THE COLD WAR
This 1945 meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin was supposed to bring peace to Europe after World War II but it actually planted the seeds of Cold War tension when Stalin broke his most important promise.
What is the Yalta Conference?
This 1950–1953 conflict began when communist North Korea invaded South Korea, drawing in U.S. and UN forces, and later China, before ending in a stalemate along the original border that still divides the peninsula today.
What is the Korean War?
This communist leader won China's Civil War in 1949 by building his power base among millions of poor rural peasants, promising them land, food, and equality, and ruled China until his death in 1976.
Who is Mao Zedong?
This Soviet leader publicly criticized Stalin after his death in 1953, launching a policy that tore down Stalin's monuments and loosened some repression, while still crushing the Hungarian Revolution with tanks in 1956.
Who is Nikita Khrushchev?
Gorbachev's 1985 policy of "openness" allowed Soviet citizens to speak freely, freed political prisoners, and let reporters criticize the government for the first time but instead of saving the communist system, it opened a door that could not be closed.
What is glasnost?
This U.S. policy, announced in 1947, promised to give political, military, and economic support to any country threatened by a communist takeover with Greece and Turkey being the first countries to receive help.
What is the Truman Doctrine?
For 13 terrifying days in 1962, the world came closest to nuclear war when the U.S. discovered Soviet nuclear missiles just 90 miles from the Florida coast, and Kennedy and Khrushchev had to negotiate a resolution before anyone fired a shot.
What is the Cuban Missile Crisis?
In this conflict that ended in 1949, Mao Zedong's communist forces defeated Jiang Jieshi's U.S.-backed Nationalist government, sending the Nationalists fleeing to Taiwan and making the world's most populated nation officially communist.
What is the Chinese Civil War?
In 1956, citizens and even the Hungarian army rose up against Soviet rule but this is what happened when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest: the uprising was crushed, the reform leader Imre Nagy was eventually executed, and the West did nothing to help.
What is the Hungarian Revolution?
On August 18, 1991, communist hardliners kidnapped Gorbachev and sent tanks into Moscow but their coup collapsed in just three days when this happened, turning the tide and destroying what remained of the Communist Party's authority.
What is the soldiers refusing to follow the order to attack the parliament building?
This Cold War strategy was based on a terrifying but logical idea: if one superpower launched a nuclear attack, the other would fire back immediately; guaranteeing that both sides would be completely destroyed, so neither would ever start a war.
What is Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)?
This 1957 Soviet achievement shocked the United States so deeply that Congress immediately created NASA and increased funding for science and math education because if the USSR could launch this into orbit, it could also launch a nuclear missile at any American city.
What is Sputnik?
Mao launched this economic campaign in 1958 hoping to rapidly turn China into an industrial power but instead, it created 26,000 collective farms, removed all incentives to work, and caused a famine that killed an estimated 15 to 55 million people.
What is the Great Leap Forward?
This Nixon policy, based on the idea of "realistic politics," replaced the dangerous strategy of brinkmanship in the 1970s; leading Nixon to become the first U.S. president to visit Communist China and sign a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union.
What is détente?
Boris Yeltsin's bold economic plan switched Russia from communism to capitalism all at once causing inflation to average 800% per year, factories to close, and thousands of people losing their jobs.
What is a "Shock Therapy"?
Rather than fighting each other directly, the U.S. and USSR used this strategy throughout the Cold War, supporting opposite sides in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and Afghanistan to compete for global influence without risking nuclear war.
What is a proxy war?
This long and costly war cost over 58,000 American lives, ended with South Vietnam falling to communism in 1975, and shattered American public trust in the government more deeply than any other Cold War conflict.
What is the Vietnam War?
Mao sent these armed groups of young students out of their classrooms in 1966 to attack teachers, professors, and government officials causing years of chaos across China before Mao's own army was ordered to shut them down in 1968.
Who are the Red Guards?
Despite signing a 30-year friendship treaty in 1950, the Soviet Union and China became rivals within a decade; eventually clashing militarily along their shared border because China resented this.
What is the Soviet-Chinese split?
On this specific date in 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of a country that no longer existed; making it the official end of the Soviet Union after 69 years.
What is Christmas Day / December 25, 1991?
Winston Churchill used this famous phrase to describe the invisible dividing line between communist-controlled Eastern Europe and the democratic nations of Western Europe; a division that would define the Cold War for decades.
What is the Iron Curtain?
This 1949 Western military alliance and its 1955 Soviet counterpart divided Europe into two armed camps; making every regional conflict a potential trigger for a much larger war between the superpowers.
What are NATO and the Warsaw Pact?
China's communist revolution in 1949 and its 1950 friendship treaty with the Soviet Union changed the Cold War by doing this; alarming the United States and directly contributing to China's involvement in the Korean War the same year.
What is the China-Soviet friendship treaty?
The Soviet invasion of this country in 1979 killed the SALT II Treaty before it could be ratified, ended the era of détente, and helped push Ronald Reagan into the White House setting the stage for a dramatic escalation of Cold War tensions in the 1980s.
What is Afghanistan?
Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika to fix the Soviet Union but these reforms, combined with Reagan's military pressure, ethnic independence movements, and the failed August Coup, all led to this final outcome that changed the world forever.
What is the complete collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union / the end of the Cold War?