Talk:Origins of the Cold War

message: This article could do a lot better at NOVA. Sarcasm and scare quotes should be either removed or replaced with descriptions of the rival Pavlovas. The claim that Stalin was not interested in foreign adventures and took eastern Europe only for defensive reasons is not consistent with the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact. There is no mention of the USSR's takeover of Czechoslovakia when it agreed to take Marshall plan aid. No mention of Moscow's control of foreign communist movements. No mention of the popular front strategy! The USSR's demobilization is mentioned but the US's is not. and so on.
Yes, we are dealing with a paranoid regime that constantly saw its ideological prejudices reaffirmed. And yes, the USSR was at its heart hostile to the "bourgeois capitalist" world. However, the Soviets were never willing to compromise the survival of their for the sake of International Communism. Eben as far back as the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany in the 1917, the hotheads and the romanticists in the party would give way to temporary expedients to preserve Bolshevik and later Communist rule in Russia. BTW, this isn't the thesis of the revisionist pinkos. This is essentially George Kennan's thesis on Soviet foreign policy. This school of thought is as "authorized" and "orthodox" as it comes. (BTW, his Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin is a good abridgement, if anyone's interested).
:You're a bit off if you see "expansionist" overtones in the "popular front." The "popular front" was born out of concerns in Moscow since 1934 over the attitudes of the new Nazi Regime. First, even after Hitler came to power, there were the continued references to USSR - and particularly to Ukraine - as predestined fields of German expansion of leading Nazis. Earlier, the Soviets had expected the Nazis to moderate their public pronouncements once they had gained power. Second, officials in Soviet establishments in Germany decried Nazi persecution of communists, socialists, and Jews, thus providing a steady stream of anti-fascist activism within the USSR. Third, there were the fears over German rearmament, which were heightened in light of the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and Poland concluded in 1/34. Stalin took this as an indication that Hitler was turning his back on the Rapallo policy, and was now seeking a revision of Germany's eastern frontiers at the expense of Russia.
:The "popular front" owed more to Soviet reaction to Hitler's accession than genuine commitment to world socialist revolution. It was a part of the campaign to persuade the French and the British that it was they who faced the grave challenge from fascism, not Russia. Meanwhile. Stalin pushed Western Comintern parties into alliances with democratic socialists in order to neutralize opposition by rightwing elements in the West to an anti-fascist collective security pact with the Soviets. Note the exhaustive undertakings by Maksim Litvinov in the years 1934-1937.
:Later, the Non-Aggression Pact was essentially an outgrowth of the failed moves toward collective security in 1934-37, which was patently clear at Munich. If you need me to elaborate, please ask, but I'm running short on time for now. 172 11:37, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This was a very pro-Soviet article. I've toned that down a bit in the attempt to make it more neutral. I didn't cut out the bit where Russian Imperialism was justified, and may come back to it later. As for the Popular front strategy it was part of Stalins strategy to involve the West in war with his enemy, Hitler, and not overtly expansionist as you say. However, expansion was constantly on Stalin's mind with the first five-year plan of 1928 as the first step in that direction, any advances that he could get through it was welcome. Prezen 16:50, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If we give the western view (the original one, aka ussr=evil, usa=good) in the paragraph dealing with the origins of cold war, than, to be NPOV, we should give the eastern view as well (aggressive imperialists armed with nuclear weapons started the cold war; aka usa=evil, ussr=good). With respect, Ko Soi IX 08:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: NOVA?

message: There was a bit of a POV creep that had gone unnoticed for a while.  I failed to notice it given that the vast majority of recent changes have been quite good. I removed an off-topic commentary on the contradictions of containment (while not pointing out the contradictions in the Soviets brandishing their role in leading the "anti-imperialist" and "progressive" camp) that someone had managed to stick into the subsection on the Truman Doctrine. 172 23:54, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent changes

message: How do you guys suggest i add this?--Striver 12:06, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Hi

message: The sections "major schools" and "postwar warning" must be removed. Churchill's speech, while important, does not warrant its own large section. While other parts of the article are very underdeveloped, such a section gives the speech undue weight. The "major schools" section does not fit into the structure of Wikipedia's coverage on the Cold War. Historiography is currently discussed in the main entry. 172 | Talk 06:12, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Explain why regarding "major schools" and "postwar warning", instead of simply "must be removed". We can remove the speech. Historiography obviously also belongs in this article.Ultramarine 06:14, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The content under "postwar warning" entirely pertains to the Fulton speech. There is no way to broaden the section. What else would the heading refer to? Regarding historiography, of course it belongs here, as in every historical article. It belongs here integrated with the coverage. As far as treating it as a topic in itself, this is done in the main Cold War entry under "historiography," not in the subarticles. 172 | Talk 06:18, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: We should certainly mention the speech, but we could trim the material. The "major schools" material is my main concern, since it extensivly discusses the origin and therefore should be in this article.Ultramarine 07:28, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Your section on the "major schools" was more a discussion of the different schools of thought in the general American historiography of the Cold War than a discussion of questions about the origins of the Cold War, the focus of this article. The main article on the Cold War contains the section about the historiography. I have rewritten the section in order to make it relevant to this article, and not a redundant rehashing of a section in the general entry of the Cold War.  172 | Talk 16:49, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Removal of irrelvent or redundant sections

message: The first paragraph of the section "Conflicting visions of postwar reconstruction" is essentially identical to the passage that opens the section titled "From Cold Peace to Cold War" in Chapter One of David Reynolds' book "One World Divided". Is this acceptable?!?!
202.89.154.179 05:43, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unreferenced quotation? 

message: It says that President Truman issued the first peacetime military draft in 1948.  That is NOT true. The first peacetime draft was by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, one year before the U.S. entered World War II.
--User:cbhadha, 20 April 2008
:This article has (and had even more) several unsourced factual errors.  For example, it stated that the U.S. government and military maintained their same state as during the war, while in reality, the U.S. cuts in military size after World War II were literally nearly 90% in two years (12 million to 1.5 million by 1947).  I didn't even really address this in changes so far, except to note the massive cuts near the odd sentences talking as if the  military in 1948 looked like that of 1945, which it most certainly did not.  They're still there.
:Perhaps even more odd in an article about the origins of the Cold War in the 1940s, it somehow contained nearly no mention of the formation of the Eastern Bloc.  I added a small section on this, but one would think given that it pretty much dominated relations between the Soviet Union and the outside world during this time period that a huge section of the article would have addressed it.Mosedschurte (talk) 10:56, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: By all means, please go through and make the needed corrections to this article. Hires an editor (talk) 03:36, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  First Peacetime draft? 

message: This article seems to contain a lot of abstract theorizing and explorations of less relevant pre-1941 history, but not too much on how the sequence of events in the five crucial post-WW2 years appeared to people at the time.  In the U.S., Stalin's blatant failure to keep his promise to hold free elections in Poland was something of a shock, and this was succeeded by a whole series of events in 1948-1949 which appeared to many people (not just fringe paranoids) to be part of a concerted Communist plan of aggression -- the Czech coup, communist victory in the Chinese civil war, the Berlin crisis, etc. -- with the attack on south Korea in 1950 being the crowning blow.  There's currently discussion of some of these events, but others are alluded to quite briefly, and there's no real attempt made to place them all in a coherent chronological sequence of events. AnonMoos (talk) 03:48, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: possibly a little less abstract theorizing, a little more on the concrete sequence of events?

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: What is consensus on the dates of the cold war?- GPRamirez5 (talk) 19:11, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: 48 hours later and still no debate and no consensus. And yet nearly a dozen dubious edits acting as if it's settled.- GPRamirez5 (talk) 21:57, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Because you haven't really convinced anyone, provided any sources, or made an actual case?  Volunteer Marek  22:13, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

text: I think this edit resolves the question, meaning there was a period of several years during which Cold War had started. That period should be covered in most detail on this page. My very best wishes (talk) 18:07, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates of Cold War? 

message: I deleted two sections that were based verbatim on  David Reynolds's 2001 book. One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945.  It was added in 2007 by user:172, a sockpuppet of a banned user. Rjensen (talk) 05:30, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  copy vio deleted