Cold War And The Fall Of Russia example essay topic

The Cold War was a war caused by the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. It started after WWII ended. Europe was left in ruins while Russia and the U.S. were left as super powers. The Cold War was a battle between these groups in political, military, and economic ideas.

Though military build up was great on both sides neither one ever directly fought each other. In this essay I'm going to talk about the following points: Rise of the Cold War, events in and because of the Cold War, and the fall of Russia. England was devastated, France was burnt to the ground, and many small nations had suffered economically. Russia had suffered many losses from the Nazi's. But they were in better shape then Europe. They still had a military and a running, economy.

In the late 40's through early 50's the Soviet Union started to spread the Lenin's ideas as it moved toward the west. In 1947 the U.S. started helping Europe economically, to help them rebuild in a system called the Marshall Plan. Russia had its own plan called the Molotov Plan. Because of this they were able to spread communism through many countries. Some of these nations were: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, and numerous countries in Southeastern Asia. But on the U.S. side we had the support from almost the entire Western Europe.

So the tension started, between Western Europe (republic society) and Eastern Europe (communism) many events happened during the cold war, one of the events that led up to the tension was the foreign aid policies. These policies were able to divide up Europe between the superpowers. After Europe was divided treaty organizations and alliances started forming up again. One of these alliances was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was on Northern Europe's side, And the Warsaw Pact. The Russians threatened to block off supply routs to Western Berlin.

The people in the city were starving and dying from the lack of supplies. Some other examples are the Cuban missile crises, where the Russian funded Cuban military had secretly made or smuggled nuclear missiles onto the island and pointed them at the U.S.A. The U.S. did go to battle though. We fought two major battles against the communists. The first was over Korea. North Korea as communist tried to spread their ideas through taking over. The U.S. funded and aided South Korea until they were able to defend themselves from other attackers.

The second time it was in Vietnam. Like the first battle North Vietnam was trying to take over South Vietnam and make it a communist nation. The U.S. sent a lot of men into it and lost many soldiers, but we were unsuccessful in stopping the North Vietnamese. Soon tension grew so the U.S. knew that they had to do something about all the nuclear missiles that Russia had. During almost the whole time that Russia and the U.S.A. had been fighting for power they had stored up a large amount of nuclear weapons. This in fact would put the whole world in danger.

This put them at worry. They concluded that the only way for them to reach the U.S. with their missiles was to launch them in such sheer numbers. To do this they would have to change the governments funding of 30% to the military to 60%. This increase in funding left the citizens in financial ruin.

People were starving to death. Countries started to revolt. A few of these countries were Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. After the fall of Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev came into power. He instituted many reforms such as military cuts, reconstruction of agriculture, openness to the government, and democratization. It was a union setup by a boat-dock worker, which unions were forbidden, to start strikes on the factories and industrialized areas.

They smartly got the world media on them. This put the Soviet Union on the spotlight. The revolt was considered one of the greatest individual defeats on the fall of communistic Russia. This brought new policies and rights. The by-products of these policies brought the collapse of the communistic countries. This lead to the establishment of non-communist political parties, free - elections, and the development of a new democratic state.

In October of 1990 the communistic government fell in Berlin, and the divided city was re-united. This was the final symbol of the fall of communism in Europe. A little bit later the Warsaw pact was abolished, and the last of the nuclear weapons were thrown in the sea. Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev officially ended the Cold War in 1991. Basically the end of the Cold War ended because the Soviet Union ceased to be a superpower.