Topic: Review of the Origins of the Cold War

According to this cartoon, how did

the Cold War start?

The Cold War: A Revisionist View

• What was the American attitude after WWII?• What does Williams note as reasons that it

was impossible for the U.S.S.R to start the Cold War?

• What did George Kennan’s work propose about the Soviet Union? How did it lead to the Cold War?

The Cold War: A post-revisionist view

• J.R Starobin: Historian and the author of Communism in Crisis

• Post-Revisionist rejects both traditionalists and revisionists.

• From the journal: The Origins of the Cold War (1969)

The Cold War: A post-revisionist view

• What caused the advent of the Cold War according to Starobin?

• What arguments does he use to prove his case?

Read the Section: “What were the origins of the Cold War”

• What is the Great Contest? (Include the historian who argued about this term)

• How does Source B show the idea that the Cold War started long before WWII because of this “Great Contest?”

Read “Early Conflicts 1918-21” through Antagonism and co-operation, 1929-41)

• If the Cold War started at 1917, why was there little tension (compared to what was seen in 1946)?

• How did world events allow the Soviet Union and the West able to overcome their differences to form an alliance?

Read “Ideology and realpolitik” and “The Riga Axioms”

• What is Realpolitik? How did the various treaties signed before WWII show this concept?

• What led to the Riga Axioms?

Turn to pg. 52 (Cartoon of Hitler)

• “Some of these new problems included Soviet restrictions on Allied service…and what Stalin considered inadequate Allied aid, given that most Axis forces were committed to the East. He came to suspect, given the massive Soviet casualties, that the USA and Britain were prepared to fight Nazism ‘down to the last Russian’.

Read Source E

• According to Gaddis: What were Stalin’s post-war goals?

• How did the Tehran Conference lead to the Cold War?

• How did the Percentage Agreements lead to the Cold War?

Read the “Breakdown of the Great Alliance” (Stop at the section: Who is to blame?)

• How was Germany handled after the war?• Why was Poland so problematic for the allies?• How did Truman approach the Soviet Union?

Was it appropriate? Why or Why not?• Describe the impact the war had on the Soviet

Union. Was Stalin entitled to support from the allies?

• How was the atomic bomb linked to the start of “spheres of influence”