March: The Start and End of the Cold War

American and USSR tanks face off at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, in 1961. (Public Domain)

At a small Missouri college, a crowd gathered to listen to whom many called “the man of the century.” On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill walked to the podium in the auditorium of Westminster College to deliver his greatest post-World War II speech. His message spurred a decades-long chain of Cold War events that, uncannily, all occurred around the week of March 5–12. His talk was titled “The Sinews of Peace;” the world, however, remembers it as “The Iron Curtain Speech.”

Churchill, Truman, and Stalin

“The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future,” stated Churchill.

Churchill had guided Great Britain through its “darkest hours” as prime minister from May 1940 to May 1945; but two months after Nazi Germany surrendered, he and his Conservative Party lost the election. Sitting behind Churchill was the man who had introduced him to the audience, Harry S. Truman. Truman had been president all of four months before World War II came to its climactic conclusion. Seven months later, he sat listening to Churchill discuss a new threat.

Winston Churchill was the prime minister of the UK and crucial statesman during World War II and the Cold War. (Public Domain)

If Americans were unaware of the events in Eastern Europe, the former prime minister was there to inform them. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere,” he said.

This “iron curtain” dividing Europe separated the democracies of the West from the states now within the grip of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Understanding Stalin, Communism, and the ideals of the Russians, Churchill made it clear how America and the West must act.

“From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness,” he said. “For that reason, the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength.”

A Telegram, an Article, and a Doctrine

Rather than the old and unsound doctrine of war, Truman attempted something new. Two weeks before Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, a young American diplomat to Russia by the name of George Kennan issued an 8,000-word telegram to the U.S. State Department. He discussed the Communist Party’s propaganda machine, its power over citizens, the insecurities of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, and the necessity of unified democracies and an educated populace on Communist propaganda.

“The greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping,” Kennan wrote in the telegram’s conclusion.

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George Kennan's tireless work to understand the tactics and situation in the USSR influenced American foreign policy. (Public Domain)

Truman and his State Department adhered to Churchill and Kennan’s warnings. Over the course of 1946, his administration formulated foreign policy targeted the Soviet Union. With the Labor Party-led British government taking softer stances against the spread of international communism, specifically in Greece and Turkey, that “awe-inspiring accountability to the future” belonged to the United States.

On March 12, 1947, Truman stood before Congress and expressed how America should counter the expansion of the “Soviet sphere.” It became known as the Truman Doctrine and was practiced for generations to come. Four months later, Kennan, now Ambassador to Moscow, wrote an article under the name “X” entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” The article, which recommended “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” gave the Truman Doctrine a different name: The Containment Policy.

President Harry Truman sits at a desk while delivering a message to Congress about Greece and Turkey, based on the Truman Doctrine. (Public Domain)

Blockades and Spies

Truman saw his doctrine tested over the next two years. On March 7, 1948, the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg agreed that George C. Marshall’s 1947 proposal of economic assistance to war-torn Europe should be extended to West Germany. The plan would institute a new currency and a federal system of government. Stalin, however, wished to keep Germany economically weak. Nonetheless, the Economic Recovery Act of 1948, known as the Marshall Plan, passed and made these decisions official.

In response, the Soviets resigned from the Allied Control Council and soon instituted the 11-month Berlin Blockade, which blocked all land access to Allied-controlled areas in Berlin. The Americans and British responded with the Berlin Airlift, which flew in food, fuel, and supplies for West Berliners until the Soviets yielded.

Truman’s doctrine underwent its greatest stress test, however, with the outbreak of the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, ending six months after he left office. Before he decided against running for reelection, the scourge of espionage reared its head.

American intelligence had discovered that its war-era Manhattan Project, used to develop the atomic bomb, had been infiltrated by Soviet spies. One of those spies was Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist. Through the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service’s (later the National Security Agency) VENONA Project, more spies were uncovered, some in the United States and some in Allied nations. Two of the most famous spies caught during the Cold War were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Their trial began on March 6, 1951, in which they were found guilty and sentenced to death.

The Manhattan Project has been in vogue thanks to detailed portrayals of those in charge. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer was one such man; he led the development of the atomic bomb. (Public Domain)

The Death of Stalin

Kennan stated in his telegram that the “effects” of “[Vladimir] Lenin’s death” “wracked [the] Soviet state for 15 years.” He concluded that “it has yet to be demonstrated that [the Soviet system] can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another.”

On March 5, 1953, that conclusion was tested as Joseph Stalin died at his dacha in Kuntsevo, a suburb of Moscow. A power struggle ensued within the Soviet Politburo, but it was Nikita Krushchev who rose to power. Compared to Stalin’s rise and reign, it was rather bloodless.

Krushchev’s reign continued through Eisenhower’s two terms, John F. Kennedy’s presidency, and the beginning of Lyndon B. Johnson’s, and was highlighted with events such as his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin (1956), the U-2 Spy Plane Incident (1960), Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

A Stalin Defection to the West

On March 6, 1967, 14 years after the death of Stalin, a 41 year-old woman from Moscow walked into the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. Her name was Svetlana Alliluyeva, and unbeknown to the American intelligence agencies, she was the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. Two days before her required return to Moscow, she requested to defect to America.

As an adult, Stalin's daughter chose to seek asylum in the United States, a request which then-President Lyndon B. Johnson accepted. (Public Domain)

President Johnson mulled over receiving the daughter of the man who helped orchestrate the ongoing struggle of the Cold War. After several weeks, he approved her arrival. She landed in New York to much fanfare. Labeled by the Soviets as a “tool for the CIA,” her citizenship was revoked in the USSR. By the 1980s, she was welcomed back; but she would eventually return to America where she stayed until her death.

The ‘Evil Empire’

A 1946 speech began this chain of March Cold War events, and nearly 40 years later, another speech became a link in the chain. Ronald Reagan had been president for two years and had come to office with the promise of a better economy and a peace-through-strength policy. Churchill had described Soviet policy as creating “an iron curtain” “across the Continent.” Reagan, however, described the Soviet Union itself in one of the more inflammatory speeches of the modern age. On March 8, 1983, while speaking at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”

Commenting on the media storm that stemmed from the comment, Reagan said, “For too long our leaders were unable to describe the Soviet Union as it actually was. The keepers of our foreign-policy knowledge—in other words, most liberal foreign-affairs scholars, the State Department, and various columnists—found it illiberal and provocative to be so honest. I’ve always believed, however, that it’s important to define differences, because there are choices and decisions to be made in life and history.”

Seven months later, the Soviet Union only confirmed Reagan’s long-held belief when its air force shot down the commercial flight Korean Airlines 007, killing the crew and all 269 passengers.

The End of the Red Line

From 1922 to 1985, seven premiers led the Soviet Union, although it was under Stalin’s control for 29 years. In 1985, the USSR elected its last.

On March 11, 1985, two years after Reagan’s “evil empire’ speech, Mikhail Gorbechev was elected General Secretary. Under his leadership, a liberal transformation of the Soviet Union began, but this liberalization resulted in its disintegration. Slowly but surely, member states of the Soviet Bloc experienced revolution and independence movements.

Two years after Gorbechev’s election, Reagan stood in front of West Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and said, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

It was a monumental moment when the Berlin Wall fell; many people were under the impression that the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe would go on forever. (Public Domain)

Two years later, the Berlin Wall—the visual representation of the “iron curtain” and one of the last symbols of the Cold War—came down. Two years after the wall fell, the Soviet Union dissolved.

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