Capitalists vs Communists: The Cold War, in Quick

Picture a child in an American classroom in the 1950s, ducking under a wooden desk with her hands over her neck, drilled again and again for a bomb that a desk could never save her from. Then picture a family in Berlin, waking one August morning in 1961 to find a fence of barbed wire put up overnight straight down the middle of their city, cutting across streets and tram lines, keeping a grandmother on one pavement from her grandchildren on the other for nearly thirty years. Neither of these was a scene from a film. For hundreds of millions of people, on both sides, that was just what normal life felt like during the Cold War.

For nearly fifty years, from the end of the Second World War to the early 1990s, the world was split down the middle. The United States and the capitalist democracies on one side, the Soviet Union and the communist states on the other. The two never once fought each other directly, army against army, which is why we call it cold. And yet almost everything about the second half of the twentieth century, its wars and walls, its rockets and spies and propaganda, was shaped by that one standoff.

Two winners who could not share the prize

In 1945 the biggest war in history ended, and when the smoke cleared only two real powers were left standing. Britain, France, and Germany were worn out or in ruins. The United States and the Soviet Union came out of it huge, confident, and victorious. They had fought side by side to destroy Nazi Germany. The problem was that they believed in almost exactly opposite things, and each had just proved to itself that it could remake the world.

The American model was capitalism, at home paired with democracy: private business owned by individuals, real elections, and markets mostly left to set their own prices. The Soviet model was communism as built by Lenin and made harder by Stalin: one ruling party that owned the farms and factories outright and promised that central planning would bring equality and plenty without the waste and cruelty of the market. This was more than dislike. Each side thought the other's system was a threat to its own survival, a rival belief that had to be held back and, in time, beaten. Europe was split in two within a couple of years, its eastern half pulled into the Soviet camp. In 1946 Winston Churchill gave the split the name that stuck. An iron curtain, he said, had come down across the continent, closing off the free-market West from the Soviet-controlled East.

Why it stayed cold

One thing explains why the Cold War never boiled over into an ordinary war between the two giants: nuclear weapons.

The United States had used the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. By 1949, to Washington's alarm, the Soviet Union had tested one of its own. Within a few years both sides held whole stockpiles rather than single bombs, then thermonuclear weapons many times more powerful, then enough of everything to destroy each other several times over. That changed the maths of war. For all of human history, a great power could hope to win a war and come out the other side. A direct fight between the superpowers now promised no winner at all. It would finish both of them, and much of the living world with them, in an afternoon.

The weapons were the most terrifying ever built, and that is exactly why they stayed in their silos: to use them was to lose. That idea later got a fittingly grim nickname, mutually assured destruction, and its acronym, MAD, said the quiet part out loud. Since neither side could fight the other head-on and expect to survive, they fought everywhere except head-on. They backed opposite sides in other people's wars, the so-called proxy wars. They raced to build deadlier weapons and then raced into space. They ran huge networks of spies and floods of propaganda, each trying to prove to a watching world that its way of life was the future.

The flashpoints

The standoff never stayed still for long. It kept flaring into crises sharp enough to make the whole world hold its breath.

Berlin was the constant sore point. The old German capital sat deep inside communist East Germany, but was itself split between West and East, a piece of the capitalist world stranded in Soviet territory. In 1948 Stalin blockaded the western half to starve it into giving in. The West answered with a remarkable airlift, flying in food and coal around the clock for nearly a year until the blockade was lifted. In 1961 the East, losing huge numbers of people who fled west through the city, sealed the border with the Berlin Wall. It stood for twenty-eight years as the physical symbol of a divided world.

In other places the Cold War turned genuinely hot, though never between the superpowers themselves. Korea was the first big proxy war, from 1950 to 1953, and it ended without a winner, along a border that still splits North from South today. Vietnam was longer and bloodier and far more divisive, and it drained American confidence for over a decade. The most dangerous moment of the whole era came in October 1962, when American spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear missiles being set up in Cuba, barely ninety miles off the coast of Florida. For thirteen days, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time before or since, until a tense deal pulled the missiles back out. Running alongside the crises was the space race, which turned some of the rivalry into something that killed no one, from the Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957, which shocked America into action, to the American astronauts who walked on the Moon in 1969.

The two camps

Most of the world sorted itself, or was pushed, into one of two camps. The West meant the United States, the democracies of Western Europe, and the military alliance that tied them together, NATO, formed in 1949 on the promise that an attack on one member was an attack on all. The East meant the Soviet Union and the communist governments it put in place and defended across Eastern Europe, tied into a rival military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.

Nearly everywhere else became disputed ground. Through aid and loans, weapons and advisers, coups and quiet pressure, the two superpowers pulled country after country towards one camp or the other, especially across the newly independent nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Some refused to pick a side. India, along with a group of others, tried to hold a formal position of non-alignment, though even staying neutral was a stand that had to be defended against constant courting from both sides.

How it ended

The Cold War did not end in a battle or a surrender or a signed peace. It ended because one side simply ran out of road. For decades the Soviet economy had buckled under the weight of the arms race, a huge military, and the deep, grinding inefficiency of central planning, a system where distant officials, not prices, decided how many shoes or tractors to make, and got it wrong again and again. It could not match Western living standards, and more and more it could not even keep its own promises to its own people. Shops ran short. The gap between the propaganda and everyday life became impossible to hide.

In the mid-1980s a new and younger Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to save the system by reforming it, easing censorship and reshaping the economy under the banners of glasnost, meaning openness, and perestroika, meaning rebuilding. But a system held together by fear does not always survive when the grip loosens. Once people were allowed to speak, and the satellite states sensed that Soviet tanks would no longer roll in to prop up their governments, the whole thing came apart with astonishing speed. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was opened, almost by accident and almost without bloodshed, and joyful crowds tore at it with hammers. One after another that year, the communist governments of Eastern Europe fell. In 1991 the Soviet Union itself broke up into fifteen separate countries. The contest was over, and the capitalist West was left standing alone.

The argument, and who won it

For all the weapons, the Cold War was not a war in the usual sense. It was an argument that ran for decades between two rival ideas of how a society should be run, carried on by two powers so heavily armed that settling it by force would have destroyed both of them. So it was decided by a slower and stranger test than any battlefield. Which system could keep delivering, year after year, for the ordinary people living inside it.

One of them ran out of money, patience, and legitimacy first. The other is still here. That is why the economic and political world we live in today, with its open markets and its inequalities, its global trade and its leftover nuclear arsenals, is in large part the world the winning side built, and the aftermath we are all still living in.

Sources

• Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, "Kennan and Containment, 1947".
• History, "Cold War: Summary, Combatants and Timeline".
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Cold War".