Historical Events
United States · Events 17
The Civil War and Foreign Intervention
From 1918 to 1922 the Soviet republic fought for its survival, encircled by White generals and intervention forces from more than a dozen foreign powers. The Red Army that Trotsky organized grew to five million soldiers and defeated the armies of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, and Wrangel in turn, as the majority of workers and peasants preferred Soviet power to the return of the landlords and the old order. Yet victory came at a terrible price: millions died from war, famine, and epidemics, while the terror practiced by both sides and the emergency rule of wartime left deep marks on the character of the Soviet state that followed.
The Pacific War
The Pacific War was the 1941 to 1945 conflict that entered its full phase when Japan attacked American and British positions on 7 December 1941. Its background was the war in China since 1937 and Japan's drive for resources and empire. Facing sanctions on oil and strategic materials, Japanese leaders sought Southeast Asian resources and hoped to shock the United States into negotiation, but Pearl Harbor brought it into total war. Japan rapidly seized the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, yet Coral Sea and Midway exposed the limits of its offensive. From Guadalcanal in 1942, Allied offensives across the Southwest and Central Pacific gained ground. The recapture of the Philippines and seizure of the Marianas in 1944 brought Japan within bombing range. In 1945 blockade, bombing, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the atomic bombings, and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan converged. Japan announced surrender on 15 August and signed the Instrument of Surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.
The Second Front and the Normandy Landings
The Second Front and the Normandy Landings trace how the western European offensive demanded by the Soviet Union after Germany invaded it in 1941 was finally opened by Allied Operation Overlord on 6 June 1944. The delay reflected a real dispute: the Soviet Union needed a western front to relieve pressure in the east, while British and American commanders argued that an invasion without enough troops, landing craft, supplies, and air superiority could fail catastrophically. Britain and the United States first attacked in North Africa and Italy, then committed to a cross-Channel invasion at the 1943 conferences and concentrated men and matériel in southern England. On 6 June 1944, Allied forces under Dwight D. Eisenhower landed airborne troops and then assaulted five beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Deception led German commanders to expect the main blow at Pas-de-Calais, but fortified positions and fighting imposed heavy losses. By the end of June the Allies had converted the beachhead into a supplied front, creating the base for the liberation of Paris in August and the advance toward Germany.
The Italian Campaign and the Fall of Mussolini
The Italian Campaign was the Mediterranean theatre of the Second World War, beginning with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and ending with the surrender of German forces in Italy in May 1945. After defeat in North Africa and sustained bombing, parts of the Fascist regime and the monarchy concluded that continuing the war would destroy the state, while the Allies sought to remove Italy from the war and tie down German forces in the south. After Sicily fell, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Benito Mussolini, and Pietro Badoglio's government signed the Armistice of Cassibile on 3 September. When announced on 8 September, German forces occupied central and northern Italy and rescued Mussolini, who established the Italian Social Republic. Allied troops landed at Salerno and Taranto, but the Apennines, Gustav Line, Anzio, and Monte Cassino made the advance costly. Rome fell in June 1944, yet fighting continued at the Gothic Line. In April 1945, the Allied offensive and a partisan uprising broke the northern front. Mussolini was captured and executed, and German Army Group C surrendered on 2 May.
The French Resistance and the Liberation of France
The French Resistance and the Liberation of France was the process of resistance and state reconstruction that began with Germany’s defeat of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime in 1940, and ended with the Allied landings in Normandy and Provence and the liberation of French territory in 1944. German occupation, Vichy collaboration and repression, forced labour, and antisemitic policy created the conditions of resistance. Charles de Gaulle’s Free France and diverse forces inside France, including Communists, Socialists, Republicans, and Catholics, pursued different aims through clandestine newspapers, intelligence, escape networks, strikes, sabotage, and armed struggle. In 1943 Jean Moulin organised the National Resistance Council (CNR) to coordinate the principal movements. In 1944 the Resistance was consolidated as the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), supported the Allied advance, and took part in the uprising in Paris. After Paris was liberated in August 1944, de Gaulle’s provisional government asserted the continuity of the Republic, denying the Vichy regime national legitimacy.
The Yalta and Potsdam Conferences
In February 1945 at the Crimean resort of Yalta, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, and in July and August at Potsdam outside Berlin, Stalin, Truman and Attlee, sat down to frame the postwar world. Yalta settled the occupation and reparation of Germany, Poland's borders and government, the Declaration on Liberated Europe, and the design of the United Nations with its Security Council veto; the USSR promised to enter the war against Japan for the return of southern Sakhalin and the Kurils. Potsdam handled the principles of German demilitarisation and denazification and the working of Poland's western border. Outside the conference rooms another age had already begun: when Truman hinted at a weapon of unusual force, Stalin showed nothing, for his intelligence had long since told him of the bomb.
The Marshall Plan and the Cold War
When the United States proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in 1947, the Soviet Union cast it as an attempt to subordinate Europe to American capital. Molotov broke off the Paris talks, and Stalin blocked the Eastern European states from taking the aid. With Zhdanov’s declaration of “two camps” and the founding of the Cominform, the world hardened into the two blocs of the Cold War.
The Berlin Blockade and Airlift
The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949) was the first large-scale confrontation of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union cut all rail, road, and water access to the Allied-controlled western sectors of Berlin. The immediate trigger was the Western introduction of the Deutsche Mark into the western occupation zones in June 1948, sealing the economic division from the Soviet zone. Joseph Stalin calculated that the blockade would force the West either to abandon the currency reform or withdraw from West Berlin. Instead, the Truman administration answered with the Berlin Airlift: over 15 months, American and British air forces flew more than 278,000 sorties, delivering 2.33 million tons of food, coal, and fuel. At its peak, one transport landed in Berlin every 30 seconds. A parallel Western counter-blockade on East Germany caused severe shortages of coal and steel.
The Soviet Atomic Project
The Soviet atomic project ran from the founding of Laboratory No. 2 under Kurchatov in 1943 to the RDS-1 test at Semipalatinsk on 29 August 1949. During the war, with resources tied to the front, it stayed small. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 it became the state's first priority: a Special Committee under Beria was created and the whole organizational, labour and material capacity of the NKVD was thrown behind it. The work ran on two tracks. Intelligence from Klaus Fuchs and others delivered Manhattan Project design material that confirmed the direction, while the domestic research of Kurchatov, Khariton, Zeldovich and Flyorov turned it into something buildable under Soviet industrial conditions. Uranium mining and the construction of the closed cities drew heavily on Gulag prisoners and forced labour.
The Korean War
The Korean War began with the southward attack of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on 25 June 1950 and stopped with the armistice of 27 July 1953. Kim Il-sung had asked repeatedly from 1949 for approval to unify by force. Stalin gave it in the spring of 1950, judging that the United States would not intervene and reckoning that the founding of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet atomic test had shifted the balance, but he ruled out direct Soviet participation. When the United States intervened under a UN command and the Inchon landing reversed the front, China sent the People's Volunteer Army, and from the summer of 1951 the line hardened near the 38th parallel. Soviet involvement stayed limited to weapons, advisers, and the pilots who flew MiG-15s from Manchurian bases, a presence both sides long denied officially.
The Soviet Space Program
From Sputnik 1 in 1957 to Leonov's spacewalk in 1965, the Soviet Union was first through every early gateway of the space age: the first artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight, the first woman in space, and the first spacewalk. The theoretical legacy of Tsiolkovsky, Korolev's OKB-1 design bureau, and the resources concentrated by free mass technical education and the planned economy carried the leap. It was a world-historical achievement by a country that had been agrarian a generation earlier.
The Building of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a 156-km border fortification built around West Berlin by the East German government starting on 13 August 1961. Between 1949 and 1961, 3.5 million East German citizens fled to West Germany, many through Berlin's open sector boundary. With the exodus of skilled workers and intellectuals pushing the East German economy toward collapse, GDR leader Walter Ulbricht persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to approve closing the border. Formal agreement was reached at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow on 3–5 August 1961, and during the night of 12–13 August some 25,000 East German troops and police sealed all crossing points to West Berlin with barbed wire. The three Western powers declined to intervene militarily because their Four-Power rights in West Berlin were not directly violated; US President John F. Kennedy concluded that 'a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.' The concrete barrier stood for 28 years as the Cold War's defining symbol, and at least 140 people died trying to cross it.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a thirteen-day confrontation in 1962, when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and collided head-on with the United States. Responding to the U.S. threat of invading Cuba and to American missiles deployed in Turkey, Khrushchev sent the missiles to defend revolutionary Cuba and balance the strategic scales. When U.S. reconnaissance discovered them and answered with a naval blockade, the world stood at the threshold of nuclear war.
Détente and the SALT Negotiations
Détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were a decade-long effort, from 1969 to 1979, by the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce Cold War tensions and bring the nuclear arms buildup under control. When the Soviet Union achieved strategic parity in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with the United States in the late 1960s, both sides concluded that limits were safer than an unbounded arms race. SALT I, signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972, produced the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty restricting missile defences and an Interim Agreement freezing the number of offensive missile launchers. The SALT II negotiations that followed reached their own peak with the Vladivostok agreement of 1974 and the signing by Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prevented ratification by the U.S. Senate and brought détente to an end.
The Helsinki Accords
The Helsinki Accords (August 1, 1975) were the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), signed by 35 states: 33 European nations plus the United States and Canada, in Helsinki, Finland. The Soviet Union had pursued a European security conference since 1954, seeking formal recognition of postwar borders, and the détente of the early 1970s finally brought the West to the table. After preliminary consultations in 1972 and two years of substantive negotiations in Geneva (1973 to 1975), heads of state gathered in Helsinki. The Final Act was organized into three 'baskets': political-military security (Basket I), economic and scientific cooperation (Basket II), and human rights and humanitarian cooperation (Basket III). Brezhnev believed he had secured the inviolability of frontiers, but the human rights provisions of Basket III gave dissidents across the Soviet bloc a platform grounded in commitments their own governments had signed.
The War Scare of 1983
The War Scare of 1983 was the most dangerous US-Soviet confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It began with the Soviet Union launching Operation RYAN in 1981, the largest peacetime intelligence operation in its history to detect a Western nuclear first strike, and culminated in November 1983 when NATO's Able Archer 83 nuclear command exercise was mistaken by Soviet leaders for the real thing. Pershing II deployments, the KAL 007 shootdown, a false alarm in the Oko early-warning system that Stanislav Petrov correctly dismissed, and the Reagan administration's psychological operations and fleet exercises combined to convince Moscow that NATO was using an exercise to mask an actual attack. The Soviet 4th Air Army loaded nuclear warheads onto combat aircraft in East Germany and Poland; the 1990 PFIAB report confirmed that 'some Soviet forces were preparing to pre-empt or counterattack a NATO strike launched under cover of Able Archer.'
The New Thinking and the End of the Cold War
Gorbachev recast Soviet diplomacy under the New Thinking: nuclear war could have no winner, and security was to be gained with one's adversary, not against them. Gromyko, foreign minister for twenty-eight years, stepped aside for Shevardnadze. Through the Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986) summits came the 1987 INF Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and in his December 1988 UN address Gorbachev announced a unilateral cut of half a million troops and freedom of choice for all nations. By February 1989 the withdrawal from Afghanistan was complete.