1. Reasons for the Cold War

1.1 Ideological differences

Why were competing ideologies a reason for the Cold War?

• Both the USA and USSR feared that the other wanted to spread its beliefs worldwide.
• Their opposing ideologies led to conflict over the governing of post-war Europe

The USSR’s ideology

• Single party rule (no free elections)
• Planned economy
• The collective is more important than individual needs
• Strict censorship
• Equality of outcome

The USA’s ideology

• Multi-party democracy
• Free market economy
• The individual needs should be protected by the state
• Free press
• Equality of opportunity

1.2 Long-term resentment

Tsarist Russia was attacked by Napoleon and then Germany in WW1

The Bolshevik Revolution (7th of November 1917)

• The USSR became communist, this meant:
  • It withdrew from WW1
  • It refused to repay its loans to the West
• In the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), the USA, France and Britain forces joined the Bolsheviks opponents
• Lenin predicted that capitalism would come to an end but not before a "series of terrible conflicts between the Soviet Union and the bourgeois states"
• The USA, France and Britain did not recognise the USSR till the 1930s

In the 1930s:

• The West allowed Hitler to rearm following a policy of appeasement
• At Munich in 1938, Britain, Italy and France allowed Germany to take over large parts of Czechoslovakia without consulting Stalin (betraying England's peace time ally)
• Britain failed to respond to Stalin's requests for an alliance against Hitler
• Stalin believed that the West wanted Hitler to destroy communism because:
  • Hitler and Stalin were bitter enemies.
    • Hitler's biography Mein Kampf had been mostly about "cutting out the cancer of communism"
  • Czechoslovakia was very close to the USSR's boarders.
• Stalin and Hitler signed the Nazi Soviet pact in August 1939 (agreeing to split Poland between them)

1.3 The USA

After WW1 America followed a policy of isolationism

• After the Bolshevik Revolution America experienced a red scare in the early 1920s
• America isolated itself from European conflicts as a result believing that two oceans were enough to protect it from its enemies.

That perspective was changed because:

• After watching dictatorships take over most of Europe and Asia , the USA realised that:
  • The USA did not want to return to the depression and wanted to secure markets for its goods, since communist countries would not buy American goods, they wanted to prevent the spread of communism
  • Dictators had to be confronted and not appeased

1.4 Tensions and disagreements during the second world war

• Roosevelt revived Woodrow Wilson universalist language and defended American policy in terms of the abstract principle of democracy and democratic freedom (shown in the Atlantic charter), this moral language annoyed Stalin because it lined up with the American interests
• Hitler had been allowed to rearm in the 1930s and had then attacked the USSR in 1941
• The grand alliance was formed after Hitler invaded the USSR on the 22nd of June 1941 and Japan bombed Pearl Harbour on the 7th of December 1941.
• When the USSR was invaded in 1941 the USA and Britain provided the…