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Yalta Confrence
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin. -
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Cold War Timeline (Willich)
The Cold War Events -
Truman Doctrine
Truman Doctrine was an international relations policy set forth by the U.S. President Harry Truman in a speech on March 12, 1947, which stated that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent them from joining the Soviet sphere. -
Marshall Plan
President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1948. It became known as the Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, who in 1947 proposed that the United States provide economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the (North) Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. -
Berlin Airlift
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 allied control. -
USSR Atomic Bomb
At a remote test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name "First Lightning." In order to measure the effects of the blast, the Soviet scientists constructed buildings, bridges, and other civilian structures in the vicinity of the bomb. -
Korean war Begins
Armed forces from communist North Korea smash into South Korea, setting off the Korean War. The United States, acting under the auspices of the United Nations, quickly sprang to the defense of South Korea and fought a bloody and frustrating war for the next three years. -
Nikita Krushchev Comes to Power
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. -
East German Uprising
The Uprising of 1953 in East Germany started with a strike by East Berlin construction workers on 16 June 1953. It turned into a widespread uprising against the German Democratic Republic government the next day. In Germany, the revolt is often called People's Uprising in East Germany. -
Rosenburg Spy Case
Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 25, 1915 – June 19, 1953) were American citizens executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. -
Korean War Ends
After three years of a bloody and frustrating war, the United States, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and South Korea agree to an armistice, bringing the Korean War to an end. The armistice ended America's first experiment with the Cold War concept of "limited war." -
Warsaw Pact
The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states -
Hungarian Uprising
The Hungarian Uprising began on 23 October 1956 when the working class took on and defeated the police and installed a new government, lasting 18 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks. -
Sputnik
The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was visible all around the Earth and its radio pulses were detectable. -
U2 Incident
The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower and during the leadership of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on 17 April 1961. A counter-revolutionary military, trained and funded by the United States government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Brigade 2506 fronted the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF) and intended to overthrow the revolutionary left-wing government of Fidel Castro. Launched from Guatemala, the invading force was defeated within three days by the Cuban armed forc -
Berlin Wall(Building)
Two days after sealing off free passage between East and West Berlin with barbed wire, East German authorities begin building a wall--the Berlin Wall--to permanently close off access to the West. For the next 28 years, the heavily fortified Berlin Wall stood as the most tangible symbol of the Cold War--a literal "iron curtain" dividing Europe. -
Cuban Missle Crisis
Print Cite During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy (1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enac -
Prague Spring
Antonin Novotny, the Stalinist ruler of Czechoslovakia, is succeeded as first secretary by Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak who supports liberal reforms. In the first few months of his rule, Dubcek introduced a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms, including increased freedom of speech and the rehabilitation of political dissidents. -
Soviet Union invades Afghanistan
The Soviet Afghanistan War was fought between Afghanistan rebels called the Mujahideen and the Soviet supported Afghanistan government. The United States supported the Afghanistan rebels in order to try and overthrow the communist government and to prevent the spread of communism. -
Lech Walesa organizes trade union Soldarity
a Polish non-governmental trade union, begins on 14 August 1980, at the Lenin Shipyards (now Gdańsk Shipyards) at its founding by Lech Wałęsa and others. In the early 1980s, it became the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. -
Berlin Wall(taking down)
The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between democracy and Communism during the Cold War. -
Mikhail Gorbechev comes to power
The Congress of People's Deputies elects General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev as the new president of the Soviet Union. -
German Unification
The German reunification (German: Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany) joined the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG/West Germany) to form the reunited nation of Germany, and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23.