The cold war

The Cold War John Lewis Gaddis Chapter 1: The Return of Fear The United States had been born out of struggle against tyranny, and had embraced a sociopolitical ideology that constrained power and held individual liberty as its highest virtue. The Soviet Union had been founded to unite the working classes under a highly centralized government to overthrow the exploitative capitalists. Both the U.S. and USSR believed that their ideologies were supreme and would spread to all corners of the Earth in due time. Karl Marx (in The Communist Manifesto) had theorized that capitalism would, by its nature, cause the world’s working classes to grow in size and resentment until they inevitably rebelled against their masters and seized control of the planet. However, Marx believed that capitalism was a necessary, if cruel, phase that all societies had to go through to build up the state’s technology and infrastructure to a level that would allow a peasant takeover. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wanted the Communist revolution to happen sooner rather than later to end the suffering of the masses. Hence, he and his comrades seized control of Russia, which would serve as a base from which Communism would radiate across the world. But in reality, Russia was not ideally suited for sustaining a Communist system because it was technologically and industrially underdeveloped and remained a primarily agrarian society. Stalin attempted to correct this through massive socioeconomic reorganization programs in which factories were built and agriculture modernized. The USSR suffered 90 times as many deaths in WWII as the U.S. For the West, things still looked uncertain in late 1945: -No one knew if the Great Depression would return -Americans remained reluctant to take a permanent role in European or world affairs and many just wanted to bring their troops home -Though fascism had been crushed, totalitarianism remained strong, best exemplified by the USSR. -The Red Army was massive and couldn’t be