What happened between VJ Day and the start of the Cold War?

March 6, 2023 9:07 AM

The Soviet Union was our ally in WW II. Then, after peace was declared, seemingly 20 minutes went by before the USSR was declared our enemy. What exactly happened in that time?

Yes, I realize “20 minutes” is an exaggeration. But the transition to enemy status took place with head-spinning speed. What was the thing or things that caused it? Please guide me to non-wonkish reading materials that lays it all out.
I was born in l954, so this all happened before me. Thanks in advance.

posted by BostonTerrier to Society & Culture (19 answers total)

There's probably a really great book someone can recommend that gets into details, but the Wikipedia entry on the Potsdam Conference gives some good basic info.
posted by the primroses were over at 9:22 AM on March 6, 2023

With the caveat that I'm just some guy... I think the wartime cooperation was more of an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of thing. "20 minutes" after the war ended, there was a power vacuum in Europe that the USA and USSR were both trying to fill, and a general tension and distrust between the two powers.

Some useful wikipedia pages:
Origins of the Cold War
Iron Curtain
Truman Doctrine
Red Scare
posted by papayaninja at 9:26 AM on March 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

My short glib answer: miscommunication happened.

Longer answer: in February of 1946, Stalin gave a speech at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, pledging to "expand Soviet industry", and many foreign policy experts in the West took that as a sign that they also wanted to expand Soviet influence and territory - especially since Stalin also dissed capitalism in that same speech.

Stalin's speech was reported on by the US media, and it freaked a lot of people out - Time Magazine called it "the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day." However, our State Department Rep who was on the ground in Moscow, George F. Kennan, had been hearing other such speeches from Stalin for the past several months and was all "this is no big deal, he's just a blowhard" and so his official report to Washington was a lot less serious.

The Pentagon got really confused because on the one side, you had the US media freaking out, and on the other side, you had Kennan saying "this is nothing", so they demanded Kennan give them a much, much more thorough analysis of exactly what he thought Stalin was likely to do, and exactly what he thought the US response should be.

So Kennan then sent the State Department a 5,000-word telegram in which he tried to come up with What Makes Soviets Tick 101. He didn't give any official specific "and therefore here's what you should do" recommendations, he mostly gave general advice about trying to educate the public about how bad Communism was and how good Western Society was, to influence our allies that way. Kennan was then seen as The Pentagon's Foremost Soviet Expert and was asked to speak and write articles about "What Makes The Soviet Union Tick" for the general public for the next several months, one of which made its way into Soviet hands in 1947. Stalin was miffed, to say the least, and took it as proof that "see, the West are all imperialists who don't wanna share." Meanwhile people in the US were already galloping off with the idea that the Soviets were trying to bring evil Communism everywhere, but they were being all sneaky about it, so the West should Put A Stop To Communism at home and contain it abroad - and that pretty much set up The Cold War.

This article on Wikipedia discusses Kennan's original telegram and subsequent articles.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:40 AM on March 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you watch the movie Patton, General Patton gets in trouble for giving a press conference in which he says the US should assault the USSR while they have a nearby trained, mobilized army. The statement is at least partially based in truth. There were also British battle plans drawn up, called Operation Unthinkable.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:40 AM on March 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

"Containment" ideology vis-a-vis the USSR was already something the US was thinking about by 1947, and was pretty institutionalized by 1950. By 1950 that resulted in a huge increase in defense spending -- and in general from 1949 onward the arms race was "on" (in 1949 USSR tested their first atomic bomb successfully). Around the same time (1950) the Korean war started, the North Korean army was backed by the Soviets and America felt it had to respond in the name of the aforementioned "containment".

One thing to keep in mind is, the USSR being an American ally was a temporary change from tensions that already existed before WWII. In fact before Germany attacked USSR in 1941, US-Soviet relations were decidedly not great, since the Soviets were actually allied with Germany (via the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which Germany violated when it attacked Russia), USSR invaded Finland, etc. So they were not exactly seen as "allies" before war made for strange bedfellows.
posted by virve at 9:45 AM on March 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Season 3 of Blowback is about the Korean War, the first military engagement of the Cold War, and is a good summary of what happened between American anticommunists, the Rhee dictatorship, Truman, the Chinese, and Stalin, with the Korean people caught in the middle. Most people have mistaken impressions of that war and its origins.
posted by supercres at 10:10 AM on March 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, so far. I have a better picture now of pre-WW II tensions, and the big Eastern European carve-up immediately post-war.
* tsk * the things they don’t teach you in history classes…..
posted by BostonTerrier at 10:21 AM on March 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

TLDR is that it grew out of that old American standby, imperialism, and Truman was moderate but weak, and was surrounded by some real shitheads; Christian missionary, imperialist, capitalist. The Soviets and Chinese weren’t involved in Korea until well after the US had active diplomatic and military presence propping up their economic interests and the Rhee regime.
posted by supercres at 10:33 AM on March 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

One piece of this (and there are lots of pieces) was tension between the USSR and the United States over Japan as WWII came to a close. This was partly a hangover from Russo-Japanese war. The Kuril Islands are still in dispute (between Russia and Japan). Suffice it to say that the U.S. was not the only allied country that had drawn up plans to invade Japan: Proposed Soviet invasion of Hokkaido.

Did Hiroshima Save Japan From Soviet Occupation? Stalin had planned to seize a major Japanese island. When Truman refused, Stalin blinked:

In 1947, when Yumashev, the author of the Hokkaido landing plan, became the Soviet Minister of the Navy, he raised the subject of the cancelled operation with Stalin. He told Stalin that at the time he had wanted to call him on the phone to insist on the landing but, upon reflection, decided not to. “That’s too bad,” Stalin replied. “If you succeeded, we would have awarded you. If you failed, we would have punished you.”

Evidently, Stalin had come to regret his decisions on Hokkaido. As the Cold War raged, the Soviet leader thought Truman had been untrustworthy and wished he’d played a tougher game. By 1950, Stalin no longer cared about the Yalta framework that had made him so cautious in August 1945. He aligned with Communist China, and gave Kim Il Sung a green light to invade South Korea. “To hell with it!” Stalin said in January 1950, speaking of Yalta. “Once we have taken up the position that the treaties must be changed, we must go all the way.”
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:34 AM on March 6, 2023

Some really interesting tidbits in here about US-Soviet relations (from both American and Soviet perspectives) as the war was ending and the Cold War was dawning. At Nuremberg the Allies were still allied in some respects and not so much in others….

Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II
posted by sesquipedalia at 10:35 AM on March 6, 2023

More historical context : a significant portion of the Allies intervened in the Russia civil war in 1918 to support the Whites agains the Bolsheviks. Many of the Russian leadership were the very same Bolsheviks who already had first hand experience with the west. As a result they were deeply paranoid, and even during the war the Russians felt like they were unfairly bearing the brunt of the German forces while the other Allies waited to open the other fronts in the European wars.
posted by zenon at 10:41 AM on March 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The previous answers are all good. I can add this:

The US and USSR were allies, but there was distrust and tension even during WWII. The nuclear strategist Herman Kahn dated the beginning of the tension to 1942 when the US ambassador to the USSR publicly complained that the Soviets were not giving credit domestically for the aid they were getting from the US.

From the point of view of the US and its allies, what got the Cold War started was the Soviets establishing pro-Soviet Communist governments in eastern Europe and trying to establish them elsewhere, initially in Greece and Turkey. This was the subject of Winston Churchill's Feb 1946 Iron Curtain speech.

The begining of the Cold War is often dated to George Kennan's telegram in Feb. 1946, discussed by Empress Callipygos above, or Truman's speech to Congress in March 1947 announcing the Truman Doctrine, initially to provide aid to Greece and Turkey to fight Communist insurgencies.
posted by JonJacky at 10:50 AM on March 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

FWIW some of the unease with Russia predates even the First World War, as Russia found both covert and overt ways to support Serbia in the conflicts that precipitated the war. With the notable exception of France (which profited from its relationship with Russia) much of Europe was wary of Russian imperialism. (I started to add something about England's relationship with France and Russia, but I don't remember enough to characterize it accurately, so rather than be wrong I'll just leave it at "complicated").
posted by fedward at 10:54 AM on March 6, 2023

Here's an Ask Historians answer.
posted by drezdn at 11:30 AM on March 6, 2023

The perceived threat to the established Western order of Soviet Bolshevism of course dates back to 1917. As noted, the Soviets initially were happy to divvy up East Europe with the Nazis. And of course the Soviets were happy to continue to pursue their own inherited imperial interests, which they didn't exactly stop doing during the war. There are naturally many more factors that affect major developments like this, and one must resist the urge to read history backwards. But with the backdrop of ideological tensions and the control of a big chunk of the world in play, it's not terribly surprising that the masks dropped quickly.

* tsk * the things they don’t teach you in history classes…..

This is all very old-fashioned AP Euro stuff, to be honest.
posted by praemunire at 11:31 AM on March 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

The division of the Korean peninsula in the wake of the Japanese imperial defeat shows this process.

at the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had each granted themselves control over one half of Korean territory. The division of the peninsula was intended to be temporary, a provisional measure while the Allied powers worked out the particulars surrounding Korea’s independence.

posted by spamandkimchi at 11:34 AM on March 6, 2023

The Cold War started before VJ Day, really. America was not fond of the USSR from 1917-1941, either, and both sides understood that amicable relations after the war was very unlikely, and prepared for its alternatives the whole time.
A lot of writing about soldiers’ life from vets who served in Europe talks about how much anti-soviet fears were part of daily life (the loyalty oath scene in Catch-22 comes to mind), and there’s writings from folks like CIA founder Allen Dulles who thought in 1941 that the US should enter the war on the side of Hitler to vanquish the Soviets.
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:16 PM on March 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember reading in Paperclip, the book about the race to grab Nazi scientists at the end of the war that the U.S. had bombed a German uranium facility before the Russians could get it.

So it seems like we sure didn't want them getting the bomb.

I'm sure there were also many who were well aware of how cozy the Russians had been with the Nazis before the invasion.
posted by atchafalaya at 12:55 PM on March 6, 2023

Let's not forget China, supposedly a major ally during the war, but once V-J day was declared, there was a major drawdown of support, while Soviet forces left all sorts of goodies, including captured Japanese arms for Mao's forces.
posted by kschang at 6:56 PM on March 6, 2023