What political, economic, and social shifts occurred in the Soviet Union during the Cold War

During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule of his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. After the war ended, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity. 

Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.

WATCH: Nuclear Terror on HISTORY Vault

The Cold War: Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” In his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree].” As a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly “arms race.” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.

The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans. In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. 

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

READ MORE: How the Cold War Space Race Led to U.S. Students Doing Tons of Homework

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these “blacklisted” writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government. 

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and “loyalty oaths” became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, The United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World.” 

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict.

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”–”relaxation”–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s relationship to the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and “perestroika,” or economic reform. 

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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Harry Truman had only been vice president for three months before assuming the presidency. During his nearly eight years in office, he attempted to contain the spread of communism as the Cold War heated up.

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Acheson played a central role in defining American foreign policy during the Cold War. As Truman's secretary of state, he encouraged U.S. involvement in the Korean War. In the 1960s, he counseled John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam.

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General George Marshall oversaw the Allied victory in World War II before serving as both secretary of state and secretary of defense. He was instrumental in developing the "Marshall Plan," aimed at rebuilding postwar Europe, stabilizing the region and preventing the spread of communism.

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In the 1940s, George Kennan developed the "containment” strategy to isolate the Soviet Union and limit the spread of communism. Containment would become the prevailing American foreign policy for decades, influencing U.S. involvement in Korea, Vietnam and Eastern Europe.

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After a successful military career in both World Wars, Gen. Douglas MacArthur commanded U.N. forces during the Korean War until his controversial dismissal by President Harry S. Truman in April 1951.

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Conceived by the Eisenhower Administration and carried out by the Kennedy White House, the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs heightened U.S.-Soviet tensions and contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.

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Robert McNamara served eight years as secretary of defense to Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He was a key architect and supporter of U.S. strategy in Vietnam, though he would later admit the policy's failures.

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In 1972, Richard Nixon travelled to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The meeting resulted in two landmark weapons treaties and eased tensions, ushering in a new policy known as détente.

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National security advisor and secretary of state to Presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger helped ease relations with the Soviet Union and China, and negotiated an end to the Vietnam War. He remains a controversial figure for his role in American actions in Cambodia, Latin America and elsewhere.

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Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter meet in Vienna to negotiate the strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II) on June 18, 1979.

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In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev worked together to diffuse U.S.-Soviet tensions, and lay the groundwork for the end of the Cold War.

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President George H.W. Bush's decades of foreign policy experience made him uniquely suited to oversee the U.S. reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

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Karl Marx, a German philosopher and economist, is considered the father of Communism. Marx collaborated with Friedrich Engels to propose a new ideology in which the state owns major resources and everyone shares the benefits of labor. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engel called for a working-class revolt against capitalism. Their motto, “Workers of the world, unite!” became a rallying cry among disgruntled working class across Europe

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German socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels was the close collaborator of Karl Marx. Engels, the son of a textile factory owner, was sent to a manufacturing plant in Manchester to learn the family business. His observations of the working class inspired his interest in socialism. He and Marx, whom he met in Manchester, published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845 and The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

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Vladimir Lenin led the Russian Revolution and founded the Soviet state. As the Soviet Union's first leader, Lenin orchestrated the Red Terror that crushed dissidence and founded Cheka, the first incarnation of dreaded Soviet secret police. Following his death in 1923, Lenin was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who adopted even more dictatorial methods of governing than Lenin. Millions of Soviets would die under Stalin's totalitarian rule.

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Mao Zedong was a theorist, soldier and statesman who led the communist People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976. He transformed his nation, but his programs, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution led to tens of millions of deaths.

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Zhou Enlai was a leading communist figure in the Chinese Revolution, and premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976, He was instrumental in opening up relations between the United States and China, resulting in President Nixon's visit in 1972, shown here.

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Kim Il-Sung ruled communist North Korea from 1948 until his death in 1994, leading his nation through the Korean War. During Kim's rule, North Korea was characterized as a totalitarian state with widespread human rights violations. His son, Kim Jong-Il, took over after his father's death. He carried on his father's totalitarian ways and often clashed with the West over his nuclear ambitions.

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Ho Chi Minh was instrumental in Vietnam’s struggle for independence and served as leader of the Vietnamese nationalist movement for more than three decades, fighting against the Japanese, then French colonial forces and then U.S.-backed South Vietnam. When Communists took over Saigon in 1975 they renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in his honor. 

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Khrushchev sparred with the United States over the Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile Crisis, but attempted some degree of "thaw" in domestic policies in the Soviet Union, easing travel restrictions and freeing thousands of Stalin's political prisoners.

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Fidel Castro established the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere after leading an overthrow of the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959. He ruled over Cuba for nearly five decades, until handing off power to his younger brother Raúl in 2008.

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Che Guevara was a prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution, and later a guerrilla leader in South America. After his execution by the Bolivian army in 1967, he was regarded as a martyred hero, and his image became an icon of leftist radicalism.

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Josip Broz Tito was a revolutionary and chief architect of the "second Yugoslavia," a socialist federation that lasted from World War II until 1991. He was the first communist leader in power to defy Soviet control and promoted a policy of nonalignment between the two hostile blocs in the Cold War.

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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, communist governments collapsed across Eastern Europe. While most of these "revolutions" were peaceful, some were not. Accused of mass murder, corruption and other crimes, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown, and he and his wife were executed in 1989.

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Mikhail Gorbachev (shown here with U.S. President Ronald Reagan) led the Soviet Union from 1985 until his resignation in December 1991. His programs of "perestroika" ("restructuring") and "glasnost" ("openness") introduced profound changes in Soviet society, government and economics and international relations.

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On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device, signaling a new and terrifying phase in the Cold War. By the early 1950s, school children began practicing "Duck and Cover" air-raid drills in schools, as in this 1955 photo. 

Read more: How 'Duck-and-Cover' Drills Channeled America's Cold War Anxiety

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The drills were part of President Harry S. Truman’s Federal Civil Defense Administration program and aimed to educate the public about what ordinary people could do to protect themselves.

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In 1951, the FCDA hired Archer Productions, a New York City ad agency, to create a film to educate schoolchildren about how to protect themselves in the case of atomic attack. The resulting film, Duck and Cover, was filmed at a school in Astoria, Queens, and alternated animation with images of students and adults practicing the recommended safety techniques.

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Two sisters sit together in their home after an atomic war drill with their family. They're holding up identification tags they wear around their necks in the March 1954 photo. 

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A family during an atomic war drill. The drills were easy to mock—how could ducking and covering really protect you from a nuclear bomb? However, some historians argue the drills could have offered some protection if a blast (of a smaller scale) occurred a distance away.

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In 1961, the Soviets exploded a 58-megaton bomb dubbed “Tsar Bomba,” which had a force equivalent to more than 50 million tons of TNT—more than all the explosives used in World War II. In response, the focus of U.S. civil defense had moved on to the construction of fallout shelters. Here, a mother and her children make a practice run for their $5,000 steel backyard fallout shelter in Sacramento, California, on Oct. 5, 1961

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This fiberglass-reinforced plastic portable shelter was unveiled on Bolling Field in Washington, D.C. on June 13, 1950. Designed for both military personnel and equipment, it was made up of 12 separated sections, each interchangeable with any other. According to its manufacturer, the shelter could be erected or dismantled by three men in 30 to 45 minutes and could comfortably accommodate 12 men barracks-style, or 20 in field conditions. 

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In this Sept. 12, 1958 file picture, Beverly Wysocki, top, and Marie Graskamp, right, Two women emerge from a family-type bomb shelter on display in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 12, 1958. 

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This is an interior view of 4,500-lb. steel underground radiation fallout shelter where a couple with three children relax amidst bunk beds and shelves of provisions. Their backyard shelter also included a radio and crates of canned food and water. During the Cold War arms race, Americans were bombarded with contradictory images and messages that frightened even as they tried to reassure. 

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Camp Century was a Pentagon-built base in northwestern Greenland that was publicly touted as a “nuclear-powered Arctic research center.” But the real reason for this Cold War base was to build and maintain a secret network of tunnels and missile silos connected by rail cars known as “Operation Iceworm.” Here, men place arch supports in the tunnel to the main trench of the permanent camp during construction in 1959.

Read more: When the Pentagon Dug Secret Cold War Ice Tunnels to Hide Nukes

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A crane loads an escape hatch onto a sled. The stairway fits inside the hatch to offer an exit from underground camp.

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A view of the main trench entrance to Century Camp, Greenland.

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A crane lowers a hatch into a lateral trench of Camp Century.

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Men place a truss to support side walls of the camp.

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In this May 1962 photo, specialists watch a control panel of the nuclear power plant that powered the camp. 

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A crane positions the nuclear plant's waste tank.

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Men stand outside barracks stationed in the Greenland outpost in May 1962

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