita Sergeyevich
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was a politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War, came to power after Stalin dies -
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and its allies against the U.S.-backed authoritarian government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. -
Dwight David Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was an American politician and general who served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961 -
Open skies
President Dwight D. Eisenhower presents his “Open Skies” plan at the 1955 Geneva summit meeting with representatives of France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The plan, though never accepted, laid the foundation for President Ronald Reagan’s later policy of “trust, but verify” in relation to arms agreements with the Soviet Union -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and known in Vietnam as Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam -
Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 (Hungarian: 1956-os forradalom or 1956-os felkelés) was a nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956 -
Start of Space Race
When the U.S and Soviet Union competed to get to the Moon -
Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro is a Cuban politician and revolutionary who governed the Republic of Cuba as Prime Minister from 1959 to 1976 and then as President from 1976 to 2008 -
U-2 incident
The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace -
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963 -
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. Constructed by the German Democratic Republic, starting on 13 August 1961, the Wall completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding countries. -
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982 -
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974 when he became the only U.S. president to resign the office -
SALT I
Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty and interim SALT agreement on May 26, 1972, in Moscow. For the first time during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union had agreed to limit the number of nuclear missiles in their arsenals. -
Gerald Ford
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. was an American politician who served as the 38th President of the United States from 1974 to 1977 -
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician and author who served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 -
Soviet-Afghan War
The Soviet–Afghan War lasted over nine years from December 1979 to February 1989. Insurgent groups fought against the Soviet Army and allied Afghan forces. -
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician and actor who was 40th President of the United States from 1981 to 1989 -
Star Wars
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars, was a program first initiated on March 23, 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. The intent of this program was to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system in order to prevent missile attacks from other countries, specifically the Soviet Union. -
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman. He was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991 when the party was dissolved -
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning "openness") policy reform -
Glasnost
Glasnost, ( Russian: “openness”) Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues. It was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and began the democratization of the Soviet Union -
George W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who was 41st President of the United States from 1989 to 1993 and 43rd Vice President of the United States from 1981 to 1989 -
Open Skies
The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a regime of unarmed aerial observation flights over the territories of its signatories. The Treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information through aerial imaging on military forces and activities of concern to them -
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. -
START
START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was a bilateral treaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms. The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994
