The Cold War

The Berlin Airlift

On 24 June, Stalin cuts all land routes into West Berlin, hoping to starve the Western sectors of the divided city out of the deep interior of the Soviet zone. Instead the Western allies mount the Berlin Airlift: for eleven months, aircraft land every few minutes, day and night, flying in food and coal for two million people. In May 1949 Stalin lifts the blockade, defeated.

NATO, the Soviet bomb, and Red China

1949 hardens the divide. On 4 April the Western democracies sign the North Atlantic Treaty, binding North America to the defence of Europe. In August the Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly. And on 1 October, Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China from the gate of Heavenly Peace. The Cold War is now global and nuclear.

Hot war in Korea

On 25 June, communist North Korea invades the South. The United Nations, in the Soviet Union's absence from the Security Council, authorises a defence led by the United States. Three years of war follow, drawing in the new People's Republic of China; the front stabilises near the 38th parallel where it began. The armistice of 1953 leaves Korea divided and some three million dead.

The Hungarian Revolution is crushed

In October a national uprising in Hungary topples the Stalinist regime and declares neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact — the Soviet military alliance formed the year before. On 4 November Soviet tanks roll into Budapest and drown the revolution in blood; some 2,500 Hungarians die and 200,000 flee west. The West, distracted by the simultaneous Suez Crisis, does not intervene.

A wall divides Berlin

On the night of 13 August, to stop the haemorrhage of refugees fleeing to the West through the last open door in the Iron Curtain, East Germany seals off West Berlin with barbed wire, soon replaced by a concrete wall. For twenty-eight years the Berlin Wall stands as the physical symbol of a divided Europe and a divided world.

Thirteen days on the brink

In October, American U-2 flights reveal Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. For thirteen days the world stands closer to nuclear war than ever before or since, as Kennedy blockades the island and demands their removal. On 28 October Khrushchev backs down; in secret, the United States agrees to withdraw its own missiles from Turkey. Both sides, shaken, install a hotline and begin to talk.

The crisis was the hinge of the Cold War. Having peered into the abyss, both superpowers pulled back: the Partial Test Ban Treaty followed in 1963, and the long process of détente and arms control began. The confrontation also confirmed the logic of 'mutually assured destruction' — the grim guarantee that neither side could win a nuclear war, which would keep the peace, of a kind, for the next quarter-century.

Tanks end 'socialism with a human face'

Under Alexander Dubček, Czechoslovakia attempts a liberalising reform of communism — the Prague Spring. On the night of 20-21 August, half a million Warsaw Pact troops invade to crush it. The 'Brezhnev Doctrine' proclaims the right of the Soviet bloc to intervene wherever socialism is threatened. In the West, the invasion disillusions a generation of communists.

Americans walk on the Moon

On 20 July, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon and Neil Armstrong takes 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'. The triumph answers the Soviet lead of the previous decade — Sputnik in 1957, Gagarin the first man in space in 1961 — and wins the space race that had become the Cold War's grandest contest of prestige and technology.

The fall of Saigon

On 30 April, North Vietnamese tanks crash through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon as the last Americans are lifted by helicopter from the embassy roof. After a decade of direct American involvement, 58,000 US and millions of Vietnamese dead, the war ends in communist victory and a united Vietnam. It is the greatest defeat of American power in the Cold War.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

On 24 December, Soviet forces invade Afghanistan to prop up a faltering communist government. They are met by a fierce insurgency of mujahideen fighters, armed and financed by the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The ten-year war — the Soviet Union's own Vietnam — bleeds the Red Army, drains the treasury, and shakes faith in the system at home.

Gorbachev tries to save the system

In March, Mikhail Gorbachev becomes leader of a Soviet Union sclerotic and stagnant. To revive it he launches perestroika — restructuring — and glasnost — openness. He seeks arms reductions with President Reagan and renounces the Brezhnev Doctrine. But reform unleashes forces he cannot control: once the peoples of the bloc no longer fear Soviet tanks, the empire begins to crack.

1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall

Through 1989 the communist regimes of Eastern Europe fall one after another — in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania — in a wave of mostly peaceful revolutions. On the night of 9 November, an East German official's confused announcement sends crowds to the Berlin Wall; the guards stand aside, and the people tear it down. The Iron Curtain is lifted.

The red flag comes down over the Kremlin

After a failed hardliners' coup in August accelerates the collapse, the Soviet republics declare independence one by one. On 25 December Gorbachev resigns; the hammer-and-sickle is lowered over the Kremlin for the last time and replaced by the Russian tricolour. On 26 December the Soviet Union formally ceases to exist. The Cold War is over, and with it the short twentieth century.

The forty-four-year contest ended without the great-power war it had always threatened. Its close left the United States the sole superpower and inaugurated a brief 'unipolar moment'; some spoke of the 'end of history'. But the collapse also unfroze conflicts the Cold War had held in check, and the map of Eurasia — fifteen new states from the Soviet Union alone — would take decades to settle.