The Cold War, modern Ukraine and the spread of democracy in the former Soviet bloc countries

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Michael De Groot, Indiana University (THE CONVERSATION) As Russia masses forces and equipment on Ukraine’s border, international tensions over a possible invasion intensify almost daily. Ukraine has emerged as ground zero of what some pundits have dubbed a new Cold War between Russia and the West. In my view as a Cold War historian, this comparison distorts the Cold War and misrepresents the stakes of the current crisis. Yet reviewing the Cold War is important because its legacy shapes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy toward Ukraine. While Ukraine was a Soviet republic during the Cold War, it has become the front line of a post-Cold War tug-of-war between Russia and the West. By insisting on NATO’s withdrawing its forces and weapons from former Soviet bloc countries, Putin would like to turn back the clock to the mid-1990s, before NATO expanded into Eastern Europe. From my reading of public accounts, Putin views NATO as a relic that retains its Cold War purpose of containing Russia. In response to NATO expansion, Putin seeks to carve a buffer zone of his own, much as former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did in response to American assistance in Europe after World War II, and consolidate a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. What was the Cold War? The Cold War was a global struggle of the United States and democratic capitalism against the Soviet Union and communism. It erupted in the mid-1940s after both nations emerged from World War II as superpowers and viewed each other as existential threats. During World War II they had cooperated to defeat Nazi Germany and Japan. After the war, both agreed to occupy Germany jointly with Britain and France and wanted to continue the alliance once the fighting stopped. But irreconcilable disagreements about the postwar international order rose to the surface. The Soviet Union asserted control over Eastern Europe ‘” the nations of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania ‘” which the Soviet Army had liberated from the Nazis. Stalin supported local communists and intimidated their opponents, and the countries rarely held free elections. U.S. President Harry Truman’s administration accused Stalin of betraying an agreement at the wartime Yalta Conference to respect European democracy. Yet what terrified U.S. officials most was the possibility that Soviet ideology would resonate with the Western European and German people who were struggling to recover from the war. U.S. policymakers feared that the desolate masses might elect communist governments that would ally with the Soviet Union against the United States. Winning hearts and minds In one of the turning points of the early Cold War, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced an economic assistance initiative for Europe in June 1947. Congress authorized the program in April 1948. The Marshall Plan, as it became known, provided more than US$12 billion to aid European reconstruction during its three years of operation. But the Marshall Plan’s logic worried the Western Europeans. Fresh off two traumatic wars against a belligerent Germany, Western Europeans feared any effort to rebuild western Germany and place it on the path to statehood. Breaking a long-standing tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, the United States joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949 to guarantee Western Europe’s security against West Germany, which became independent the following month.