Historiography of the Cold War

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History of the Cold War

As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet-U.S. relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.

While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism," and "post-revisionism." However, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories, and more recent scholars have tended to address issues that transcend the concerns of all three 'schools'.

Soviet historiography was under central control and blamed the West for the Cold War.

In Britain, the historian E.H. Carr wrote a 14-volume history of the Soviet Union, focused on the 1920s, published 1950-78. His friend R.W. Davies, said Carr belonged to the anti-Cold-War school of history, which regarded the Soviet Union as the major progressive force in the world, the United States as the world's principal obstacle to the advancement of humanity, and the Cold War as a case of American aggression against the Soviet Union. Carr criticized those Anglophone historians who, he felt, had unfairly judged the Soviet Union by the cultural norms of Britain and the United States. In 1960, Carr wrote that:

Much of what has been written in the English speaking countries during the last ten years about the Soviet Union […] has been vitiated by this inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of imaginative understanding of what goes on in the mind of the other party.

The first school of interpretation to emerge in the U.S. was "orthodox." For more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, few U.S. historians challenged the official U.S. interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War. The "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.Thomas A. Bailey, for example, argued in his 1950 America Faces Russia that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate years following World War II. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at the Yalta Conference, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. From that view, U.S. officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the Marshall Plan.

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