Cold War Timeline

As memories of the Cold War fade into history, I felt it would be a good idea to produce a timeline of what actually happened, fortunately many people who lived through the period, like myself, are still alive; but as each year passes so do the number of witnesses. Not every event can be included, but on this page you will find an outline and on the accompanying pages you will find details and links to key events.

For those of us who lived through the period there was the background of the constant ideological struggle between east and west. It impinged on all of our live to some extent. At times it became quite intense. Most of he population  of the UK managed to avoid thinking about it for much of the time, but periodically something would happen which brought it to the forefront.

Most people think of the Cold War as starting shortly after the second world war and ended in the early 90s. The reality is rather different, as far as Russia was concerned it really began with the October Revolution of 1917, long before Winston Churchill's keynote speech of 1946. Immediately that the Bolsheviks, to their own surprise, came to power they found themselves surrounded by hostile agencies. These forces came from both within the country and without. Where they didn't actually, exist their understanding of Communism created them, either in reality or mentally. Marxists throughout the world understood that they were in a class war, Marx and Engels had told them so. In effect the Bolsheviks declared an ideological war on every country in the world. All countries, according to Lenin, were run by imperialist, capitalist, "bourgeois scum". It was the duty of every communist to fight the battle to come.

The British were among the first to react in suggesting the buy up of Russian banks and assets. The Communists responded by simply nationalizing the banks and assets.  The British reply was to mount a covert sabotage and espionage campaign, including bribery to scuttle merchant ships and flood mines. One of the most audacious British plans occurred on 1st July 1918, when a Special Operations force raided the Czar's house in an attempt to rescue him and his family. In the event only one member of his family, his daughter Tatiana, managed to make it back to England. The response of Lenin was to order the execution of the Czar and his family. In this tit-for-tat war Britain was swift to respond. Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British consul to Moscow, was in reality a British Secret Service (MI6/SIS) agent. He was ordered to undertake the assassination of Lenin. Bruce Lockhart used the famous spy, Sidney Reilly who recruited  Fanny Kaplan, real name Feiga Haimovna Roytblat to shoot Lenin, which she did on 31st August, he was hit but not killed. The reaction involved the sacking of the British Embassy in Petrograd. The British, of course, demanded an apology, which was not forthcoming, and retaliated by arresting Lockhart as a spy. Reilly escaped to England. The British arrested the top Bolshevik in London Maxim Litvinov. Later came what was to become quite common during the Cold War, namely the exchange of Lockhart for Litvinov.

Within months the Soviets made it clear that their aim was world domination, when they introduced the Communist International.

The reason that the Cold War started and continued such a long time is probably down to a mutual mistrust between the Soviet Union and its allies - principally China, and others at various times, and the USA and its allies - principally the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia plus, later, other members of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation).

Whilst the above is undoubtedly true, for the purposes of this site, it is really only necessary to consider the period from 1945 until the early 90s. It is generally conceded that the latter part of 1945 marked the time when relations between Moscow and Washington began deteriorating.

At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union stood firmly entrenched in Eastern Europe, they were intent upon installing, in the region,  governments that would pay allegiance to the Kremlin. It also sought to expand its sphere of influence into North Korea, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Similarly, the United States established a security zone of its own that comprised Western Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Both sides were looking for a way to secure their futures from the threat of another world war, but it was the threat that each side perceived from the other that allowed for the intensification of the existing mutual suspicion.

In the early Cold War (between 1945 and 1948), the conflict was more political than military. Both sides argued with each other at the UN, sought closer relations with nations that were not committed to either side, and articulated their differing visions of what a postwar world should. By 1950 the Cold War had become an increasingly militarized struggle. The communist takeover in China, the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, the advent of a Soviet nuclear weapon, tensions over occupied Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the formation of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as rival alliances had all enhanced the Cold War's military dimension. U.S. foreign policy reflected this transition when it adopted a position that sought to "contain" the Soviet Union from further expansion this containment policy would remain the central strategic vision of U.S. foreign policy from 1952 until the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Successive American presidents and successive Soviet premiers tried, in a variety of ways, to manage the Cold War, and the history of their interactions reveals the delicate balance-of-power that needed to be maintained between both of the superpowers. Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigned as a hard-line Cold War Warrior and spoke of "rolling back" the Soviet empire, but when given a chance to dislodge Hungary from the Soviet sphere-of-influence in 1956, he declined. The death of Stalin in 1953 prefaced a brief thaw in East-West relations, but Nikita Kruschev also found it more politically expedient to take a hard line with the United States than to speak of cooperation.

Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962)

Around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, intelligence officers in the US created this map to show the potential range of Soviet missiles if they were launched from Cuba. IRBM stands for intermediate-range ballistic missile, and MRBM is medium-range ballistic missile.By 1960, both sides had invested huge amounts of money in nuclear weapons, both in an attempt to maintain parity with each other's stockpiles, but also because the idea of deterring conflict through "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) had come to be regarded as vital to the national interest of both. As nuclear weapons became more prolific, both nations sought to position missile systems in ever closer proximity to each other's borders. One such attempt by the Soviet government in 1962 precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest that the world has ever come to a large-scale nuclear exchange between two countries.

In the early 1960s the American containment policy shifted away from a heavy reliance on nuclear weapons to more conventional  warfare in pursuit of a more "flexible response" to the spread of communism. Although originally articulated by President Kennedy, it was in 1965 that President Johnson showcased the idea of flexible response when he made the initial decision to commit American combat troops to South Vietnam. American at that time regarded Southeast Asia as vital to its national security, and President Johnson made clear his intention to insure South Vietnam's territorial and political integrity "whatever the cost or whatever the challenge."

The United States ultimately fought a long, bloody and costly war in Vietnam that poisoned U.S. politics, damaged its reputation in much of the world, and seriously damaged its economy. The Nixon administration inherited the conflict in 1969, and although it tried to improve relations with the Soviets through detente, and even took the unprecedented step of establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China , neither development brought about decisive change on the Vietnamese battlefield. The United States abandoned the fight in 1973 under the guise of a peace agreement that left South Vietnam emasculated and vulnerable.

Although Nixon continued to negotiate with both the Soviets and Maoist China, the Soviet Union and the United States continued to subvert one another's interests around the globe in spite of the hopes of detente.

Leonid Brezhnev became Soviet premier in 1964 as Kruschev's replacement, and while he too desired friendlier relations with the United States on certain issues, particularly agriculture, genuinely meaningful cooperation remained elusive.

By the end of the 1970s, the hope for an extended thaw had utterly vanished. Jimmy Carter became president in 1976, and although he was able to hammer out a second arms limitation agreement with Brezhnev, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan significantly soured U.S.-Soviet relations. In an attempt to place a greater emphasis on human rights in his foreign policy, Carter angrily denounced the incursion and began to adopt an increasingly hard line with the Soviets. The following year, Americans overwhelmingly elected a president who spoke of waging the Cold War with even greater intensity than had any of his predecessors, and Ronald Reagan made good on his promises by dramatically increasing military budgets in the early 1980s.

By 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had replaced Brezhnev in Moscow, and he quickly saw that drastic changes in the Soviet system were necessary if was to survive. He instituted a series of liberal reforms known as perestroika, and he seemed genuinely interested in more relations with the West, a principal known as glasnost. Although Reagan continued to use bellicose language with respect to the Soviet Union for example labeling it an "evil empire", the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship was personally warm and the two leaders were able to decrease tensions substantially by the time Reagan left the White House in 1989.

Despite improved East-West relations, however, Gorbachev's reforms were unable to prevent the collapse of a system that had grown rigid and unworkable. By most measures, the Soviet economy had failed to grow at all since the late 1970s and much of the country's populace had grown weary of the aged Communist hierarchy and its command economy. In 1989 the spontaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and two years later the Soviet government itself fell from power.

The Cold War had lasted for forty-six years, and is regarded by many historians, politicians, and scholars as the third major war of the twentieth century. Some experts are of the opinion that the Cold War never ended. Events such as the annexation of the Crimea, and the invasion of Ukraine would support that view.