Cold War (1947–53)

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History of the Cold War

The Cold War (1947–1953) is the period within the Cold War from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953. The Cold War began almost immediately following World War II and lasted through most of the 20th century. Political relations between the West and the USSR were tainted even before VE-Day when Stalin was told that the US would be negotiating a separate peace with Nazi SS General Karl Wolff in northern Italy, and the Soviet Union would not be allowed to participate. The dispute led to heated correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin, and Wolff, a war criminal, appears to have been guaranteed immunity at the Nuremberg Trials.A few days after VJ-Day cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet embassy in the Canadian capital, offering documentary proof of two wartime networks of Soviet spies in North America, one aimed at the Manhattan Project. In the next five years spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs were exposed and British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union.

During World War II, the Soviet Union annexed several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Most of those countries had been ceded to it by the secret agreement portion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. These later annexed territories include Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs),Latvia (became Latvian SSR),Estonia (became Estonian SSR),Lithuania (became Lithuanian SSR), part of eastern Finland (became part of the Karelo-Finnish SSR) and northern Romania (became the Moldavian SSR).

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