From the end of World War Two to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia and America eyed each other with suspicion and hostility as the world lived in the shadow of the Cold War. As post-war Europe was rebuilt, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin struggled to maintain peace among the former Eastern and Western Allies. Two ideologies, two political systems, two cultures, two superpowers became entrenched in a fight for dominance, each firm in the belief that history would prove them right.
The End of the Second World War: Apocalypse
The Beginning of the Cold War: The Freeze
Three Speeches: ‘An iron curtain has descended’
The Marshall Plan: ‘Communism cannot be stopped in Europe’
Berlin: ‘You should not and cannot abandon this city and this people’
US Anti-Communism: ‘Reds Under the Bed.’
Stalin’s Final Years: ‘I’m finished, I don’t even trust myself’
Khrushchev: ‘Different roads to socialism’
The Berlin Wall: ‘Berlin is the testicles of the West’
The Cuban Missile Crisis: ‘We’ll all meet together in Hell’
China, the USA and the Soviet Union: ‘Ping-pong diplomacy’
The Decline of Détente: ‘Lennonism, not Leninism’
Afghanistan: ‘The Soviet Vietnam’
The Polish Pope and Solidarity: ‘The last nails in the coffin of communism’
The Ex-Actor: ‘Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root’
Gorbachev: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
The End of the Soviet Union: ‘The threat of a world war is no more’
Appendix 2: Timeline of the Cold War