Cold War Europe

Cold War, the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons. The term was first used by the English writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” It was first used in the United States by the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947.

A brief treatment of the Cold War follows. For full treatment, see international relations. You can also see the cold war europe map here. By the final weeks of the Second World War, Soviet troops had advanced

westward, pushing the Nazi army back to Berlin. When the war ended, Soviet

troops occupied several Central and Eastern European states, including the

eastern part of Germany.

During the war, the USSR absorbed the three formerly independent Baltic

states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as a piece of Romania, which

it established as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the remaining

Central and Eastern European states it occupied, the USSR helped establish

hardline communist governments modeled after the Soviet system.

The USSR, along with the United States, Britain, and France, jointly occupied

Germany and Austria. The victorious powers established Austria as an independent and neutral county but disagreed over the fate of Germany. The

three Western powers established the market-based Federal Republic of

Germany in the west, while the USSR established the hardline socialist state

of the German Democratic Republic in the east.