Constructed in 1961, the Berlin Wall bisecting the former German capital was a concrete manifestation of the ideological division between the capitalist West and the Communist East.
The Spread of Communism
In 1953 strikes and protests during the Cold War in East Germany produced the first internal reactions against the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. The hostility of the population was put down by units of the Red Army stationed there. When Hungarian nationalists and intellectuals staged an anti-Communist revolt in October 1956, the Soviet Union ordered troops from the Soviet bloc into Budapest to crush resistance. When similar demands for reform and openness developed in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact forces intervened. In 1968 tanks appeared in Prague and Communist orthodoxy was reinstated.
The Western states responded little to these internal Communist crises. However, the Cold War intensified when the status of independent West Berlin was once again threatened by the Soviet bloc. In 1961 the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, ordered a solid frontier wall to be built across Berlin, dividing the capitalist west from the Communist east. The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the permanent division between the two different ways of life.
The history of the Cold War was marked by the complete shift in the international balance of power, made possible by the rise of Soviet Union and American military and economic strength during World War II. The confrontation between the two camps was not entirely new, since the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s had been feared by much of the West as the vanguard of a new social order. In the 1950s, however, the Soviet Union was perceived to be a much greater threat -- not only a challenge to Western assumptions about personal freedom, but the center of a worldwide Communist web that menaced the established order throughout the developing world. The American government developed a strategy of "containment" designed to limit the spread of communism.
The strategy was supported by America's allies in NATO but opposed by a growing youth movement hostile to what was seen as a new form of imperialism, and anxious about the growing threat of nuclear war. The first major test for containment came in 1959 when Fidel Castro led a Communist-inspired revolt in Cuba. The new revolutionary regime was supported by the Soviet Union. When it became clear in 1962 that Castro was being supplied with Soviet Union missiles, Washington issued an ultimatum to the Soviet Union to remove them, and ordered a naval blockade of Cuba.
The confrontation was one of the most dramatic episodes of the postwar period. At the final moment, Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered Soviet Union vessels bound for Cuba to turn back. U.S. president John F. Kennedy was saved from having to make a final decision for military action. A year later, Kennedy was assassinated; in 1964 Khrushchev was removed from office by his party colleagues.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the Cold War came to direct conflict between the two superpowers. The conflict was played out thereafter by proxy: one side or the other lending support to third-party states, engaging in espionage and covert operations, and arming and funding guerrilla movements and insurgencies. In 1964 the United States, led by President Lyndon Johnson, made the decision to commit troops and aircraft to the civil war in South Vietnam, and for 10 years the U.S. fought to contain the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union. In 1975, following prolonged antiwar protests in the United States and Europe, the last American forces were withdrawn.
Four years later, the Soviet Union sent troops to fight in Afghanistan in support of the Communist regime, an intervention that lasted 10 years and cost the lives of thousands of Soviet Union soldiers. The United States provided aid and arms for the anti-Communist guerrilla movement. In 1989 the Soviet Union withdrew its forces. Both the Vietnam and Afghan wars were the longest periods of active fighting for both states since World War II. Both involved high casualties, considerable cost, and eventual defeat. Cold War by proxy proved deeply damaging to both of the superpowers that fought it.
On the next page, read about nonproliferation treaties and arms limitation talks that attempted to ease tensions throughout the world.
