description: Once the fighting stopped, the East-West alliance soon fell apart. East-West collaboration was succeeded by a cold war for the next forty-five years. According to the authors, this conflict was not caused by anything that the Western powers did or failed to do. Not was the cold war occassioned by Russian imperialism of the traditional kind. The cold war, rather, was inherent in the structure of communist government in the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was moved by an inner dynamic—because peaceful coexistence between capitalism and the communism was impossible, the cold war was inevitable. The Communists in their aims went further than the most despotic czars. The authors outline the development of the Soviet strategy, its shifts and turns, as well as its enduring objective. The essay also compares nazism and communism and analyses the role of communist parties in the West and of fellow travelers and fronts in the communist offensive against the West. The writers take issue with revisionist historians who put the primary blame for the cold war on the Western powers, more specifically on the United States. Overall, containment, advocated by policy makers such as George Kennan, worked; the strategy in the long run proved even more successful than its originators could have anticipated.
language: English
title: World War II and the Beginning of the Cold War (Volume 14)
titlecomplete: World War II and the Beginning of the Cold War (Volume 14) (Hoover Essays)
publisher: Hoover Institution Press