Russian Rulers History Podcast · Mark Schauss

The Cold War - Part One

·23 min·5 clips

The episode opens by moving on from Archpriest Avakum Petrov and turning to the Cold War. The host says he wants to approach it from the Soviet side whenever possible. He frames the conflict as a real danger, not a tidy classroom label. Then he reaches back to his own childhood. He remembers emergency drills in elementary school in New York City during the 1960s. He makes the obvious point that hiding under a desk would not have done much if a bomb had landed nearby. The Cold War is dated from the end of World War II in 1945 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. He also places its peak at the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Some people, he notes, would argue that the 1980s under Reagan brought the sharpest tensions. The first major crisis he treats in detail is Berlin. After the city is divided into sectors, the Soviet Union blocks Western road, rail, and canal access to the parts under Western control. He ties that move to West Germany's introduction of the new Deutsche Mark. The Western Allies answer with the Berlin Airlift. The operation runs from June 26, 1948, to September 30, 1949. He lingers on the scale of it. At the height of the effort, a plane landed every 45 seconds at Tempelhof Airport. More than 2.3 million tons of supplies were flown in. About 2.5 million civilians depended on that flow. He treats the airlift as the point where Stalin had to back off from trying to take over the old German capital. From there he steps back to the Truman Doctrine. He dates it to March 1947. He links it to communist rebellions in Greece and Turkey. He says Truman presented the doctrine as support for free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by the people of West Berlin. Greece gets the longer treatment. The Communist Party of Greece refused to disband and disarm after the Axis left. The Caserta Agreement had already set a framework for resistance forces to come under the Greek government. The host pushes the story forward as a chain of causes and consequences, not as a detached survey. He keeps returning to the idea that the Cold War was fought through proxies all over the world. The episode ends by setting up the Korean War as the next major phase. The whole thing moves in a straight line, with little ceremony and a lot of dates, names, and hard historical pressure.

As heard by us

A blunt Soviet-side account of the Cold War's early pressure points.

The Cold War is told from a Soviet-side angle whenever possible, and it works best when it stays close to the sequence of events: the Berlin Blockade, the split of Berlin, the Western airlift, and the Truman Doctrine.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the Cold War from the Soviet side, start here.

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