Historiography 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 ' . Interpretations of the Cold War . Pro - Soviet accounts . The Soviet historiography was under central control , and blamed the West for the Cold War . In Britain , the Cambridge 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 . . . " Orthodox accounts . 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 . This " 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 postwar years . Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta , imposed Soviet - dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations , and conspired to spread communism throughout the world . From this 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 . This interpretation has been described as the " official " U . S . version of Cold War history . Although it lost its dominance as a mode of historical thought in academic discussions in 1960s , it continues to be influential . Revisionism . U . S . involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned some historians and created a cadre of historians with sympathy towards the Communist position and antipathy towards American policies . This group sought to challenge the premises of " containment " , and thus with the assumptions of the " orthodox " approach to understanding the Cold War . " Revisionist " accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War , in the context of a larger rethinking of the U . S . role in international affairs , which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony . While the new school of thought spanned many differences among individual scholars , the works comprising it were generally responses in one way or another to William Appleman Williams ' landmark 1959 volume , " The Tragedy of American Diplomacy " . Williams challenged the long - held assumptions of " orthodox " accounts , arguing that Americans had always been an empire - building people , even while American leaders denied it . Following Williams , " revisionist " or left wing writers placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States , citing a range of U . S . efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II . According to Williams and later " revisionist " / left wing writers , U . S . policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining the market system and democracy . In order to achieve that objective , they pursued an " open door " policy abroad , aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for U . S . business and agriculture . " Revisionist " scholars challenged the widely accepted scholarly research that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar " expansionism " . They cited evidence that the Soviet Union ' s occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale , and that Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies . In this view , the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States ; moreover , the U . S . maintained a nuclear monopoly until the USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949 . Revisionist historians have also contradicted the scholarly work that proves that the origins of the Cold War date no further back than the immediate postwar period . Notably , Walter LaFeber , in his landmark study , " America , Russia , and the Cold War " , first published in 1972 , argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to U . S . trade , markets , and influence . LaFeber argued that the U . S . commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U . S . influence and trade , underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War . Starting with Gar Alperovitz , in his influential " Atomic Diplomacy : Hiroshima and Potsdam " ( 1965 ) , " revisionist " scholars have focused on the U . S . decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of World War II . In their belief , the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima , in effect , started the Cold War . According to Alperovitz , the bombs were not used on an already defeated Japan to win the war , but to intimidate the Soviets , signaling that the U . S . would use nuclear weapons to stop Soviet expansion , however this they failed to do . New Left historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko ' s " The Limits of Power : The World and U . S . Foreign Policy , 1945 – 1954 " ( 1972 ) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War . The Kolkos argued U . S . policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary . The U . S . was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence , but any form of challenge to the U . S . economic and political prerogatives through either covert or military means . In this sense , the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs , and more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients , and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy . Another prominent revisionist is Melvyn P . Leffler . Post - revisionism . The " revisionist " interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own . In a variety of ways , " post - revisionist " scholarship , before the fall of Communism , challenged earlier works on the origins and course of the Cold War . During the period , " post - revisionism " challenged the " revisionists " by accepting some of their findings but rejecting most of their key claims . Another current attempt to strike a balance between the " orthodox " and " revisionist " camps , identifying areas of responsibility for the origins of the conflict on both sides . Thomas G . Paterson , in " Soviet - American Confrontation " ( 1973 ) , for example , viewed Soviet hostility and U . S . efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War . The seminal work of this approach was John Lewis Gaddis ' s " The United States and the Origins of the Cold War , 1941 – 1947 " ( 1972 ) . The account was immediately hailed as the beginning of a new school of thought on the Cold War claiming to synthesize a variety of interpretations . Gaddis then maintained that " neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War . " He did , however , emphasize the constraints imposed on U . S . policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics . Gaddis has , in addition , criticized some " revisionist " scholars , particularly Williams , for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War . Gaddis ' s 1983 distillation of post - revisionist scholarship became a major channel for guiding subsequent Cold War research . An almost immediate move to subvert the barely erected post - revisionist framework came from Melvyn P . Leffler , who " demonstrated that it was not so much the actions of the Kremlin as it was fears about socioeconomic dislocation , revolutionary nationalism , British weakness , and Eurasian vacuums of power that triggered US initiatives to mold an international system to comport with its concept of security . " This provoked " strong rebuttals " from the post - revisionists , though Leffler deemed their objections inaccurate and unsubstantiated . Out of the " post - revisionist " literature emerged a new area of inquiry that was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who started the conflict than in offering insight into U . S . and Soviet actions and perspectives . From this perspective , the Cold War was not so much the responsibility of either side , but rather the result of predictable tensions between two world powers that had been suspicious of one another for nearly a century . For example , Ernest May wrote in a 1984 essay : From this view of " post - revisionism " emerged a line of inquiry that examines how Cold War actors perceived various events , and the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes . But after the opening of the Soviet Archives , while Gaddis does not hold either side entirely responsible for the onset of the conflict , he has now argued that the Soviets should be held clearly more accountable for the ensuing problems . According to Gaddis , Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts , given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman , who was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home . Asking if it were possible to predict that the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months , leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war , Gaddis wrote in his 1997 book , " We Now Know : Rethinking Cold War History " : For Stalin , Gaddis continues , " World politics was an extension of Soviet politics , which was in turn an extension of Stalin ' s preferred personal environment : a zero - sum game , in which achieving security for one meant depriving everyone else of it . " According to Leffler , the most distinctive feature of " We Now Know " is the extent to which Gaddis " abandons post - revisionism and returns to a more traditional interpretation of the Cold War . In unequivocal terms , he blames the Cold War on Stalin ' s personality , on authoritarian government , and on Communist ideology . " 21st century scholarship . Since the 2000s , benefiting largely from the opening of Cold War - era archives in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world , Cold War historians have begun to move on from questions of blame and inevitability to consider the Cold War in the " longue durée " of the 20th century , and alongside questions of culture , technology , and ideology . Historians have also begun to consider the Cold War from a variety of international perspectives — " i . e . " non - American , non - Soviet — and most especially have stressed the importance of what was then called the " Third World " in the latter half of the Cold War . As Odd Arne Westad , co - editor of the " Cambridge History of the Cold War " ( 2010 ) has written :