Cold war

Cold War 1943-91

By Istiak
  • Tehran Conference

    The Tehran meeting was the first time the so-called 'Big Three' met – Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, WinstonChurchill of Great Britain and F D Roosevelt of America. It was to set the direction of World World Two in Europe.
  • Yalta Potsdam

    The Tehran meeting was the first time the so-called 'Big Three' met – Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, WinstonChurchill of Great Britain and F D Roosevelt of America. It was to set the direction of World World Two in Europe.
  • End of world war 2

    The Tehran meeting was the first time the so-called 'Big Three' met – Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, WinstonChurchill of Great Britain and F D Roosevelt of America. It was to set the direction of World World Two in Europe.
  • 'Iron curtain' speech

    In one of the most famous orations of the Cold War period, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemns the Soviet Union's policies in Europe and declares, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
  • Truman doctrine/Marshall plan

    With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.
  • Berlin blockade/airlift

    The End of the Blockade. By spring 1949, it was clear that the Soviet blockade of West Berlin had failed. It had not persuaded West Berliners to reject their allies in the West, nor had it prevented the creation of a unified West German state.
  • Hungarian uprising

    he 1956 Hungarian Uprising, often referred to as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, is considered by many as the nation's greatest tragedy. The Uprising was an almost spontaneous revolt by the Hungarian people against the ruling Communist Party of the time and the Soviet policies which were crippling post-war Hungary.
  • Berlin wall

    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. It was thrown up overnight, on 13 August 1961.
  • 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.
  • Prague spring/Czechoslovakia

    The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II
  • Detente

    Détente (a French word meaning release from tension) is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when President Richard M. Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party
  • Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

    In December 1979, in the midst of the Cold War, the Soviet 40th Army invaded Afghanistan in order to prop up the communist government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) against a growing insurgency.
  • Olympic boycott by USA

    The Soviet invasion spurred Jimmy Carter to issue an ultimatum on 20 January 1980, that the US would boycott the Moscow Olympics if Soviet troops did not withdraw from Afghanistan within one month. 65 countries and regions invited did not take part in the 1980 Olympics.
  • The Carter Doctrine

    The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf.
  • Ronald Reagan proposed strategic arms

    Reagan’s first nuclear initiative, however, went in the opposite direction. In October 1981, he unveiled his plan for a major, strategic modernization program to add thousands of additional warheads and a variety of new delivery systems to the U.S. arsenal, while improving U.S. command and control capabilities. The strategic package, which in large part built on previous programs, called for a big increase in bomber forces, including 100 B-lBs
  • Olympic boycott by Russia

    The boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles followed four years after the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The boycott involved 14 Eastern Bloc countries and allies, led by the Soviet Union, which initiated the boycott on May 8, 1984.
  • Gorbachev leader of the USSR

    On 15 March 1990, Gorbachev was elected as the first executive President of the Soviet Union with 59% of the Deputies' votes. ... Communist rule in the Soviet Union weakened, and centralized power from Moscow was unable to combat centrifugal forces in the South. In the elections, many Party candidates were defeated.
  • Glasnost and Perestroika

    To reform the distraught Soviet Union, the democratization of the Communist Party was promoted through Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of “perestroika” and “glasnost.” Perestroika refers to the reconstruction of the political and economic system established by the Communist Party.
  • INF treaty

    The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.
  • Tadeusz Mazowiecki elected leader of the Polish government

  • Berlin wall comes down

    The Berlin Wall: 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. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders.
  • Velvet revolution

    In November and December, Czechs commemorate the Velvet Revolution. It refers to a bloodless revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the communist regime in 1989, and brought back democracy to Czechs after fifty years of lack of freedom – after Nazi occupation and communist rule.
  • Malta summit

    The Malta Summit comprised a meeting between US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, taking place on December 2–3, 1989, just a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  • Romanian revolution

    On 22 December 1989, Romania's communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in a violent revolution and fled from the capital, Bucharest. Three days later, he and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad. It was the last of the popular uprisings against communist rule in eastern Europe that year.
  • German reunification

    Accordingly, on Unification Day, 3 October 1990, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and five new Federal States on its former territory joined the Federal Republic of Germany. East and West Berlin were reunited and joined the Federal Republic as a full-fledged Federal City-State.
  • Collapse of the soviet union

    On December 25, 1991, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, thereafter replaced by the Russian tricolor. Earlier in the day, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his post as president of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state.
  • End of warsaw pact

    On 1 July 1991, in Prague, the Czechoslovak President Václav Havel formally ended the 1955 Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance and so disestablished the Warsaw Treaty after 36 years of military alliance with the USSR.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev resigned

    They also preemptively accepted Gorbachev's resignation. ... On the night of 25 December, in a nationally televised speech, Gorbachev announced his resignation as president—as he put it, "I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."