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Yalta Conference
At Yalta, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin made important decisions regarding the future progress of the war and the postwar world. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed not only to include France in the postwar governing of Germany, but also that Germany should assume some, but not all, responsibility for reparations following the war. -
Postdam Conference
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. The major issue at Potsdam was the question of how to handle Germany. Despite numerous disagreements, the Allied leaders did manage to conclude some agreements at Potsdam. -
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain formed the imaginary 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 symbolized efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West and non-Soviet-controlled areas. -
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. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent. -
Berlin Airlift
After World War 2, Germany was divided into four occupation zones. Berlin was located inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. Soviet forces blockaded rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas of Berlin. The United States and the United Kingdom responded by airlifting food and fuel to Berlin from Allied airbases in western Germany. -
Mao Zedung
Mao Zedong (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which he led as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976. -
NATO
Formed in 1949 with the signing of the Washington Treaty, NATO is a security alliance of 30 countries from North America and Europe. NATO's fundamental goal is to safeguard the Allies' freedom and security by political and military means. -
North Korean Invasion
North Korea invaded South Korea following clashes along the border and rebellions in South Korea. North Korea aimed to militarily conquer South Korea and therefore unify Korea under the communist North Korean regime. -
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Korean War
After five years of simmering tensions on the Korean peninsula, the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when the Northern Korean People's Army invaded South Korea in a coordinated general attack at several strategic points along the 38th parallel, the line dividing communist North Korea from the non-communist Republic -
Jacabo Arbenz
On June 27, 1954, democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company. Árbenz was replaced by decades of brutal U.S.-backed regimes that committed widespread torture and genocide. -
Brinkmanship
Brinkmanship, a foreign policy practice in which one or both parties force the interaction between them to the threshold of confrontation in order to gain an advantageous negotiation position over the other. The technique is characterized by aggressive risk-taking policy choices that court potential disaster. -
Ngo Dihn Diem
Vietnamese political leader who served as president, with dictatorial powers, of what was then South Vietnam, from 1955 until his assassination -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty established by the Soviet Union and seven other Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania (Albania withdrew in 1968) -
Space Race
The “space race” was a Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop aerospace capabilities, including artificial satellites, unmanned space probes, and human spaceflight. -
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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. -
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was a five-year economic plan executed by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, began in 1958 and was abandoned in 1961. The goal was to modernize the country's agricultural sector using communist economic ideologies. -
M.A.D.
Mutually Assured Destruction, or mutually assured deterrence (MAD), is a military theory that was developed to deter the use of nuclear weapons. The theory is based on the fact that nuclear weaponry is so devastating that no government wants to use them. -
Non-Aligned Movement
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is an international organization (group of countries) who do not want to be officially aligned with or against any major power bloc (group of countries). In 2019, the movement had 120 members and 27 observers. -
Fidel Castro
Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, he also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1961 until 2011. Under his administration, Cuba became a one-party communist state; industry and business were nationalized, and socialist reforms were implemented throughout society. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban missile crisis was a major confrontation in 1962 that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba. The crisis also marked the closest point that the world had ever come to a global nuclear war. -
Gulf of Tonkin Incident
In early August 1964, two U.S. destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam radioed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese forces. In response to these reported incidents, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested permission from the U.S. Congress to increase the U.S. military presence in Indochina. -
Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasted until his death in 1976. -
Vietnamization
Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops". -
First Man on Mood
Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, and Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon's surface six hours and 39 minutes later, on July 21 at 02:56 UTC. -
Iranian Revolution
Iranian Revolution, also called the Islamic Revolution, Persian Enqelāb-e Eslāmī, popular uprising in Iran in 1978–79 that resulted in the toppling of the monarchy on February 11, 1979, and led to the establishment of an Islamic republic. -
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Soviet-Afghan War
The Soviet Union intervened in support of the Afghan communist government in its conflict with anti-communist Muslim guerrillas during the Afghan War (1978–92) and remained in Afghanistan until mid-February 1989. -
Operation 333
Four decades ago, the Soviet Union launched a secret mission to assassinate the Afghan president and seize control of Kabul. The assault on December 27, 1979, was the bloody opening act to the Soviet-Afghan War that would set the country on a course for decades of conflict. -
Star Wars
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), byname Star Wars, proposed U.S. strategic defensive system against potential nuclear attacks—as originally conceived, from the Soviet Union. The SDI was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in a nationwide television address on March 23, 1983. -
Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991. Gorbachev resigned and turned over his presidential powers—including control of the nuclear launch codes—to Yeltsin, who was now the first president of the Russian Federation. That evening, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian tricolor flag. -
Commonwealth of Independent States
The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is a regional intergovernmental organization focused on cooperation on political, economic, environmental, humanitarian, cultural, and other issues between a number of former Soviet Republics.