-
Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in Russia in 1917 which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. -
Soviet Bomb Test
This was a classified research and development test to develop nuclear weapons by the Soviets. Their first successful test was conducted on August 29, 1949. -
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas. On the east side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union, while on the west side were the countries that were allied to the United States or nominally neutral. It lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1992. -
Potsdam Conference
Stalin, Churchill, and Truman gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier. The goals of the conference also included the establishment of postwar order, peace treaty issues, and countering the effects of the war. -
Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The United States dropped the bombs after obtaining the consent of the United Kingdom, as required by the Quebec Agreement. The two bombings killed 129,000–226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. They remain the only use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. -
Hollywood 10
10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress, were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. The 10 were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $12 billion in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
Berlin Blockade and Airlift
During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Soviets offered to drop the blockade if the Western Allies withdrew the newly introduced Deutsche mark from West Berlin. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on April 4, 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defense whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. -
Korean War
As a product of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, Korea had been split into two sovereign states. Both governments claimed to be the sole legitimate government of all of Korea, and neither accepted the border as permanent. The conflict escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces, supported by the Soviet Union and China, moved into the south on June 25, 1950 -
Eisenhower’s Massive Retaliation Policy
This policy sought to counter the growing Soviet threat. It viewed nuclear weapons as a means of deterring war and as a first recourse should deterrence fail. -
Army-McCarthy hearings
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 Army accused Chief Committee Counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the Army to give preferential treatment to G. David Schine. McCarthy counter-charged that this accusation was made in bad faith and in retaliation for his recent aggressive investigations of suspected Communists and security risks in the Army. -
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. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact, formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was established as a balance of power or counterweight to NATO; there was no direct confrontation between them. Instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and in proxy wars. -
Hungarian Revolution
It was a nationwide revolt against the Marxist-Leninist government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from October 23 until November 10, 1956. Though leaderless when it first began, 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. -
Khruschev Takes over
Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, serving as premier from 1958 to 1964. Though he largely pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, he instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis by placing nuclear weapons 90 miles from Florida. -
U2 Incident
A United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory. The single-seat aircraft, flown by pilot Francis Gary Powers, was hit by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missile and crashed near Sverdlovsk (today's Yekaterinburg). Powers parachuted safely and was captured. -
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.Constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on August 13, 1961, the Wall cut off West Berlin from virtually all of surrounding East Germany and East Berlin until government officials opened it in November 1989.Its demolition officially began on June 13, 1990 and finished in 1992. -
Bay of Pigs invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on April 17, 1961. A counter-revolutionary military group trained and funded by the CIA, Brigade 2506 fronted the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF) and intended to overthrow the increasingly communist government of Fidel Castro. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
A confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war. -
Detente under Nixon
This was the distinct lessening of the war and was a core element of the foreign policy between the Soviet Union and the United States. This lead to the making of multiple treaties in the years following. -
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. Under the Reagan Doctrine, the United States provided overt and covert aid to anti-communist guerrillas and resistance movements in an effort to "roll back" Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. -
Berlin Wall Speech
A speech made by U.S. 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. Reagan said if they wanted trust and peace they had to show it. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall began the evening of November 9, 1989 and continued over the following days and weeks, with people nicknamed Mauerspechte (wall woodpeckers) using various tools to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts in the process, and creating several unofficial border crossings.
