Russia’s main national interest after setting up other communist republics was to further spread communism. They went about setting up organisations such as Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) and Comecon (Council for Economic Mutual Assistance) to provide economic and military assistance to soviet satellite states. The Warsaw pact was set up in 1955 to provide a combined military force of soviet satellite states. As Eastern Europe unified as communists, Eastern Europe united with the fear of communism. The fear of the spread of communism to Western Europe caused Western European countries to join forces to stop the spread.
Though the need to defeat the Germans had made USSR a partner in the Allied forces from 1941 onwards, Stalin had displayed the tendency that he wanted to dominate the world, and he used dictatorial powers and military powers towards people of his own country as well as others. Even during the Yalta Conference of 1945 towards the end of World War II, which suggested the high point of wartime unity and goodwill between the Allies and the Soviet Union, Stalin showed his determined to control the countries in Eastern Europe. Thus, under the outward display of unity some elements of distrust between USSR and other allied countries already existed. This disharmony between them came to surface when, after the war ended, Stalin of USSR refused to honor the Declaration on Liberated Europe, in which the Allies promised to hold democratic elections in the European countries liberated from war. After the war, USSR cut off almost all contacts between the West and the territories it controlled in Eastern Europe.
The main reason for the Marshall Plan as a turning factor was in its forthrightness. It can be seen as the United States throwing down an economic gauntlet to the Soviet Union, challenging its authority in Eastern Europe by offering economic aid to countries under the USSR. Despite altruistic claims of helping states grow, the United States was really engaging in dollar diplomacy, attempting to harness the developing economies for their own use. Due to the continual expansion of their own economy, the Americans needed to find emerging markets through which they could both import and export goods, and found them in the Eastern European states. This, however, was seen by the Soviet Union as a form of economic expansion through which the Americans were bringing Eastern European states into their own sphere of influence, and was a direct challenge to their authority.
In the following essay the different reasons of the containment policy will be discussed and therefore the distinctive approaches of George Frost Kennan, former diplomat and the author of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” which inspired the containment policy, and Denna Frank Fleming, an American historian who wrote the essay called “Resolving the Russian American deadlock”, will be used. One of the key arguments in order to create the containment policy, mentioned by George Frost Kennan, was the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism. Kennan made this conclusion after analyzing the outstanding features of communist thought. One of the main elements of Communist ideology was that Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and the working class will one day rise
Having a series of puppet states in Eastern Europe would give the metropole invaluable security, ensuring that the states which bordered it were friendly and would support it in a theoretical invasion. Stalin must have been mindful of the Quisling governments which enthusiastically aided the Nazis in invading the Soviet Union – the Croats and the Hungarians in particular. Another reason for the Soviet desire to dominate Eastern Europe was an ideological one. Stalin was a committed communist in the vein of Marx and Lenin, and he knew well the key Communist tenet of proletarian internationalism. The workers of the world had to be “liberated” from bourgeois exploitation.
The western view of the time saw Stalin as doing one of two things: either continuing the expansionist policies of the tsars, or worse, spreading communism across the world now that his one-state notion had been fulfilled. Admittedly, the first view of Stalin, as an imperialist leader, may be twisted. The Russians claim, and have always claimed, that Stalin's motives were purely defensive. Stalin wished to create a buffer zone of Communist states around him to protect Soviet Russia from the capitalist West. In this sense, his moves were not aggressive at all -- they were truly defensive moves to protect the Soviet system.
That would make Germany weaker and put a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union twice in 30 years and Stalin wanted to ensure that it would not happen again. He also wanted to guarantee that Poland had a pro-Soviet government. Stalin already had a government who were in exile: the Lublin Poles. But Roosevelt and Churchill supported another group, the strongly anti-Communist ‘London Poles’. These Poles had helped organize the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, aiming to gain part of Poland before Stalin’s Red Army took full control of the country.
Communism’s goal was to bring down capitalism in any way possible. When Stalin came into power in 1924, the US mistrusted him even more. During this time, Germany was in the process of building itself up. Stalin was concerned that Russia would be attacked and the US was concerned watching Hitler spread his rule. Stalin and the US created a brief alliance because they were both concerned with stopping Hitler.
Primary Causes Of The Cold War The conflict between the US and the formerly known USSR occurred because of several political conflicts. Both the US and the U.S.S.R. felt that their ideology was better and because of World War 2, pre-existing strife had built up. The major ideological difference was that the U.S.S.R. was supporting communism, whilst the US was supporting capitalism. With the actions of the soviet union, helping to liberate the defeated countries, it was understood that the liberators may stay and help them install their form of government and leave. Fear of the other country laying influence of their ideology, as a means to gain power, tensions rose.
This developed until a confrontation, from Western and Eastern Europe, in a nuclear arms race. Moreover, the decisions made by the ‘Big Three’ at the international conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam between 1943 and 1945 contributed to the deterioration of relations between American and the USSR. At the Yalta conference, February 1945, Germany had not been defeated so it was split into four zones of occupation by Britain, France, America, Russia and free elections were allowed in Eastern Europe: the Declaration of the Liberated. Also, Russia joined the UN and promised to help defeat Japan after Germany was defeated. Later that year in Potsdam, many open disagreements took place because Germany had lost the war so Russia had promised to fulfil, Churchill had lost the 1945 election and Roosevelt died so Truman, who replaced him was angered by the large scale reparations imposed on Germany and the setting up of a communist government in Poland.