After World War II, relations between the Americans and the Soviets deteriorated. The USSR wanted to guarantee its security by surrounding itself with allied countries along its borders. The Red Army does not withdraw from the countries it liberated from Nazism and, contrary to the commitments made in Yalta, it does not organize free elections there. The objective of this “war” is to maintain the nuclear balance from 1949, the year in which the USSR possesses the bomb. It is above all a war of regimes, since American capitalism is opposed to Soviet communism.
Ideological opposition between the capitalist and communist systems
As early as the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that both the United States and Imperial Russia were destined to become an empire on a world scale and that they would oppose each other for global domination as soon as they came into contact. The manifest destiny of the United States cannot accept the existence of a challenge to its vision of the world, any more than the continental vocation of holy Russia (even if it became atheist) can not allow a Eurasian state to pledge allegiance to another great power.
The economic and ideological choices made by these two great powers will provide a rationalization of their inevitable opposition, a rationalization that will be presented as the essential foundation of the Cold War. The two socio-economic systems are indeed totally opposed
Although the sending of a Western expeditionary force in support of the white armies (1917-1918) is sometimes presented as a convincing argument, it is clear that the origins of the Cold War go beyond the socio-economic framework, as shown by the continuation of the competition between the two countries after the entry of Russia into the capitalist system.
The fact that the Soviet Union was a "closed" society where it was extremely difficult to know who had influence over what, what were their real resources and their real intentions was one of the salient features of the Cold War, fueling the real or imaginary doubts and fears of the West which, for its part, with its changes of government and policy according to elections often perplexed Soviet analysts.
The immediate causes:the post-war situation
Stalin seeks to shelter the USSR from a new attack by creating a territorial and ideological "glacis", that is to say a protective space which removes the threat from the Soviet borders:
* by pushing the borders of the USSR further west by annexing the Baltic countries and part of Poland, while the German territories located east of the Oder and the Neisse de Görlitz are placed under Polish administration (shared at the Potsdam conference);
* by imposing pro-Soviet governments in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army, countries which would later become “people’s democracies”. The Prague Coup in Czechoslovakia, one of the few real pre-war democracies in Eastern Europe, was the most visible expression for the West of this policy and was seen as the hegemonic manifestation of the USSR.
Even before the end of hostilities with Germany, the Soviet Union established communist order in the territories liberated by the Red Army:
* arrest of sixteen leaders of the Polish Secret Army, formally invited to Moscow for “political talks”, the two main leaders of the Polish resistance dying in prison a few months later. The Polish government in exile in London, abandoned by the West, was gradually denied all responsibility and the Lublin Committee, formed by the Soviets, took control of the country;
* attribution of the Czechoslovak province of Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Ukraine, which provides the Soviet Union with a common border with Hungary;
* installation in power of the communist parties both in Bucharest and in Sofia, and elimination of all other political formations;
* establishment in Vienna, without consulting the West, of a pro-Soviet provisional government whose leader approved the Anschluss in 1938;
* Finally, Marshal Tito, now established in Belgrade, refuses, contrary to what the Kremlin had promised the Allies, to let King Peter II return from exile.
Increasingly worried about these repeated violations of the Atlantic Charter and the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe, Churchill expressed alarm in a May 12, 1945 telegram to Truman at the risks of seeing the Soviet forces advance to the shores of the Atlantic and already uses the expression "Iron Curtain", which will become famous. In March 1946, in a resounding speech, he openly denounced this Soviet stranglehold on Central and Eastern Europe. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has fallen across the continent. (...) The communist parties, which were very weak in all these Eastern European states, have obtained a power that far exceeds their importance and they seek everywhere to exercise totalitarian control. Police governments are setting up everywhere, to the point that with the exception of Czechoslovakia, there is no real democracy. »
In Germany, in their zone of occupation, the Soviets vigorously carried out the denazification decided upon at the Potsdam Conference. More than 120,000 people are interned in "special camps", which will exist until 1950. 42,000 prisoners are believed to have died there from deprivation and abuse. This purge policy goes hand in hand with the appointment of communist executives to key positions in the administration, police and justice, and several thousand agents who worked under the Third Reich are "recycled" by the new East German security services or maintained in the administration and many officials of the old regime will serve the new power until the 1960s.
The Western allies, on the other hand, bet more on a “re-education” (Umerziehung) of the German people, associated with a policy of indulgence with regard to the “followers” (Mitläufer) and sympathizers of the regime. German scientists are thus picked up by the JIOA in order to work for the United States (Operation Paperclip), while former civil servants or soldiers of the Third Reich are allowed, if they have not been condemned by the justice, to exercise their functions again. As soon as the war was over, the OSS, the embryo of the CIA, entrusted former Wehrmacht Major-General Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Abwehr for the eastern front (Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost), with the task of to create an intelligence service covering all the territories formerly occupied by Germany. To justify its budget - which is partly used to exfiltrate, in collaboration with ODESSA, former collaborators or Nazi war criminals - this newly created spy network, precursor of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) and baptized Gehlen Org by US Defense, sometimes conveys entirely fabricated and increasingly disturbing information about the power of the Red Army and the expansionist strategy of the USSR. As early as 1947, the United States made it part of their propaganda, when in reality the Soviet Union had not yet begun to recover from the world conflict.
It should be noted, however, that even if Stalin probably did not intend to extend the sphere of Soviet domination by arms, the USSR nonetheless vassalized the countries occupied by the Red Army by progressive establishment of “people's democracies” and undertook several attempts to increase by intimidation its sphere of influence in Iran (see Iranian-Soviet crisis), in Greece and in Turkey; As Stalin said, he knew not to go too far if resistance to his ambitions grew tense.