History UsefulNotes / HistoryOfTheColdWar

The Chinese Civil War had been ongoing since about 1916 or so, and the two strongest factions to emerge from it in the final years of the conflict were the German-Soviet-US-backed Guomindang (lit. National People's Party, aka 'The Nationalist Party') and the Soviet-backed Communist Party. After winning the conventional war with the capture of Hainan island in May 1950, the Communists went on to stamp out the last Guomindang and Muslim insurgencies (bar those in Burma) by the mid-1950s. The USSR strongly insisted that the new People's Republic of China should have the permanent Security Council seat in the UN, not the Republic of China/Taiwan. Because of the boycott, the USSR didn't have to abstain from voting on UNSC Resolution 82 (If the USSR ''hadn't'' been able to find a way to avoid attending, vetoing it would probably have been necessary to avoid the appearance of selling the PRC out-- even though this would not have been in the USSR's interests. Appearances matter ) which was passed on 27 June. For the first time in its history, the UN was going to war. 17 countries showed up, with nearly all the work being done by the U.S. (who provided 88% of the UN task force) and South Korea. After initial setbacks the UN started to push the North Koreans back; when they pushed too far, the Chinese did just as Stalin had hoped and joined the party to forestall what they saw as a potential NATO invasion. The Soviets were then able to make a killing selling the PRC all sorts of semi-obsolescent weaponry (such as semi-automatic rifles, which assault rifles like the [[CoolGuns AK-47]] had just made redundant) and greatly strengthened their alliance and 'Revolutionary Cred' within the 'Second World' (by fighting the capitalist First World, of course) by providing anti-air weaponry to and fighter cover for the Chinese forces.[=MacArthur=] had plans to expand the war into China, though these plans were never executed as he was relieved of command for making damaging statements against Truman. ''[[Literature/{{Mash}} M*]][[Film/{{Mash}} A*S]][[Series/{{MASH}} *H]]'' dealt with a lot of incoming wounded.\\\

The USA's Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM (No, [[NamesTheSame not]] [[VideoGame/XComUFODefense those]] [[VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown guys]])) discussed what to do about the missiles on Cuba. JFK secretly recorded the meetings, which helps historians a lot. The Joint Chiefs were being GeneralRipper before that trope first appeared. Indeed, Air Force General Curtis [=LeMay=]— the inspiration for Ripper — was at the meetings advocating airstrikes. Eventually they settled on a blockade. Since that is legally an act of war, they called it a "quarantine", and JFK announced the existence of the missiles to the world. This completely wrong-footed Khrushchev and Castro. Their secret alliance was supposed to have been, well, ''secret'' until they chose to publicly declare it (when the missiles were all in-place). Declaring its existence ''after'' the revelations about the missiles would make it look like they were lying (in addition to not having had legal grounds for moving Soviet war material onto Cuban soil because they hadn't had an alliance), so they never ended up revealing it. The USA's Strategic Air Command (SAC) went to [[DefconFive DEFCON-2]] for the only time in its history.\\\

After a few very tense days, two contradictory letters, and the Soviets deciding not to challenge the quarantine line, a deal was reached. The missiles would be removed from Cuba, and the US would not invade Cuba like they had been kinda-planning to do. The U.S. also secretly agreed to remove the Jupiter and Thor missiles, but they were obsolete anyway as the ICBM force was coming on-line. When the dust settled Kennedy looked like the victor, Khrushchev suffered a final blow his prestige that cost him his job, and the world breathed a sigh of relief that the "Thirteen Days" had not been their last. To make further crises easier to solve, the HotLine was set up.\\\

The Soviet Union had promised to hold free elections in the areas under its control. The elections held, however, are [[YouSaidYouWouldLetThemGo generally considered to have been unfree]]. [[UsefulNotes/IronCurtain Communist governments were slowly installed in the various states, who declared their allegiance to Moscow.]] The monarchies of Romania and Bulgaria were abolished, literally at gunpoint in Romania and with a ridiculously blatant rigging of a plebiscite in Bulgaria. (In a strange twist, Simeon II, last Tsar of Bulgaria, would much later be democratically elected prime minister of that country.) In 1948, the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was found below his bathroom window in Prague. He had played a role in the February 1948 Czech Coup, where non-communist members of the unity government quit trying to force elections. This led to the communists forming a new government instead. Masaryk had been unhappy about Czechoslovakia's decision not participate in the Marshall Plan. The government [[CutHimselfShaving called his death a suicide]], but his cause of death is debated to this day. Many call it the [[DestinationDefenestration Third Defenestration of Prague]] ((after the First Defenestration that had started the 15th-century Hussite Wars and the Second Defenestration that started the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar).)\\\

In Eastern Europe, Soviet Union strained by wartime deprivations, a famine in 1946, nonetheless took the task of wartime reconstruction and organization. In Poland, they rebuilt with the aid of Polish residents much of Warsaw, which had been destroyed by Nazi Germany, and undertook the task of agrarian reform. (Many Polish also believe that the Soviets enabled this by refusing to aid the Home Army during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, but recent military historians such as David Glantz and Richard Overy agree that the Rokossovsky's Belarussian Front faced a counter-attack and they could not have realistically aided the Uprising and while Stalin was definitely not a man with Poland's best interest at heart, this would qualify as a case of NotMeThisTime) Wartime reparations from Germany as well as the use of German [=POWs=]s as forced labour, aided them considerably in post-war reconstruction. The greater wartime losses of its population and the post-war famine, was one of the factors why the USSR did not see a baby boom compared to post-war America, which eventually led to the latter exceeding the Soviet Union in population size. \\\

Korea is notable for being the first jet war, where jet aircraft were used in a big way, especially the [=MiG-15=] and F-86 Sabre. It was still, however, a guns-only environment, since air-to-air missiles were not around yet. A lot of the 'North Korean' pilots were from the Soviet Air Force. The UN knew this and chose to ignore it, the US pointedly not following through on what they later called 'Massive Retaliation' doctrine (immediate nuclear carpet-bombing of the USSR's cities in the event of any US-USSR conflict whatsoever). After a short period of back-and-forth campaigns, followed by a long stretch of negotiations while fighting over the same set of meaningless hills around the 38th parallel, the war ended in a stalemate, unresolved to this day. (Upon Stalin's death the new Soviet leadership, a Troika under Lavrenty Beria (who, depending on who you ask, was either a sociopathic serial rapist and murderer or a regular Soviet senior official who actually tried to push through genuinely beneficial reforms but [[WrittenByTheWinners got vilified after losing]]), decided that the USA was becoming just a teeeeeeensy bit too paranoid and nuke-happy for them to be comfortable with continuing an open war against them. Consequently the Soviets pushed for a truce and got it. Both sides declared [[PyrrhicVictory victory]]-- but since the UN, China, and the Soviet Union never officially declared war, no treaty was signed. The two surface combatants, North and South Korea, still have not officially signed a treaty to end the war.)

UsefulNotes/JosefStalin died in the March of 1953 in suitably horrific circumstances much to the relief of many Soviet Jews who were suffering during his final purge of the Doctor's Plot, which was immediately ended and reversed at his passing. What followed was a serious power struggle in the Soviet Union's leadership. The first to come to power was [[FourEyesZeroSoul Lavrentiy Beriya]], the former head of Stalin's secret police (the NKVD). Unfortunately for him, nobody trusted and everybody hated him. He moved to take down his troika partners and premier enemies within the party and government, but in doing so overlooked UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev. (Khruschev was a mere 'second-tier' leader in Georgiy Malenkov's faction at the time, but in response to Beria's attempts the party and the government rallied around him as a new leader. Khrushchev and General Georgy Zhukov ([[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII yes]], ''[[UsefulNotes/RedsWithRockets that]]'' Georgy Zhukov) rallied enough members of their respective factions to mount a coup. Troops loyal to Zhukov accompanied him as he personally arrested Beria and ensured he got the trial (and subsequent execution) he'd had coming for so long for his crimes against the Soviet people in general and the Soviet leadership in particular.) This period of uncertainty, as revealed in Soviet Archives, had the potential for detente. During his brief time in power Beria had seriously proposed the re-unification of Germany as a neutral state. There was a surprising amount of genuine support for the initiative, but Beria's association with the initiative made it politically unacceptable for Malenkov to give it the go-ahead once he took power. In addition, [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/18/last-days-of-stalin-joshua-rubinstein-review none of their proposals were seriously considered by the West]] even if UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill of all people supported the potential for changes in the Soviet Union. It was not in the interests of the Eisenhower administration to allow the Soviets to play peacekeepers and pacifist. The Soviet Invasion of Hungary was far more to their liking. The administration did not do anything to help the Rebels citing the potential for the nuclear war but they also saw it as an opportunity to further discredit the communists, which it did. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was bad, but for most fellow travelers of Communists and actual party members, this became the true BrokenPedestal moment (After Beria's removal Malenkov, one of the few leaders of the Soviet Union to not be bald, took power with Khruschev and Zhukov as his seconds. During his premiership, the Soviet Union invaded UsefulNotes/{{Hungary}} to suppress the popular anti-Soviet revolutions that were going on. However, Beria's attempted purge of Malenkov had actually made him and Khruschev equals, and Khrushchev proved quite influential in running the country during Malenkov's premiership. He was the first advocate of reducing nuclear arms in order to refocus the economy on consumer goods, which required peace talks with the U.S. Eventually Malenkov ran afoul of Khrushchev, to whom he referred as "the moon-faced idiot", and was ousted as Premier and replaced with Nikolay Bulganin, who basically just let Khrushchev run the country. Malenkov ended up as [[ReassignedToAntarctica a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan]]. An improvement from Stalinist times; in the past he might have been shot as Khruschev so helpfully reminded him).\\\

Khruschev's polices of destalinization also marked the origins of the Sino-Soviet split. UsefulNotes/MaoZedong warned him that many communist parties around the world counted on Stalin's leadership for their legitimacy (including his), and by discrediting Stalin in such a manner, they would politically compromise the relationships of satellite communists to the metropole. (Mao's leadership of the CCP was never as secure and firm as Stalin's. The CCP didn't exist until the Soviets formed it in Shanghai during the 20s, and indeed the Soviets backed the KMT of Dr Sun-Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek. Stalin suggested to the CCP, in the words of the Soviet Emissary to China, to serve the KMT "as a coolie" yet repeated purges by the KMT made that impossible for them to do and eventually Mao led the CCP during the 30s and 40s to an independent KMT course that Stalin did not authorize but finally shrugged his shoulders and accepted) Khruschev went ahead nonetheless, and this, coupled with constant border clashes between the Chinese and the Soviets at the Amur River, marked the start of a break between the two largest Communist nations. (Mao was a ruthless and calculating leader who had been a [[LaResistance "resistance"]] leader against the Japanese, [[ThePiratesWhoDontDoAnything whom he was careful to maintain unofficial truces with at all times]], and the Guomindang. Unfortunately, by the end of 1952 the Civil War was completely over and he was the undisputed leader of the entire country. "Unfortunately", [[ModernMajorGeneral his policies]] [[DidntSeeThatComing proved]] [[ArtisticLicenseEconomics disastrous]]. The Second Five-Year Plan/"Great Leap Forward" killed a couple of dozen million through starvation-related diseases and exposure to the elements (no more, please, let's not go for sensationalism) and The Cultural Revolution killed tens of thousands (and traumatised tens of millions) in brutal and disturbingly mass-hysteric ways. These included many of the Communist Party’s own revolutionary leaders, who were [[{{Unperson}} unpersoned]] as “reactionary rightists”.) \\\

From about 1956-1961, China and the Soviet Union slowly split apart due to a myriad of issues and bad blood in general. In the post-war period Stalin took advantage of Communist China's isolation from the rest of the world to force Mao into a series of ''very'' unequal trade agreements in exchange for the limited technical assistance the USSR gave China. (This is on top of the whole "insult to injury thing" whereby the Soviets had literally stolen half of China's industry. By dismantling all the industries of Manchuria wholesale (and shipping them back to the USSR) during their occupation of the region, they doomed 100,000+ locals to starve and/or freeze to death during the winter of 1945-46.) Mao for his part believed that Stalin's successors were too soft and that, as their senior, ''he'' should be leader of the Communist ("Second") World. In any case, tension mounted until it escalated into border clashes. China developed her own nuclear weapons largely as a deterrent against the Soviets and even began to compete with the Soviet Union for satellite states; notably, Enver Hoxha’s Albania switched to China’s side in 1961. (After Mao’s death Hoxha would pursue a paranoid isolationist policy, denouncing both the PRC and the USSR, and proclaimed Albania to be the world’s only Marxist-Leninist state) The break opened up China to America more, starting with sporting tournaments and building to Richard Nixon's famous visit in 1972. (As an aside, the saying "only Nixon could go to China" is symbolic of Nixon's conservatism: a liberal would've been accused of being a Communist himself, but Nixon (like Eisenhower before him) couldn't be.) Mao Zedong's death in 1976 brought the more capitalist Deng Xiaoping into power, and he instituted many economic reforms. By the end of the Cold War China had abandoned much of the Maoist ideology and fast moving towards becoming a market economy, though it remains to this day a one-party state.

The end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII had meant that the colonial powers could no longer afford to maintain their empires without American support. Roosevelt was committed to decolonization and classic old-fashioned imperialism had seen its day. Ideas like democracy, self-determination and nationalism began to spread around the world and many in the colonies were no longer willing to tolerate colonial rule. Neither the Americans nor the Soviets were keen on colonies either, and called for "decolonization" in the name of self-determination and freedom. (Arguably this was hypocritical given that America had itself had been a colonial power after their Civil War and 1898 Spanish-American Wars, in Cuba and the Philippines. The USSR had reclaimed most of Imperial Russia's former territories after their own Civil War and WWII (to be fair, Russian "colonization" was drastically different from and arguably more benevolent than that of other European powers, with no ethnic/racial dimension but a ''very'' strong religious/ideological one).) During the Cold War, outright colonialism was replaced with two superpowers aggressively pushing various countries in their political direction, and helping foster revolts in the ones that didn't. This bears resemblance to the Anglo-French continental great power rivalry of the 18th Century but now played out on a global scale (England and France between say 1712-1815 engaged in a century of wars across all their colonies backing rivals and rebellions to weaken each other's position. One French proxy-war was the American War of Independence and the Americans received French patronage to weaken the First British Empire. This ended with UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution and Napoleon's defeat which led to the consolidation of UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire). As countries in the so-called "Third World" gained independence one by one with varying degrees of Sino-Soviet aid, the West and the Soviet Union (and China too) competed in various morally-questionable ways to bring them into their respective spheres.\\\

The US, for its part, devised and tested increasingly powerful nuclear bombs, starting with the Castle Bravo tests of the first Hydrogen bomb in 1954. The "father" of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, would go on to propose a 10 ''Gigaton'' nuclear bomb named GNOMON that, using the Teller-Ulam linking system, could theoretically destroy the entire world. Appropriately, it's delivery system was written as "Backyard." Congress wasn't interested and Teller's increasingly unhinged proposals got him shunned in the mainstream scientific community. Combined with the calls from many Manhatten Project scientists like Robert Oppenheimer for de-escalation and the US government's interest in a bigger boom waned. Resources were instead directed to increasing the capabilities of their delivery systems, and towards defensive systems.\\\

The rest of the French Empire would disintegrate similarly. French colonial rule was even more heavy-handed than the British, so as a result its colonies struggled more under independence. Communist insurgencies were common, owing both to the popularity of socialist ideology in the Francophone world -including France itself, which second to Italy had the most powerful communist movement in the West- and to the abject poverty and desperation the French had left them in. Moralizing initiatives in the late 19th century and early 20th century forced the British to put their money where their mouth was and build up their colonies to prove their "civilizing mission" wasn't just talk. France, and the other European nations, held no such pretensions, and their colonies were purely exploitative for the benefit of the motherland. This left them under-developed and unequipped to handle independence. Syria would fight off the French and struggle to find an independent identity, briefly uniting with Nasser's Egypt before being taken over by Bashir al Assad's Ba'ath Party (only tangentially related to Saddam's Ba'ath Party in Iraq). Their African possessions, sans Algeria, were granted independence throughout the 50s and 60s, but not always without violence. Plans to unite the Francophone countries of West Africa fell through partly due to tribalism, but mostly because the French dropped it when they realized that [[DivideAndConquer a bunch of small, weak countries are easier to control than one big one.]] To this day, France has continued to play a hand in West African political and military affairs in order to maintain their interests in the region. Vietnam, which is covered in more detail [[TheVietnamWar it's own page]], faced a communist insurgency by the Viet Minh.\\\

Other countries also had their share of decolonization messes: the Dutch, with their bloody campaign to hold their East Indies which killed a good hundred-thousand, and the almost cartoonishly brutal Belgians with their war in and evacuation of the Congo (which killed hundreds of thousands more) and its horrific aftermath (the Rwandan Genocide). Notably, Portugal and Franco's Spanish State, both ruled by quasi-fascist dictators, did not let go of their colonies until the mid-1970s when both countries lost their revolutionary wars against the locals and thereafter became democracies. Angola and Mozambique, two Portuguese colonies in Africa, soon became the scene of bloody, decades-long proxy wars, fought between Soviet-backed and Western-backed rebel factions, with occasional Cuban and South African interventions, which continued long after the Cold War ended. The unpopularity of these colonial wars led to the collapse of the Portuguese ''Estado Novo'' fascist dictatorship, and not long after Franco would pass and Juan Carlos II would oversee Spain's transition back to democracy.\\\

The Soviets’ ICBM forces were a) very few, b) ''very'' vulnerable as they were not in silos (The USSR used a mostly train-based missile launch system, under the (ultimately mistaken) impression that a mobile force was more difficult to destroy than a stationary, reinforced location. A direct side effect of this is that US intelligence agencies became ''very'' good at finding things with the increasingly ubiquitous SpySatellite, which was more or less developed to spy on 'the Russians'.), and c) time-consuming to launch (Most Soviet missiles used a particularly toxic and, more importantly, ''corrosive'' blend of rocket fuel (the R-7s that also served as satellite launchers ran on relatively benign liquid oxygen and kerosene, but see below). Because Soviet metallurgy was not as advanced as U.S. efforts, the Soviet missiles could only be fueled for a limited time (a few days) before they would have to be unfueled, maintained, and refueled (with the R-7s, the liquid oxygen would evaporate in even ''less'' time, about a day). As a result, unless an offensive posture was needed, missiles were kept empty of rocket fuel until they were set to be launched. Since fueling a missile can take up to ''four hours'', it was understandably a problem for launch preparedness. This is why Cold War movies make such a big deal about missiles being fueled: it is neither a secret process, and it indicates a dramatic increase in offensive posture. U.S. missiles did not have this problem.).\\\

The victor of Stalin's death is, without a doubt, [[BaldOfAwesome Nikita Khrushchev]]. For most of his reign he was the First Secretary of the Communist party, but he was definitely in control of the Soviet Union until about 1963. His policy of "Peaceful Coexistence" was essentially a rip-off of Malenkov's ideas—since the fall of the capitalist devils was inevitable, the USSR would have no need to oppose the U.S., because fate would take care of it for them. As such Khrushchev could focus more money on the Soviet domestic economy. Khrushchev was a fairly simple, plain-speaking guy...which got him (and the world) into trouble a few times. (Such as his accusation, on being barred access from Disneyland, that the U.S. government was keeping secret nuclear missiles hidden under Tomorrowland—presumably in the same place they're keeping Disney's frozen corpse.) An important aspect of Khrushchev's reign was the policy of de-Stalinization, whereby he discredited Stalin, and by extension Stalin's network of client-patronage (which formerly had included him). He accused Stalin of being heavily involved in purges and he reconstructed many of the victims during the 30s, while leaving out the fact that he himself had submitted execution quotas during ThePurge. Some political prisoners were freed and some of the gulags were closed; [[Creator/AleksandrSolzhenitsyn a survivor of the gulags]] was even allowed to publish his experiences. However, Khrushchev stopped short of initiating a true political liberalization.\\\

In 1958, a man with [[BadassBeard an impressive beard]] called UsefulNotes/FidelCastro overthrew the Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. Batista had been pro-[[BananaRepublic big business]]. Cuba was a major exporter of sugar, was famous for its cigars, and TheMafia had set up shop there. However, the U.S. government had not been totally in love with this Batista guy, and had actually arms embargoed him.\\\

A similar situation occurred in Palestine, only this time it was the UN that pressured the British into leaving. As a result, the British became somewhat infamous in diplomatic circles for a "not our bloody problem, we warned you" attitude to the UsefulNotes/ArabIsraeliConflict in TheFifties and [[TheSixties Sixties]]. The rest of the Empire went fairly quietly, with many British overseas territories gaining their independence from 1950-1980. However, it was not always a peaceful transition of power. Many countries, such as Grenada, would be fraught with political instability and eventually fall to dictatorship. In Kenya in the 1950s, the Mau Mau Uprising threatened British colonial rule, with the British resorting to outright genocidal measures to fight them. Some British colonies, like Ghana, would peacefully gain their independence and manage to stay (relatively) politically stable, and to this day Commonwealth countries maintain some of the highest living standards and strongest economies in their respective regions. For example, the top 3 performing sub-Saharan African economies are all former British colonies: South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. Some British colonies would instead try to preserve the white nationalist policies of the Empire through violence, with South Africa becoming a horrific apartheid state, and white colonists in newly independent Rhodesia fighting an African socialist insurgency. Both would fight bloody wars across the region of Southern Africa, intervening in the independence wars of Angola and Mozambique to try and keep the balance in favor of white colonists. The white nationalists would thankfully lose in the end, but while South Africa started on a path to democracy and integration, whites were largely driven out of Rhodesia, and the rebels mostly failed to develop the region, with their rule descending into kleptocratic cronyism not all dissimilar to colonial rule.\\\

A similar situation occurred in Palestine, only this time it was the UN that pressured the British into leaving. As a result, the British became somewhat infamous in diplomatic circles for a "not our bloody problem, we warned you" attitude to the UsefulNotes/ArabIsraeliConflict in TheFifties and [[TheSixties Sixties]]. The rest of the Empire went fairly quietly bar the Bush Wars of British Rhodesia (which only killed a few thousand).\\\

Other countries also had their share of decolonization messes: the Dutch, with their bloody campaign to hold their East Indies which killed a good hundred-thousand, and the almost cartoonishly brutal Belgians with their war in and evacuation of the Congo (which killed hundreds of thousands more) and its horrific aftermath (the Rwandan Genocide). Notably, Portugal and Franco's Spanish State, both ruled by quasi-fascist dictators, did not let go of their colonies until the mid-1970s when both countries lost their revolutionary wars against the locals and thereafter became democracies. Angola and Mozambique, two Portuguese colonies in Africa, soon became the scene of bloody, decades-long proxy wars, fought between Soviet-backed and Western-backed rebel factions, with occasional Cuban and South African interventions, which continued long after the Cold War ended.

Female suffrage in England and the United States took effect a few years after the October Revolution, while the British Empire passed more reforms after the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarI that finally and decisively put into effect universal suffrage in the metropole (albeit not its colonies which it maintained until UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and a more committed anti-colonial Democrat President entered office). The United States for its part, under Woodrow Wilson, encouraged national self-determination and limited but not complete decolonization, measures to end imperialism to erode the appeals of Communism at home. But American isolationism and the vested interests of industrial elites which supported both parties led to the repression and mass deportation of many American radicals during the first RedScare. This would moderate during TheThirties in the wake of TheGreatDepression, under the Presidency of UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt. He was the first American President to officially recognize the Soviet Union, and he instituted the New Deal, a social democrat policy partially inspired by the (perceived) successes of the USSR's First Five Year Plan, [[TheMoralSubstitute and created with the goal to co-opt class angst and anti-establishment feelings]] that might potentially strengthen the cause and appeal of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The CPUSA was always a marginal party but it was at its ''least'' marginal during the 30s, having a good deal of influence in the Union movement, and taking up the cause of African-American enfranchisement by marching to the South in the 30s (which laid down the foundations for the UsefulNotes/CivilRightsMovement) which generated fear, anger and reaction among American conservatives, as well as moderate liberals.\\\

Within England, the Labour Party enjoyed growing consensus, leading the Conservatives to agitate and engage in anti-communist campaigns. The Labour was social democrat rather than Communist, but the existence of a Communist Party made their less-radical-by-few-degrees platform more consensual and attractive to the English base (Lenin also recommended the British Communist Party to ally and support them). An early victory by Labour in the 20s was derailed by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter the propaganda success of the forged Zinoviev Letter]], while Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists, admittedly fringe, managed to attract high profile support from England's elites. The international appeals of Communism also led the UsefulNotes/TheRaj to go lightly on seemingly moderate and harmless reformers like UsefulNotes/MahatmaGandhi whose political successes led in turn to widespread international consensus for decolonization and Indian Independence, permanently tarnishing the formerly widely believed British propaganda about benevolent colonial enterprise. UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill was a fierce anti-communist and imperialist. He was favorable to General Franco during the UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar and opposed the Republicans (mostly because they were supported by the USSR) and indeed England, France and the USA refused to intervene in said conflict, which became a celebrated cause for the Popular Front coalition sponsored by Comintern (an anti-fascist alliance between multiple leftwing parties to halt fascism).\\\

In the wake of the Cold War, American politics swung to the right, culminating in the second RedScare, leading to the Smith Act Trials, UsefulNotes/TheHollywoodBlacklist and a vast propaganda campaign to discredit communism at home and abroad. This ultimately manifested itself in the political careers of UsefulNotes/JosephMcCarthy and also UsefulNotes/RichardNixon who as Republican senator propelled to fame with his involvement in Whitaker Chambers-Alger Hiss incident. UsefulNotes/HarryTruman, who had proved to be unfortunately inexperienced at foreign policy (despite the fact that he had more sense than [[GeneralRipper MacArthur]] in that he thought dropping [[AtomicHate the Bomb]] on China was a bad idea), was out as president. Truman was anti-communist but opposed to anti-communist agitation. The Democrat candidate Adlai Stevenson who had similar inclinations lost to UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower who won on a strong anticommunist platform and who co-opted some of [=McCarthy=]'s rhetoric as part of his campaign. As the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, Senator [=McCarthy=] couldn't even begin to claim that he was soft on commies, which gave Ike much more room to decide his own foreign policy, unlike Truman, who'd been pressured into a tough stance by [[RedScare the McCarthy brigade]]. It was Eisenhower that pushed the disastrous Korean War towards a close in the same year that he was sworn in and his administration would ultimate withdraw patronage from [=McCarthy=] leading to the latter's downfall and political disgrace, putting [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness a stopper to hectoring anti-communist hysteria now that it clearly served its purpose]] of putting a Republican in the White House after 20 years of Democrat presidency. \\\

This also meant that the U.S. overthrew communist regimes and killed communists Latin America. This meant propping up pro-American leaders in the area—even (heck, especially) if they were brutal dictators. They helped overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala, leading to four decades of military rule before the CIA helped restore democracy in 1993. They also supported a coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, a popular left-wing leader who the U.S. was afraid would go Soviet. The coup went off on 11 September 1973—a fact noted 30 years later on the second anniversary of 9/11. Allende's fall led to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, a rather nasty piece of work. And in Brazil in 1964, and in Argentina, and in Uruguay, and… you get the idea. The U.S. involvement in Latin American politics caused a great degree of lingering resentment and partly explains Hugo Chávez. It turns out that when the "capitalism" team is known for propping up authoritarian dictatorships, communism gets more popular—who knew?

* Traditionalist - USA good, USSR evil.
* Revisionist - USA bad, USSR bad.
* Post-revisionist - USA bad, USSR worse(the status of the latter hinging of course upon the incumbency of UsefulNotes/JosefStalin).

Vietnam was split, on a supposedly temporary basis, into two zones: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), a Communist nation, and the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam), which was capitalist and French/U.S. backed. The southern state was only supposed to be temporary, and a planned election in 1956 was meant to reunify the country. It never happened. It was realized that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win the elections, so the south refused to hold them. This [[NotSoDifferent piece of irony]] is mostly forgotten in the United States. For even more irony, Ho Chi Minh, during the war with French, actually sought U.S. backing. The U.S. opted for French imperialism over communist insurgency.\\\

* Post-revisionist - USA bad, USSR bad/evil (the status of the latter hinging of course upon the incumbency of UsefulNotes/JosefStalin).

The Chinese Civil War had been ongoing since about 1916 or so, and the two strongest factions to emerge from it in the final years of the conflict were the German-Soviet-US-backed Guomindang (lit. National People's Party, aka 'The Nationalist Party') and the Soviet-backed Communist Party. After winning the conventional war with the capture of Hainan island in May 1950, the Communists went on to stamp out the last Guomindang and Muslim insurgencies (bar those in Burma) by the mid-1950s. The USSR strongly insisted that the new People's Republic of China should have the permanent Security Council seat in the UN, not the Republic of China/Taiwan. Because of the boycott, the USSR didn't have to abstain from voting on UNSC Resolution 82 (If the USSR ''hadn't'' been able to find a way to avoid attending, vetoing it would probably have been necessary to avoid the appearance of selling the PRC out-- even though this would not have been in the USSR's interests. Appearances matter ) which was passed on 27 June. For the first time in its history, the UN was going to war. 17 countries showed up, with nearly all the work being done by the U.S. (who provided 88% of the UN task force) and South Korea. After initial setbacks the UN started to push the North Koreans back; when they pushed too far, the Chinese did just as Stalin had hoped and joined the party to forestall what they saw as a potential NATO invasion. The Soviets were then able to make a killing selling the PRC all sorts of semi-obsolescent weaponry (such as semi-automatic rifles, which assault rifles like the [[CoolGuns AK-47]] had just made redundant) and greatly strengthened their alliance and 'Revolutionary Cred' within the 'Second World' (by fighting the capitalist First World, of course) by providing anti-air weaponry to and fighter cover for the Chinese forces. [=MacArthur=] got sacked for wanting to actually attack-- and, indeed, ''nuke''-- China proper. ''[[Literature/{{Mash}} M*]][[Film/{{Mash}} A*S]][[Series/{{MASH}} *H]]'' dealt with a lot of incoming wounded.\\\

As with the 1950s, the 80s witnessed an important shift in leadership on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Compared to Richard Nixon (who was the first Western leader to open relations with Red China, and signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the USSR), Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, Reagan was staunchly anticommunist, being one of [=McCarthy's=] contacts in Hollywood, and worked to heat tensions that had been cooled since the 70s. Meanwhile, the USSR witnessed a rapid change in leadership, going through three chairmen in three years before Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the position, the youngest leader in its history and first to have been born since Red October.\\\

There are three approaches among western political scientists regarding the Cold War, which can be surmised thusly. They also overlap with the views of the Soviet Union, informed and otherwise-- most English-language opinions being, of course, uninformed given the USSR's secrecy and the USA's self-obsession, as well as the propaganda campaigns of each nation and power-bloc:

Korea had been a ''de facto'' Japanese colony since the UsefulNotes/RussoJapaneseWar of 1905 and an official one in 1910, and much like Germany was supposed to become one independent country after the war. However, the Soviets and NATO were as unable to agree on the form of government such a new nation would take in Korea as they were in Germany, and so Korea was split (without actually bothering to consult the Korean dictators or people, natch). The Soviet occupation zone became the [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic People's Republic of Korea]] (UsefulNotes/NorthKorea), and got a Communist one-party government under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung. (Kim had played some ill-defined role as a Communist rebel leader against the Japanese before and during the war; his official biographers give him a heroic role, but outside observers claim he did little but sit in Soviet territory and make surprisingly practical plans.) The American occupation zone in the south became the Republic of Korea (UsefulNotes/SouthKorea), and got a Capitalist kleptocracy under the leadership of Syngman Rhee. This is because the NATO occupation forces thought a 'firm hand' was necessary to curb communist influence, and Rhee (who'd been in exile in the USA) fit the bill nicely. Both dictators sought to unify the peninsula by force, but as a partial democracy South Korea's politicians were ultimately able to veto the armament programme that Rhee needed to impose his rule upon the north. On 25 June 1950 (which is why the war is known as the 6.25 War in Korea), North Korean forces unexpectedly crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, using that age-old justification that they were attacked first. (In this case, they weren't.) When it became very clear that South Korea was losing badly, Truman went to the United Nations to get approval for what he termed a "police action". This rather strange term allowed him to avoid actually getting a declaration of war from Congress, which he felt would be too time-consuming. The legality of this is disputed, but it has since proved [[CombatPragmatist a useful maneuver in U.S. foreign policy]]. As someone once said, "Decisions are made by those who show up". In this case, it was the Soviet Union who very deliberately didn't - because they ''wanted'' a USA-PRC confrontation of some sort, the bigger the better (The logic was simple: USA-PRC conflict would prevent Sino-American rapprochement and strengthen Sino-Soviet ties whilst keeping the USA's attention focused in East Asia and not Europe. This would help keep Soviet changes to the political nature of eastern Europe (which was already barely-independent, but had to be brought under close and proper Soviet control to guard against defections to 'The West') out of the spotlight in the US media. To this end the Soviets boycotted the UN's Security Council meetings over 'the China issue').\\\

The Chinese Civil War had been ongoing since about 1916 or so, and the two strongest factions to emerge from it in the final years of the conflict were the German-Soviet-US-backed Guomindang (lit. National People's Party, aka 'The Nationalist Party') and the Soviet-backed Communist Party. After winning the conventional war with the capture of Hainan island in May 1950, the Communists went on to stamp out the last Guomindang and Muslim insurgencies (bar those in Burma) by the mid-1950s. The USSR strongly insisted that the new People's Republic of China should have the permanent Security Council seat in the UN, not the Republic of China/Taiwan. Because of the boycott, the USSR didn't have to abstain from voting on UNSC Resolution 82 (If the USSR ''hadn't'' been able to find a way to avoid attending, vetoing it would probably have been necessary to avoid the appearance of selling the PRC out - even though this would not have been in the USSR's interests. Appearances matter ) which was passed on 27 June. For the first time in its history, the UN was going to war. 17 countries showed up, with nearly all the work being done by the U.S. (who provided 88% of the UN task force) and South Korea. After initial setbacks the UN started to push the North Koreans back; when they pushed too far, the Chinese did just as Stalin had hoped and joined the party to forestall what they saw as a potential NATO invasion. The Soviets were then able to make a killing selling the PRC all sorts of semi-obsolescent weaponry (such as semi-automatic rifles, which assault rifles like the [[CoolGuns AK-47]] had just made redundant) and greatly strengthened their alliance and 'Revolutionary Cred' within the 'Second World' (by fighting the capitalist First World, of course) by providing anti-air weaponry to and fighter cover for the Chinese forces. [=MacArthur=] got sacked for wanting to actually attack - and, indeed, ''nuke'' - China proper. ''[[Literature/{{Mash}} M*]][[Film/{{Mash}} A*S]][[Series/{{MASH}} *H]]'' dealt with a lot of incoming wounded.\\\

Korea is notable for being the first jet war, where jet aircraft were used in a big way, especially the [=MiG-15=] and F-86 Sabre. It was still, however, a guns-only environment, since air-to-air missiles were not around yet. A lot of the 'North Korean' pilots were from the Soviet Air Force. The UN knew this and chose to ignore it, the US pointedly not following through on what they later called 'Massive Retaliation' doctrine (immediate nuclear carpet-bombing of the USSR's cities in the event of any US-USSR conflict whatsoever). After a short period of back-and-forth campaigns, followed by a long stretch of negotiations while fighting over the same set of meaningless hills around the 38th parallel, the war ended in a stalemate, unresolved to this day. (Upon Stalin's death the new Soviet leadership, a Troika under Lavrenty Beria (who, depending on who you ask, was either a sociopathic serial rapist and murderer or a regular Soviet senior official who actually tried to push through genuinely beneficial reforms but [[WrittenByTheWinners got vilified after losing]]), decided that the USA was becoming just a teeeeeeensy bit too paranoid and nuke-happy for them to be comfortable with continuing an open war against them. Consequently the Soviets pushed for a truce and got it. Both sides declared [[PyrrhicVictory victory]] - but since the UN, China, and the Soviet Union never officially declared war, no treaty was signed. The two surface combatants, North and South Korea, still have not officially signed a treaty to end the war.)

Just as importantly, they also strove to develop nuclear deployment systems. For all their advances in creating weapons, the Soviets did not actually have any means of striking at the USA until 1957 - and even then, by 1963 they had just over ''twenty'' operational missiles (not twenty 'types' of missiles, ''twenty missiles'') capable of delivering nukes to US cities. The US, on the other hand, could potentially hit the USSR with hundreds of nukes courtesy of their intercontinental strategic bombers and early missile fleet. While it was possible for the Soviets to nuke Britain and France, the effect of this hinged entirely on the USA's sympathy to their cause. \\\

Predictably, the rapid buildup of ever more powerful nuclear arms by two ideologically-opposed superpowers seemingly on the brink of war scared quite a few people. The world had, after all, seen the terrible power of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some of the new ones were hundreds of times more powerful than those from 1945. Nuclear testing has shown by the 1950s the dangers of radiation, or "fallout", which can result from a nuclear explosion. During the Korean War, in the People's Republic of China fallout shelters were built around the country and children learned to "duck and cover". Mainland Chinese citizens were told to expect, and be prepared for, a nuclear attack at any time. Because they overestimated the Soviets' capabilities the USA, too, began teaching its citizens to make basic preparations but didn't really give the issue much thought at this time. On the other hand [[UsefulNotes/UltimateDefenceOfTheRealm the UK government recognised the futility of such preparations]] (given the country's population density, only the barest fraction of their people could conecivably be saved) and wanted to avoid panicking their people at all costs, so their own measures were extremely limited even in comparison with the USA's. Unsurprisingly, the USSR made a point of not educating her own citizens about nuclear matters or building any shelters - as the USA was already more than capable of killing them all, shelters or no, and keeping the populace uninformed and thus avoid anti-nuclear sentiment was seen as a great advantage over Western countries.\\\

Some of the Cuban revolutionaries were staunch Communists. Arguably, Castro had not been one of them, (at least that's what he initially stated) seeming more interested in general ideas of independence from U.S. and foreign capital. Given the political climate of the day, though, a side had to be chosen. Very soon after the revolution, Cuba established a partnership with the Soviet Union - who loved them to bits. The propaganda value of the Cuban Revolution (which had succeeded in 'overthrowing American Imperialism' with basically no Soviet involvement) was immense. This partnership did not go down well with the U.S., which had been taking a wait-and-see approach up to this point (it didn't help that Castro had seized thousands of dollars of Cuban & U.S. Property in Cuba and murdered those who resisted). They quickly put a trade embargo on the place that remains to this day. (Although the Obama Administration has been attempting more diplomacy recently, as ignoring the problem clearly hasn't made Cuba any less communist.) Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to covertly fund a [[UsefulNotes/BayOfPigsInvasion CIA coup of Cuba by means of revolutionaries dispatched to invade Cuba's Bay of Pigs]]. They seem to have seriously believed they could cover up their own involvement in the operation. The plan was not complete when JFK became president, but JFK decided to go ahead anyway - believing that the CIA and military knew what they were doing. He didn't want to deal with the criticism that he abandoned Eisenhower's plan, and he also didn't like Communism.\\\

UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} has its national consciousness tightly connected to the Catholic Church. It was one of the few countries behind the Iron Curtain where the Church had greater power than in the west. Poles are to this day maintaining that the church represents the nation more accurately than the state. The Communists did not like it, and they weren't subtle about it. (In Stalin's times Cardinal Wyszynski - the leader of the Polish Church - suffered three years of house arrest, priests and bishops were sent to prisons, and even convents were raided by the police.) Numerous strikes in Poland (Poznan in 1956, Gdansk in 1970 (events in nearby Gdynia became commemorated in protest song "The Ballad of Janek Wisniewski"), Bydgoszcz in 1976) were caused by rises in prices of staple food, the literal "bread and butter". Sometimes these increases would be as high as 50%. The Church attempted mediation, but ultimately nothing could be done. By 1976, growing discontentment led to first semi-organised opposition groups showing up to protect the rights of the strikers. They would later form a large part of the intellectual core of democratic opposition.\\\

There are three approaches among political scientists regarding the Cold War, which can be surmised thusly. They also overlap with the views of the Soviet Union, informed and otherwise - most English-language opinions being, of course, uninformed given the USSR's secrecy and the USA's self-obsession, as well as the propaganda campaigns of each nation and power-bloc:

* Traditionalist - USA good, USSR evil.
* Revisionist - USA bad, USSR bad.

The Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—had decided to secede from the Soviet Union long before the August Coup. Now the rest of the Republics began to leave. In November 1991, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party, and on December 8, 1991, he met in secret with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to sign the Belavezha Accords, officially dissolving the Soviet Union and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent Nations in its place. Gorbachev, no longer with a country to rule, resigned as President of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991, extinguishing his office and granting all the powers that came with it to Yeltsin. That night, the Hammer and Sickle was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, and the following day, the Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence. The USSR-- and with it, the Cold War-- had come to its definitive end. Yeltsin declared the new Russian Federation to be the successor state to the USSR and the Commonwealth the successor organization, allowing Russia to assume the USSR's global responsibilities (especially its permanent seat on the UN Security Council).\\\

Without support from the West, they turned inwards and faced a host of problems at hand: they were a one-party state in a largely rural nation with poor urbanization in need of modernization, their working-class urban base which propelled them to power was depleted as a result of their participation during the Civil War, while their war communism policies were harsh and unpopular among rural peasants. Initially Lenin offset it via New Economic Policy (NEP) which was intended to lessen the hostility of peasantry to the Bolshevik party. This attempt at a mixed economy bore short-term results and the USSR started to recover. After his death, there was another power struggle with some advocating a continuance of the NEP (Nikolai Bukharin), others arguing for world revolution, collectivization of agriculture and mass industrialization (UsefulNotes/LeonTrotsky). World revolution was decisively unpopular with both Bukharin and UsefulNotes/JosefStalin. Collectivization and industrialization started looking very attractive to the Politburo, on account of the fact that the gains made by NEP did not allow for investment and development of industry and military at the pace they would need to close the gap between them and the advanced nations. Stalin being more familiar with Russian traditions than Marxist-Hegelian dialectic, was motivated by fears of Western invasion and exploitation of Russian vulnerability(Based on memories of the Mongol invasions, the Time of Troubles, the invasion of Sweden and the invasion of Napoleon) and the legitimacy this could provide the Soviet Union. This launched the famously brutal decade of TheThirties beginning with incompetently managed collectivization that exacerbated a food crisis and a drought in 1933-1934 into a horrific famine across the Soviet Union, greater centralism and control of bureaucracy that ultimately oversaw the brutal purges, as well as massive industrialization that, at terrible human cost, was closing the gap between the Soviet Union and the West.\\\

International observers did not cool their own fears in the face of the Soviet Union's retreat from its inherently revolutionary origins. The United States of America, UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire, [[UsefulNotes/{{France}} the French Third Republic and its Colonial Empire]], the UsefulNotes/WeimarRepublic were well aware of the appeals of Communism to a good portion of their own citizens and subjects. The October Revolution inspired freedom fighters of different political persuasions across all Imperialist colonies, receiving praise and commendation from the likes of Sun Yat Sen (whose KMT received official support and patronage from the USSR), Jawaharlal Nehru, and Ho Chi Minh(A graduate at Whampoa Military Academy set up by the Soviets to help the KMT) taking inspiration from UsefulNotes/VladimirLenin(Who continues to enjoy a neutral and/or positive reputation in these ex-colonial nations) and the Bolshevik Party. The Bolsheviks had promised voting rights for women, anti-racist and anti-colonialist ideals, self-determination, labour reform and unionization. In retrospect they obviously promised more than they eventually delivered, but in the face of official hostility to their nation, they relied greatly on the goodwill and common aspirations of late 19th Century Internationalism and in the wake of the sudden and shocking toppling of an hitherto untouchable autocracy and the conversion of the world's largest nation with Europe's largest population to a Socialist form of government had two effects. In the case of Europe, it vindicated the apocalyptic reactionary fantasies of entrenched traditionalists and this led to the rise of Fascism. In the case of more developed nations with liberal infrastructure, namely the Anglophone, [[TheMoralSubstitute it generated consensus for reform on the part of moderate conservatives]] and centrist liberals leading them to put into effect many planks of the Bolshevik platform.\\\

Within England, the Labour Party enjoyed growing consensus, leading the Conservatives to agitate and engage in anti-communist campaigns. The Labour was social democrat rather than Communist, but the existence of a Communist Party made their less-radical-by-few-degrees platform more consensual and attractive to the English base (Lenin also recommended the British Communist Party to ally and support them). An early victory by Labour in the 20s was derailed by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter the propaganda success of the forged Zinoviev Letter]], while Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists, admittedly fringe, managed to attract high profile support from England's elites. The international appeals of Communism also led the UsefulNotes/TheRaj to go lightly on seemingly moderate and harmless reformers like UsefulNotes/MahatmaGandhi whose political successes led in turn to widespread international consensus for decolonization and Indian Independence, permanently tarnishing the formerly widely believed British propaganda about benevolent colonial enterprise. UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill was a fierce anti-communist and imperialist. He was favorable to General Franco during the UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar and opposed the Republicans( mostly because they were supported by the USSR) and indeed England, France and the USA refused to intervene in said conflict, which became a celebrated cause for the Popular Front coalition sponsored by Comintern (an anti-fascist alliance between multiple leftwing parties to halt fascism).\\\

Korea had been a ''de facto'' Japanese colony since the UsefulNotes/RussoJapaneseWar of 1905 and an official one in 1910, and much like Germany was supposed to become one independent country after the war. However, the Soviets and NATO were as unable to agree on the form of government such a new nation would take in Korea as they were in Germany, and so Korea was split (without actually bothering to consult the Korean dictators or people, natch). The Soviet occupation zone became the [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny Democratic People's Republic of Korea]] (UsefulNotes/NorthKorea), and got a Communist one-party government under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung. ( Kim had played some ill-defined role as a Communist rebel leader against the Japanese before and during the war; his official biographers give him a heroic role, but outside observers claim he did little but sit in Soviet territory and make surprisingly practical plans.) The American occupation zone in the south became the Republic of Korea (UsefulNotes/SouthKorea), and got a Capitalist kleptocracy under the leadership of Syngman Rhee. This is because the NATO occupation forces thought a 'firm hand' was necessary to curb communist influence, and Rhee (who'd been in exile in the USA) fit the bill nicely. Both dictators sought to unify the peninsula by force, but as a partial democracy South Korea's politicians were ultimately able to veto the armament programme that Rhee needed to impose his rule upon the north. On 25 June 1950 (which is why the war is known as the 6.25 War in Korea), North Korean forces unexpectedly crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, using that age-old justification that they were attacked first. (In this case, they weren't.) When it became very clear that South Korea was losing badly, Truman went to the United Nations to get approval for what he termed a "police action". This rather strange term allowed him to avoid actually getting a declaration of war from Congress, which he felt would be too time-consuming. The legality of this is disputed, but it has since proved [[CombatPragmatist a useful maneuver in U.S. foreign policy]]. As someone once said, "Decisions are made by those who show up". In this case, it was the Soviet Union who very deliberately didn't - because they ''wanted'' a USA-PRC confrontation of some sort, the bigger the better.(The logic was simple: USA-PRC conflict would prevent Sino-American rapprochement and strengthen Sino-Soviet ties whilst keeping the USA's attention focused in East Asia and not Europe. This would help keep Soviet changes to the political nature of eastern Europe (which was already barely-independent, but had to be brought under close and proper Soviet control to guard against defections to 'The West') out of the spotlight in the US media. To this end the Soviets boycotted the UN's Security Council meetings over 'the China issue'.)\\\

The Chinese Civil War had been ongoing since about 1916 or so, and the two strongest factions to emerge from it in the final years of the conflict were the German-Soviet-US-backed Guomindang (lit. National People's Party, aka 'The Nationalist Party') and the Soviet-backed Communist Party. After winning the conventional war with the capture of Hainan island in May 1950, the Communists went on to stamp out the last Guomindang and Muslim insurgencies (bar those in Burma) by the mid-1950s. The USSR strongly insisted that the new People's Republic of China should have the permanent Security Council seat in the UN, not the Republic of China/Taiwan. Because of the boycott, the USSR didn't have to abstain from voting on UNSC Resolution 82( If the USSR ''hadn't'' been able to find a way to avoid attending, vetoing it would probably have been necessary to avoid the appearance of selling the PRC out - even though this would not have been in the USSR's interests. Appearances matter ) which was passed on 27 June. For the first time in its history, the UN was going to war. 17 countries showed up, with nearly all the work being done by the U.S. (who provided 88% of the UN task force) and South Korea. After initial setbacks the UN started to push the North Koreans back; when they pushed too far, the Chinese did just as Stalin had hoped and joined the party to forestall what they saw as a potential NATO invasion. The Soviets were then able to make a killing selling the PRC all sorts of semi-obsolescent weaponry (such as semi-automatic rifles, which assault rifles like the [[CoolGuns AK-47]] had just made redundant) and greatly strengthened their alliance and 'Revolutionary Cred' within the 'Second World' (by fighting the capitalist First World, of course) by providing anti-air weaponry to and fighter cover for the Chinese forces. [=MacArthur=] got sacked for wanting to actually attack - and, indeed, ''nuke'' - China proper. ''[[Literature/{{Mash}} M*]][[Film/{{Mash}} A*S]][[Series/{{MASH}} *H]]'' dealt with a lot of incoming wounded.\\\

Korea is notable for being the first jet war, where jet aircraft were used in a big way, especially the [=MiG-15=] and F-86 Sabre. It was still, however, a guns-only environment, since air-to-air missiles were not around yet. A lot of the 'North Korean' pilots were from the Soviet Air Force. The UN knew this and chose to ignore it, the US pointedly not following through on what they later called 'Massive Retaliation' doctrine (immediate nuclear carpet-bombing of the USSR's cities in the event of any US-USSR conflict whatsoever). After a short period of back-and-forth campaigns, followed by a long stretch of negotiations while fighting over the same set of meaningless hills around the 38th parallel, the war ended in a stalemate, unresolved to this day.(Upon Stalin's death the new Soviet leadership, a Troika under Lavrenty Beria (who, depending on who you ask, was either a sociopathic serial rapist and murderer or a regular Soviet senior official who actually tried to push through genuinely beneficial reforms but [[WrittenByTheWinners got vilified after losing]]), decided that the USA was becoming just a teeeeeeensy bit too paranoid and nuke-happy for them to be comfortable with continuing an open war against them. Consequently the Soviets pushed for a truce and got it. Both sides declared [[PyrrhicVictory victory]] - but since the UN, China, and the Soviet Union never officially declared war, no treaty was signed. The two surface combatants, North and South Korea, still have not officially signed a treaty to end the war.)

UsefulNotes/JosefStalin died in the March of 1953 in suitably horrific circumstances much to the relief of many Soviet Jews who were suffering during his final purge of the Doctor's Plot, which was immediately ended and reversed at his passing. What followed was a serious power struggle in the Soviet Union's leadership. The first to come to power was [[FourEyesZeroSoul Lavrentiy Beriya]], the former head of Stalin's secret police (the NKVD). Unfortunately for him, nobody trusted and everybody hated him. He moved to take down his troika partners and premier enemies within the party and government, but in doing so overlooked UsefulNotes/NikitaKhrushchev.( Khruschev was a mere 'second-tier' leader in Georgiy Malenkov's faction at the time, but in response to Beria's attempts the party and the government rallied around him as a new leader. Khrushchev and General Georgy Zhukov ([[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII yes]], ''[[UsefulNotes/RedsWithRockets that]]'' Georgy Zhukov) rallied enough members of their respective factions to mount a coup. Troops loyal to Zhukov accompanied him as he personally arrested Beria and ensured he got the trial (and subsequent execution) he'd had coming for so long for his crimes against the Soviet people in general and the Soviet leadership in particular.) This period of uncertainty, as revealed in Soviet Archives, had the potential for detente. During his brief time in power Beria had seriously proposed the re-unification of Germany as a neutral state. There was a surprising amount of genuine support for the initiative, but Beria's association with the initiative made it politically unacceptable for Malenkov to give it the go-ahead once he took power. In addition, [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/18/last-days-of-stalin-joshua-rubinstein-review none of their proposals were seriously considered by the West]] even if UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill of all people supported the potential for changes in the Soviet Union. It was not in the interests of the Eisenhower administration to allow the Soviets to play peacekeepers and pacifist. The Soviet Invasion of Hungary was far more to their liking. The administration did not do anything to help the Rebels citing the potential for the nuclear war but they also saw it as an opportunity to further discredit the communists, which it did. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was bad, but for most fellow travelers of Communists and actual party members, this became the true BrokenPedestal moment(After Beria's removal Malenkov, one of the few leaders of the Soviet Union to not be bald, took power with Khruschev and Zhukov as his seconds. During his premiership, the Soviet Union invaded UsefulNotes/{{Hungary}} to suppress the popular anti-Soviet revolutions that were going on. However, Beria's attempted purge of Malenkov had actually made him and Khruschev equals, and Khrushchev proved quite influential in running the country during Malenkov's premiership. He was the first advocate of reducing nuclear arms in order to refocus the economy on consumer goods, which required peace talks with the U.S. Eventually Malenkov ran afoul of Khrushchev, to whom he referred as "the moon-faced idiot", and was ousted as Premier and replaced with Nikolay Bulganin, who basically just let Khrushchev run the country. Malenkov ended up as [[ReassignedToAntarctica a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan]]. An improvement from Stalinist times; in the past he might have been shot as Khruschev so helpfully reminded him).\\\

Khruschev's polices of destalinization also marked the origins of the Sino-Soviet split. UsefulNotes/MaoZedong warned him that many communist parties around the world counted on Stalin's leadership for their legitimacy (including his), and by discrediting Stalin in such a manner, they would politically compromise the relationships of satellite communists to the metropole.(Mao's leadership of the CCP was never as secure and firm as Stalin's. The CCP didn't exist until the Soviets formed it in Shanghai during the 20s, and indeed the Soviets backed the KMT of Dr Sun-Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek. Stalin suggested to the CCP, in the words of the Soviet Emissary to China, to serve the KMT "as a coolie" yet repeated purges by the KMT made that impossible for them to do and eventually Mao led the CCP during the 30s and 40s to an independent KMT course that Stalin did not authorize but finally shrugged his shoulders and accepted) Khruschev went ahead nonetheless, and this, coupled with constant border clashes between the Chinese and the Soviets at the Amur River, marked the start of a break between the two largest Communist nations. (Mao was a ruthless and calculating leader who had been a [[LaResistance "resistance"]] leader against the Japanese, [[ThePiratesWhoDontDoAnything whom he was careful to maintain unofficial truces with at all times]], and the Guomindang. Unfortunately, by the end of 1952 the Civil War was completely over and he was the undisputed leader of the entire country. "Unfortunately", [[ModernMajorGeneral his policies]] [[DidntSeeThatComing proved]] [[ArtisticLicenseEconomics disastrous]]. The Second Five-Year Plan/"Great Leap Forward" killed a couple of dozen million through starvation-related diseases and exposure to the elements (no more, please, let's not go for sensationalism) and The Cultural Revolution killed tens of thousands (and traumatised tens of millions) in brutal and disturbingly mass-hysteric ways. These included many of the Communist Party’s own revolutionary leaders, who were [[{{Unperson}} unpersoned]] as “reactionary rightists”.) \\\

From about 1956-1961, China and the Soviet Union slowly split apart due to a myriad of issues and bad blood in general. In the post-war period Stalin took advantage of Communist China's isolation from the rest of the world to force Mao into a series of ''very'' unequal trade agreements in exchange for the limited technical assistance the USSR gave China.( This is on top of the whole "insult to injury thing" whereby the Soviets had literally stolen half of China's industry. By dismantling all the industries of Manchuria wholesale (and shipping them back to the USSR) during their occupation of the region, they doomed 100,000+ locals to starve and/or freeze to death during the winter of 1945-46.) Mao for his part believed that Stalin's successors were too soft and that, as their senior, ''he'' should be leader of the Communist ("Second") World. In any case, tension mounted until it escalated into border clashes. China developed her own nuclear weapons largely as a deterrent against the Soviets and even began to compete with the Soviet Union for satellite states; notably, Enver Hoxha’s Albania switched to China’s side in 1961. (After Mao’s death Hoxha would pursue a paranoid isolationist policy, denouncing both the PRC and the USSR, and proclaimed Albania to be the world’s only Marxist-Leninist state) The break opened up China to America more, starting with sporting tournaments and building to Richard Nixon's famous visit in 1972. (As an aside, the saying "only Nixon could go to China" is symbolic of Nixon's conservatism: a liberal would've been accused of being a Communist himself, but Nixon (like Eisenhower before him) couldn't be.) Mao Zedong's death in 1976 brought the more capitalist Deng Xiaoping into power, and he instituted many economic reforms. By the end of the Cold War China had abandoned much of the Maoist ideology and fast moving towards becoming a market economy, though it remains to this day a one-party state.

The end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII had meant that the colonial powers could no longer afford to maintain their empires without American support. Roosevelt was committed to decolonization and classic old-fashioned imperialism had seen its day. Ideas like democracy, self-determination and nationalism began to spread around the world and many in the colonies were no longer willing to tolerate colonial rule. Neither the Americans nor the Soviets were keen on colonies either, and called for "decolonization" in the name of self-determination and freedom. (Arguably this was hypocritical given that America had itself had been a colonial power after their Civil War and 1898 Spanish-American Wars, in Cuba and the Philippines. The USSR had reclaimed most of Imperial Russia's former territories after their own Civil War and WWII (to be fair, Russian "colonization" was drastically different from and arguably more benevolent than that of other European powers, with no ethnic/racial dimension but a ''very'' strong religious/ideological one).) During the Cold War, outright colonialism was replaced with two superpowers aggressively pushing various countries in their political direction, and helping foster revolts in the ones that didn't. This bears resemblance to the Anglo-French continental great power rivalry of the 18th Century but now played out on a global scale(England and France between say 1712-1815 engaged in a century of wars across all their colonies backing rivals and rebellions to weaken each other's position. One French proxy-war was the American War of Independence and the Americans received French patronage to weaken the First British Empire. This ended with UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution and Napoleon's defeat which led to the consolidation of UsefulNotes/TheBritishEmpire). As countries in the so-called "Third World" gained independence one by one with varying degrees of Sino-Soviet aid, the West and the Soviet Union (and China too) competed in various morally-questionable ways to bring them into their respective spheres.\\\

The British eventually left the Indian Subcontinent, which given more than a century of enabling caste and religious disputes and prejudices(Including one failed partition of Bengal), was an inevitably violent process, known as the Partition which resulted in the deaths of more than a million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus during one of the largest population transfers and human migration in history.(It's a bit fuzzy ''why'' exactly the British favoured a two-state solution to Indian independence, but some recent research has proposed that Indian-Muslim leader Ali Jinnah and his party were simply trying to use the threat of a two-state solution to secure greater influence for Muslims in a hypothetical unitary Indian state. However, it seems that the Indian-Hindu leader Jawaharlal Nehru and ''his'' party weren't willing to give them ''quite'' as much leeway as they wanted and in any case the British apparently took his proposals at face value (rather than seeing them as the bargaining-chips they were), leading to a two-state solution that nobody actually wanted. Worse yet, the British were completely broke thanks to five years of Total War and could not raise the money they needed to both implement and fund the NHS (which practically doubled government spending overnight) ''and'' fund a two-year de-colonisation programme. Since Clement Attlee's Labour Party had been sworn-in promising to create the NHS, they cut the latter down to just one year, resulting in a shambolic mess that got hundreds of thousands—if not millions—wounded (and many killed) and a great deal of property and wealth being lost.) This led to two states, India and Pakistan. The former became a Republic that claimed to be part of the Non-Aligned Movement refusing to side either with the United States and the Soviet Union, but generally leaned towards the Soviet Union. Pakistan would in turn be backed by the United States of America, an alliance that continued even after the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, well into UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror. The partitions Palestine and Cyprus, both British possessions, were also less than perfect and the British notably killed and tortured a few tens of thousands during the 'Mau-Mau' uprising in Kenya(One of the victims was apparently UsefulNotes/BarackObama's grandfather). The British also helped the newly-independent (albeit still with ''very'' close economic ties to Britain) Malaysian Federation put down a Maoist insurgency amongst her ethnic-Chinese population( to which the somewhat simplistic but undeniably effective solution was simply to imprison the entire ethnic-Chinese population in the areas the insurgency operated in. They'd correctly noted that since the extremely strong ethnic/racial component to politics in the fledgeling federation meant that only Chinese people were supporting the guerillas (since the Malay majority had wanted to impose "socialist" employment quotas that would require all businesses to have a minimum number of Malay employees, a measure that in the long run really did help lift the relatively disadvantaged Malay population out of poverty) ) and keep troops around to make the newly-independent Indonesian Republic think twice about trying to annex Malaysia.\\\

Some of the Cuban revolutionaries were staunch Communists. Arguably, Castro had not been one of them,(at least that's what he initially stated) seeming more interested in general ideas of independence from U.S. and foreign capital. Given the political climate of the day, though, a side had to be chosen. Very soon after the revolution, Cuba established a partnership with the Soviet Union - who loved them to bits. The propaganda value of the Cuban Revolution (which had succeeded in 'overthrowing American Imperialism' with basically no Soviet involvement) was immense. This partnership did not go down well with the U.S., which had been taking a wait-and-see approach up to this point (it didn't help that Castro had seized thousands of dollars of Cuban & U.S. Property in Cuba and murdered those who resisted). They quickly put a trade embargo on the place that remains to this day.(Although the Obama Administration has been attempting more diplomacy recently, as ignoring the problem clearly hasn't made Cuba any less communist.) Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to covertly fund a [[UsefulNotes/BayOfPigsInvasion CIA coup of Cuba by means of revolutionaries dispatched to invade Cuba's Bay of Pigs]]. They seem to have seriously believed they could cover up their own involvement in the operation. The plan was not complete when JFK became president, but JFK decided to go ahead anyway - believing that the CIA and military knew what they were doing. He didn't want to deal with the criticism that he abandoned Eisenhower's plan, and he also didn't like Communism.\\\

The Soviets’ ICBM forces were a) very few, b) ''very'' vulnerable as they were not in silos(The USSR used a mostly train-based missile launch system, under the (ultimately mistaken) impression that a mobile force was more difficult to destroy than a stationary, reinforced location. A direct side effect of this is that US intelligence agencies became ''very'' good at finding things with the increasingly ubiquitous SpySatellite, which was more or less developed to spy on 'the Russians'.), and c) time-consuming to launch(Most Soviet missiles used a particularly toxic and, more importantly, ''corrosive'' blend of rocket fuel (the R-7s that also served as satellite launchers ran on relatively benign liquid oxygen and kerosene, but see below). Because Soviet metallurgy was not as advanced as U.S. efforts, the Soviet missiles could only be fueled for a limited time (a few days) before they would have to be unfueled, maintained, and refueled (with the R-7s, the liquid oxygen would evaporate in even ''less'' time, about a day). As a result, unless an offensive posture was needed, missiles were kept empty of rocket fuel until they were set to be launched. Since fueling a missile can take up to ''four hours'', it was understandably a problem for launch preparedness. This is why Cold War movies make such a big deal about missiles being fueled: it is neither a secret process, and it indicates a dramatic increase in offensive posture. U.S. missiles did not have this problem.).\\\

The USA's Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM(No, [[NamesTheSame not]] [[VideoGame/XComUFODefense those]] [[VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown guys]])) discussed what to do about the missiles on Cuba. JFK secretly recorded the meetings, which helps historians a lot. The Joint Chiefs were being GeneralRipper before that trope first appeared. Indeed, Air Force General Curtis [=LeMay=]— the inspiration for Ripper — was at the meetings advocating airstrikes. Eventually they settled on a blockade. Since that is legally an act of war, they called it a "quarantine", and JFK announced the existence of the missiles to the world. This completely wrong-footed Khrushchev and Castro. Their secret alliance was supposed to have been, well, ''secret'' until they chose to publicly declare it (when the missiles were all in-place). Declaring its existence ''after'' the revelations about the missiles would make it look like they were lying (in addition to not having had legal grounds for moving Soviet war material onto Cuban soil because they hadn't had an alliance), so they never ended up revealing it. The USA's Strategic Air Command (SAC) went to [[DefconFive DEFCON-2]] for the only time in its history.\\\

UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy increased aid to South Vietnam and sent more military advisors,( There were approximately 1000 U.S. advisors in Vietnam when Eisenhower left office. That number rose to 16,000 under JFK) but Diem was getting increasingly unpopular, and the NLF were getting increasingly popular. A monk burned himself to death in public protest. The U.S. administration, fearing a "domino effect" if Vietnam went Communist, backed the overthrow and murder of Diem without Kennedy's advance knowledge or approval.\\\

The Khmer Rouge, led by a man called Pol Pot, had a less strictly Marxist philosophy than that espoused by, say, the North Koreans. Or, for that matter, by the Dutch. "Communism" in this case was a purely agrarian utopia for peasants only, and required the elimination of industry, modern technology, the urban environment, and anyone guilty of propagating these social ills. Since all other Communists regarded modern technology and industry as the best thing since sliced bread(Well, there was no sliced bread in CommieLand. Let's just say bee's knees.), this quickly resulted in the Khmer Rouge having no friends.\\\

For backstory, we have to go back to UsefulNotes/WW2. Britain and the USSR repeated their feat from WWI, which had been to invade and occupy southern and northern Iran respectively (to protect the Royal Navy's oil supply from the Ottoman Empire)—but this time, it was also done to secure a second route by which Lend-Lease material aid to the USSR could be delivered to them all-year-round ( The other route, around Scandinavia to the port of Arkhangelsk as in the First World War, was closed for six months of the year when the seas froze over in winter and its ships were also subjected to constant and ''fierce'' raids from ''Luftwaffe'' and ''Kriegsmarine'' forces based in Norway and Finland. The main route used during World War I, Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, was made unavailable by Japan's declaration of war upon the Allies and the USA just five months after the USSR had been brought into the war ). They installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran. He fled the country in 1951 when the popular Mohammad Mossadegh was democratically elected as Prime Minister. The CIA and [=MI6=] launched a coup d'état that removed Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah. The autocracy then secularized and Westernized the nation—often ignoring the Iranian Constitution. This caused nationalist, Leftist and Islamist groups to resist, though usually they weren't united. This is possibly why conspiracy theorists lump Communists and Islamists together, despite many of them hating the other with a passion.(This isn't to say that there weren't some Islamist leftists; indeed, one of the biggest Islamist factions, the Mojahideen-e-Khalq (People's Mojahideen) followed the Islamic Socialism of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Shariati Ali Shariati]], which tried to synthesize Islam and socialism.) The tension from the suppression and fighting culminated in the Iranian Revolution in 1979, leading to the current Islamic Republic of Iran, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.\\\

UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} has its national consciousness tightly connected to the Catholic Church. It was one of the few countries behind the Iron Curtain where the Church had greater power than in the west. Poles are to this day maintaining that the church represents the nation more accurately than the state. The Communists did not like it, and they weren't subtle about it. (In Stalin's times Cardinal Wyszynski - the leader of the Polish Church - suffered three years of house arrest, priests and bishops were sent to prisons, and even convents were raided by the police.) Numerous strikes in Poland (Poznan in 1956, Gdansk in 1970(events in nearby Gdynia became commemorated in protest song "The Ballad of Janek Wisniewski"), Bydgoszcz in 1976) were caused by rises in prices of staple food, the literal "bread and butter". Sometimes these increases would be as high as 50%. The Church attempted mediation, but ultimately nothing could be done. By 1976, growing discontentment led to first semi-organised opposition groups showing up to protect the rights of the strikers. They would later form a large part of the intellectual core of democratic opposition.\\\

The government opted to "calm the country down".(Whether it was forced by the Soviet Union or did it on its own is a matter of discussion.) They introduced martial law, interred Solidarity leaders, let the ZOMO riot police attack workers still on strike, and generally hurt the public image of themselves. This caused the international reaction, including UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan introducing import sanctions on Poland. This is quite possibly the only time in history when someone has helped a foreign nation by ''not'' trading with it. The American support to Solidarity is one of the reasons why today's Poland is one of the most pro-U.S. countries in the world.\\\

It didn't take long for ''glasnost'' to backfire. As a result of ''glasnost'', the Soviet people were given more civil and political freedoms than ever before… and they soon wanted more. Now that past and contemporary Soviet crimes, misrule and mistakes are now out in the open and being debated, the authority and legitimacy of the CPSU were being compromised. Worse still, nationalist sentiments which previously was either suppressed, controlled or otherwise made insignificant, began to fueled ethnic tension across the Soviet Union. "Socialist brothers" in Armenia and Azerbaijan in particular were at each other's throats over Nagarno-Karabakh (a messy situation involving an Armenian state surrounded by Azeri territory which remained unresolved to this day). Gorbachev, under attack from reformists, conservatives and nationalists, were unable to reconcile them.\\\

Gorbachev was rather more successful on the international front. Relations between the USA and USSR began to improve. Gorbachev agreed to disarmament treaties and planned the withdraw Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, which was just as well—military spending had been crippling to the Soviet economy.\\\

Gorbachev wanted to see Eastern Europe embrace its new freedoms and establish moderate Communist regimes similar to his own. Eastern Europe, however, was force-fed Communism by Moscow for 40 years and decided it had enough. Instead of a revitalized Warsaw Pact, within two years all the Eastern European countries would abandon communism and the Warsaw Pact itself would cease to have any relevance whatsoever. The events of 1989 came to be called the "Autumn of Nations", but here at Tv Tropes it was the "UsefulNotes/HoleInFlag Revolution". ( So-called because when nationalists and democrats marched against the ruling Communists in 1989 and brought them down they were flying flags with the Communist state symbols cut out.)\\\

Czechoslovakia had their own "Velvet Revolution". With the country paralyzed by protests and strikes, and their Communist comrades losing power one by one, the Czechoslovak communists under hardliner Gustáv Husák yielded and gave up power. Writer Vaclav Havel became Czechoslovakia's first noncommunist President since 1948.( Alexander Dubcek, the moderate communist leader who was the architect of the reformist "Prague Spring" in 1968 and was later ousted by Soviet troops, returned in triumph as Chairman of the Federal Assembly.)\\\

This brings us to Cuba, in 1962, where he saw the opportunity to pursue policy intiatives 2 and 3 simultaneously. The USA had demonstrated its hostility to the Cuban regime by attempting the Bay of Bigs coup against it, and Soviet intelligence reports indicated (accurately, as recently-declassified US government documents attest) that some elements within the US government were clamouring for an invasion. The Cuban Revolution had been big news in the USSR recently since it was one of very few 'wins' that the Soviets could claim for their policy of de-colonisation (Algeria had overshadowed it recently, but it was still very fresh in people's minds). Abandoning Cuba to American Imperialism was simply not an option, especially given that Khruschev's first great policy initiative (disarmament) had cost him credibility when it publicly fell through. Cuba was also a way to redress the strategic balance. With all the lack of forethought characteristic of his impulsive style of leadership, Khruschev came to regard the staging of strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba as a means to score some more points against the USA by getting them to back down from the threat of nuclear war 'again' (as he saw it).\\\