Period 6: Communism and the Cold War Flashcards
What was the Cold War?
- 1945 to early 1990s
What were the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945?
- Allies drew up plans
- Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe were divided into temporary “spheres of influence,” each to be occupied and rebuilt by the Allies
- Germany was divided into 4 regions under France, Britain, the U.S., and the USSR
- USSR wanted its neighboring states too like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria
- the US wanted those nations to have free elections
- the USSR refused and set up puppet states in those countries
How was Germany split up in 1948?
- the French, British, and American regions merged into one, forming a democratic West Germany
- the USSR’s region became East Germany
- the capital, Berlin, was on the eastern side
- within Berlin an eastern and western zone were created
What was the Berlin Blockade?
The Soviets wanted all of Berlin to be within its control, so they cut off land access to Berlin from the west, known as the Berlin Blockade.
What was the Berlin Airlift?
The West retaliated to the Soviet’s Berlin Blockade by flying in food and fuel to the “trapped” western half of the city, an action known as the Berlin Airlift.
What was the Berlin Wall?
- Berlin was divided in half after the Soviets relented due to the West’s Berlin Airlift
- the Soviets built a wall between the two halves in 1961
- prevented East Berliners access to the West until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989
What was the Eastern bloc, aka Soviet bloc or Soviet satellites?
- East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary
- Yugoslavia was communist too but established its own path because it had testy relations with Moscow
What was the Western bloc?
- Western Europe, including Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, West Germany, and eventually Greece and Turkey
What was the Truman Doctrine?
- 1947
- the US said it would aid countries threatened by communist takeovers, aka containment
What was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)?
- a military alliance of mutual defense formed by the Western bloc to uphold the Truman Doctrine
What was the Warsaw Pact?
- a military alliance formed by the Eastern bloc in response to the Western bloc’s NATO
What was the Iron Curtain?
- the line between East and West
- named the Iron Curtain by Winston Churchill because Western influence couldn’t penetrate it and Easterners were rarely allowed to go to the Western bloc
What was the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968 and the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957?
- attempted to limit nuclear technology to just five powers (China, Russia, USA, Great Britain, and France)
- Israel, India, and Pakistan chose not to participate in the treaty and now have some nuclear weapons capacity
- North Korea develops nuclear material, violating treaty terms
- Iraq and Iran have attempted to build uranium enrichment programs
- only South Africa has voluntarily dismantled its nuclear weapons program
Who was Sun Yat-sen?
- led the Chinese Revolution of 1911 after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1911
- established the Guomindang (KMT)
What were Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People?
Nationalism, socialism, and democracy.
Who was Jiang Jieshi?
- Sun Yat-sen’s successor
- established the KMT as the ruling party of China
What two forces wreaked havoc on Jiang Jieshi’s plans for the KMT as the ruling party of China throughout the 1920s and 1930s?
- the Japanese empire invaded Manchuria and made an effort to take over all of China in the late 1930s
- the communists, allied w/the USSR, were building strength in northern China
Who was Mao Zedong?
- led the communists to drive the KMT south by 1949 until they fled to Taiwan where they established the Republic of China
- collectivized agriculture and industry and instituted sweeping social reforms using policies similar to Stalin’s five-year plans after the success of the Communist Revolution in 1949
What happened as a result of the creation of the Republic of China in Taiwan?
- mainland China became the People’s Republic of China, the largest communist nation in the world under the leadership of Mao Zedong
- the UN and US recognized the People’s Republic of China as China in 1973
What was Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward?
- implemented by the late 1950s
- huge communes were created as a way of catapulting the revolution toward its goal of a true Marxist state
- local governments that ran the communes couldn’t produce the high agricultural quotas demanded by the central government so they lied about their production causing starvation deaths
