U.S.-Soviet Relations: Yalta to the Berlin Airlift
This paper will discuss the evolution of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War in 1948. It will trace the deterioration in these relations, starting with friction between the two countries in the alliance against Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War, through the advent of American nuclear power, to the imposition of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. The paper will end with the Berlin Airlift, which marked the final dissolution of the Second World War Alliance.
The evolution of U.S.-Soviet relations up to the Cold War cannot be understood without a brief background on the effect of the Second World War. Soviet leaders had presented the Soviet Union as an alternative to, and an enemy of, the liberal democratic Western countries in the 1920s and 1930s. Western leaders obliged this view by demonizing the new Soviet republics. The rise of Hitler did not soften this view, particularly when the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939. In accordance with this pact, the Soviet Union did not respond to the German invasion of Poland, the borders of which Germany and Russia had quarreled for decades. The two powers had already agreed upon the division of Poland and stayed out of each other's military escapades over the next 21 months.
Thus, it was a shock to Stalin when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. He actually appears to have suffered some form of breakdown in the wake of the invasion: he did not speak publicly for nearly two weeks. When he did regain his senses, he appealed not to the ideals of socialism, but invoked notions of nationalism and patriotism, imploring the Soviet people to defend "Mother Russia." He evidently realized that socialism held little appeal for most of the people and that he ...