In order to ensure containment, the US introduced Marshall Aid. This was the process of delivering economic aid, including food, machinery, building materials, expertise and in some cases money, to countries in Europe that were seen to be in danger of being taken over by communists. The theory was that if a country was prosperous and its people were happy, then support for communism would not exist. The divisions caused by ideological differences became clear with the formation of two alliances; NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Ideological differences The ideological schism that had developed since World War One was clear at the peace conferences of Yalta and Potsdam in Emergence of communism. Bolshevik soldiers. The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact US President Harry Truman.
Higher Subjects Higher Subjects up. It was clear that Russia lacked an effective leader capable of real reforms. Russia also lacked a leader who could obtain the support of the revolutionaries and the liberals, and stabilise the economy and the chaos caused by the disgruntled Russians. The dissatisfaction that the Russians felt over their poverty, suffering and lack of political rights reached a climax during the years of the First World War.
Overthrowing the tsarist regime seemed the only way out, and revolution was not far off. The reason for the discrepancy is that Russia did not follow the Western calendar. The traditional Russian Christmas is celebrated in the first week of January.
Before , Russia followed the Julian calendar. In accordance with this calendar when the Revolution took place, it was February in Russia. The one is named according to the Russian and the other, the Western calendar. The important thing is to be consistent regardless of the calendar being used. This lesson refers to the March or November Revolutions.
Today, Russia also follows the Gregorian calendar that the West uses, and that we use in South Africa. Although the climate for revolution was ripe by , the March Revolution nevertheless took people by surprise. Not a single Bolshevik leader was in Russia when the revolt broke out, as many of them were exiled because of their anti-war campaign.
Lenin himself was in Switzerland at the time. Since , workers had held strikes and protests against the Tsarist regime. In January a mass strike was planned to commemorate Bloody Sunday, the event that had sparked the Revolution.
The following month more strikes were held, and the Tsar did not react, unsuspecting of the danger posed by them. Later in March, when the strikes had become bigger and more widespread, he tried to suppress the protesters who were anti-war and rejected his rule. Confrontations with the police led to injuries and arrests. The Duma requested the Tsar to respond to the revolt with reforms, but their appeals were ignored. He dismissed the Duma, who refused to obey his orders.
The protests turned into full blown mutiny and one of Russia's biggest cities, Petrograd, was taken over by the resistance movement- which freed the political prisoners there.
The Tsar lost all control of the country, and it became necessary for a provisional committee to rule Russia until a new government was established. Two governmental bodies were put in place: the Provisional Committee of the Duma, and the Provisional Committee of the Soviet. The Duma represented the aristocracy the conservatives , and they had to negotiate with the Tsar for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The Soviet represented the workers and soldiers, and was to look after the interests of these people.
There were serious differences between the two bodies, but they were forced to work together to prevent the Tsar from suppressing the revolution. Out of these two bodies, a first Provisional Government emerged in March , was led by the Duma. This meant the end of the Tsar and the year old reign of his family, the Romanovs. The first stage of the Russian Revolution, namely the March Revolution, was over.
The tsarist regime was overthrown, and in its place was a Provisional Government. The revolutionary parties Social-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks did not play a big role in the March Revolution. Those who did play a role were the conservatives, namely the Kadets and the Octobrists those who believed in and supported the October Manifesto. This would mean that the conservatives would have a great influence in the Provisional Government.
The Provisional Government was instituted in March , and consisted mainly of middle class liberals. It had no real power without the support of the soviets. The soviets comprised workers' strike and revolutionary committees during the Revolution, and after the March Revolution included all peasants, soldiers and workers.
By this stage, the soviets formed the majority of the Russian population, without their support the Provisional Government could not be effective. The Provisional Government had legal power but the soviets had the real political power. They stayed in the background, not taking obvious control and leadership of Russia but were able to influence and reject government decisions and actions.
At first, the Provisional Government enjoyed great support, especially among political groups like the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, as long as the interests of the peasants, workers and soldiers were protected. The government was unable to keep this support, because they could not meet the most basic needs of the masses- peace, food and land.
The workers wanted bread, or relief from poverty, and the hunger that they had suffered for so long. The soldiers wanted peace, but Russia's involvement in the First World War continued. The Provisional Government failed to withdraw Russia from the War. Land and autonomy, the major concern of the peasants and minority groups, could not be addressed while there was a war effort. The Provisional Government was also dragging its feet on the issue of elections for a Constitutional Assembly.
Its role had been intended to be temporary, but the new leaders were no keen to lose this power. These factors seriously damaged the Provisional Government's credibility, and they lost a great deal of public support.
The Russian masses wanted someone who could solve their problems and provide peace, bread and land. A new leader promising them this arose. He was Vladimir Ilych Lenin and he became the first communist leader of both Russia and the world. He returned to Russia soon after the revolution and soon realised that the Provisional Government was ineffective and deaf to the people's demands.
In April , the Bolsheviks, influenced by Lenin, withdrew their support from the government. Lenin then released several statements in which he revealed his aims. These 'April statements' would become his plan of action. He called for an end to Russia's involvement in the First World War, the disbanding of the Provisional Government and its replacement by the Bolshevik led soviets, as well as the release of land to the masses. At first the reaction to him was negative, as many felt his aims were too radical.
But Lenin's statement spoke to the hearts of the masses, and in promising to address the issues of peace, bread and land he gradually gained more and more support. Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to gain control of the great network of soviets all over Russia.
The soviets were an established instrument of authority and power and if the Bolsheviks had control over them and their vast support base, the Provisional Government could be overthrown. Lenin was therefore in favour of a new revolutionary phase to force real transformation in Russia. Meanwhile, the Provisional Government made some attempts at reforms. They invited the soviets to form a coalition with them, but the Bolsheviks refused to have anything to do with the government and the middle classes leadership.
The Bolsheviks were nervous of being blamed for the government's mistakes, and this choice gained even more support for Lenin and his Bolshevik Party. The months leading up to the November Revolution were marked by growing unrest.
By July , Bolshevik supporters were hankering for a revolution. They pressured the Bolshevik Party to move faster than planned, and in July they attempted a coup. But the Bolsheviks had not gained enough support, and in June only received support from of the over soviets. The coup failed miserably, and the government reacted by imprisoning the Bolshevik leaders, whom they believed responsible for the coup. Lenin escaped imprisonment by fleeing to Finland.
The Provisional Government still refused to withdraw from the First World War, and the Russian army continued to experience defeat after defeat. In September, the conservatives staged a counter-revolution against the Provisional Government. Sensing the danger, the government asked the Bolsheviks for help against the counter-revolutionaries. This was a significant event because the Bolsheviks could keep the moral high ground claiming that without participating in the ineptitude of the government, it had managed to prove it was needed.
After this, support for the Bolshevik Party grew considerably. Where they had been a minority party in June, they now gained the majority of seats in some soviets, most notably those in Moscow and Petrograd. From Finland, Lenin began to urge Bolshevik supporters to prepare for the next revolution. He was convinced that the time was ripe for a revolution and exploited the Provisional Government's mistakes and weakening position to gain support for the revolution.
Although the Party's central committee was not yet convinced, Lenin visited Petrograd on 22 October where he persuaded the workers to follow him. A week later, the Petrograd Soviet formed a military revolutionary committee, led by Bolshevik member, Leon Trotsky. The Provisional Government saw this as a direct challenge to their authority, and acted against Bolshevik newspapers.
The answer was peace, bread and land. But Kerensky had left it far too late. Key state buildings were taken over, such as the Winter Palace in Petrograd where the Provisional Government was at the time.
The government gave little resistance and was overthrown. Lenin issued a proclamation declaring that Kerensky was no longer Prime Minister and that the Provisional Government was no longer in place. He promised to immediately begin to fulfil the nation's demands for peace, bread and land. He also promised that the soviets would govern, and so grant power to the masses. Shortly after the revolution, the Bolsheviks gained the majority of the seats in the main umbrella Soviet body.
The Cold War belonged to the whole world, not just the superpowers armed with atomic weapons. With his latest book, a wise and observant history titled simply The Cold War , Westad aims to bring this global view of the conflict to a wider audience.
The new book provides a more comprehensive account of the Cold War than his earlier work, tracking its repercussions in every corner of the world, and spends less time in debates with other historians. There is general agreement that it started between and , and ended between and Tensions ran especially high from the end of World War II in to the Cuban missile crisis in , then relaxed somewhat, only to rebound in the s.
But throughout those four-plus decades, the threat that atomic warfare would destroy human life loomed large. Westad has long argued that we should take a broader view of the roots of the Cold War. For him, its distinctive feature was the competition between capitalism and communism.
In his earlier book, he placed the beginning of the Cold War in the Russian Revolution of The competition was for the society of the future, and there were only two fully modern versions of it: the market, with all its imperfections and injustices, and the plan, which was rational and integrated. Soviet ideology made the state a machine acting for the betterment of mankind, while most Americans resented centralized state power and feared its consequences.
The stage was set for an intense competition, in which the stakes were seen to be no less than the survival of the world. The new states of the Soviet bloc excluded hostile forces from government—which meant suppressing the right, splitting the left, and putting loyal Communists in charge of minority governments that would necessarily have to depend on Moscow and rule by force. In Western Europe, the United States faced a similar challenge. Needing to ensure a return to viable capitalism, administrations from Truman on also split the left, ignored the crimes of the right, and worked to bar Communists from power.
The United States, however, could accommodate a broader range of outcomes in Europe than the Soviets could. It tolerated countries in which the moderate left operated democratically and built up the welfare state, because doing so undermined the appeal of communism by proving that capitalism could provide public services and a social safety net.
But if Communists threatened to gain too much influence in Western Europe, America attempted to undermine their success through covert action —as it did in elections in France in and in Italy in In and , when elected governments tried to nationalize British-owned oil in Iran and distribute American-owned land in Guatemala to peasants, they were overthrown by the CIA.
Similarly, the Soviet Union could not abide political reforms within its sphere of influence: A more open socialism in Hungary was crushed in , when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. Surely not everything between and can be described as the result of the Cold War; that period, after all, includes the World War II alliance between the U. Both superpowers attempted to gather influence and to secure commitments to their way of seeing and interpreting the world.
And that means that even the phenomena that are not reducible to Cold War tensions were affected by it. Consider the process of decolonization that accelerated in the years after World War II. The United States nominally took an anti-colonial position. It supported decolonization—as it did in Dutch Indonesia—if it thought the brutality of colonial rule might make communism look attractive by comparison.
But in other cases, such as Vietnam, a French colony until —America simply took over colonial projects from weakened European allies. The Soviet Union, for its part, generally lined up behind forces of national liberation except in its sphere of influence , if only because they had the potential to undermine its rival.
Some countries, like India, tried to reject Cold War politics altogether, mixing democratic elections with economic planning and formally establishing the Non-Aligned Movement in
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