-
Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in Russia in 1917 which dismantled the Tsarists autocracy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power and destroyed the tradition of czarist rule. It started on Mar 8, 1917 to Nov 7, 1917. -
Potsdam Conference
Held near Berlin, the Potsdam Conference (July 17-August 2, 1945) was the last of the World War II meetings held by the “Big Three” heads of state.The leaders arrived at various agreements on the German economy, punishment for war criminals, land boundaries and reparations. -
Atomic bomb - Hiroshima/Nagasaki
During the final stage of World War II, the United States detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed 129,000–226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. They remain the only use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. -
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1992. The term symbolizes the efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West and its allied states. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947. -
Hollywood 10
Hollywood Ten, in U.S. history, 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress, were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $12 billion in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
Berlin Blockade and Airlift
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control.The Western Allies organized the Berlin airlift (26 June 1948–30 September 1949) to carry supplies to the people of West Berlin, a difficult feat given the size of the city's population. -
NATO
NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is an international alliance that consists of 29 member states from North America and Europe. It was established at the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949. From its founding, NATO's primary purpose was to unify and strengthen the Western Allies' military response to a possible invasion of western Europe by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. -
Soviet bomb test
The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. At a remote test the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name “First Lightning.” -
Khrushchev Takes over
The Soviet government announces that Nikita Khrushchev has been selected as one of five men named to the new office of Secretariat of the Communist Party. Khrushchev’s selection was a crucial first step in his rise to power in the Soviet Union—an advance that culminated in Khrushchev being named secretary of the Communist Party in September 1953, and premier in 1958. -
Eisenhower’s Massive Retaliation Policy
In 1954 President Eisenhower adopted a foreign policy of “massive retaliation.” This policy sought to counter the growing Soviet threat. It viewed nuclear weapons as a means of deterring war and as a first recourse should deterrence fail. -
Army-McCarthy hearings
The Army–McCarthy hearings were a series of hearings held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations to investigate conflicting accusations between the United States Army and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. -
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defence treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War.It was the Communist counteraction to NATO . The Warsaw Pact came to be seen as quite a potential militaristic threat, as a sign of Communist dominance, and a definite opponent to American capitalism. The signing of the pact became a symbol of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. -
The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a nationwide revolt against the Marxist-Leninist government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. -
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. As a product of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, Korea had been split into two sovereign states. -
U2 Incident
On 1 May 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory. -
Bay of Pigs invasion
On April 17, 1961, 1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. -
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.During the early years of the Cold War, West Berlin was a geographical loophole through which thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally encircled West Berlin. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.The Soviet Union (USSR) began building missile sites in Cuba in 1962. Together with the earlier Berlin Blockade, this crisis is seen as one of the most important confrontations of the Cold War. -
Detente under Nixon
Period of the easing of Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union from 1967 to 1979. The era was a time of increased trade and cooperation with the Soviet Union and the signing of the SALT treaties. It began in 1969, as a core element of the foreign policy of U.S. president Richard Nixon, in an effort to avoid the collision of nuclear risks. -
The Reagan Doctrine
The Reagan Doctrine was a strategy orchestrated and implemented by the United States under the Reagan Administration to overwhelm the global influence of the Soviet Union in an attempt to end the Cold War. -
Reagan’s Berlin Wall Speech
"Tear down this wall!" is a line from a speech made by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, calling for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open up the barrier which had divided West and East Berlin since 1961. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989)
The Fall of the Wall. On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin's Communist Party announced a change in his city's relations with the West. He said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders.The wall symbolized the lack of freedom under communism.
