'A World Divided: Superpower Relations, 1943-72' is one of the eight Paper 1 depth studies. You study two of them, so only work through these lessons if this is one of your chosen options.
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Unlock This CourseIn 1945 the USA and the Soviet Union (USSR) won the Second World War together. Within a few years they were bitter rivals in a Cold War. To understand why, you need to go back to 1917 and to two very different sets of ideas about how a country should be run.
Key terms:
Politics: only the Communist Party is allowed. There are no free elections.
Economy: the state owns factories, farms and shops, and plans what is made.
Beliefs: wealth should be shared, so the needs of society come before the freedom of one person. The government controls newspapers and radio.
Politics: democracy. People choose between several parties in free elections.
Economy: private owners run businesses for profit. Some people become rich while others stay poor.
Beliefs: the freedom of each person comes first, including free speech and a free press.
These ideas could not both be right, and each side thought the other was a danger. Communists believed that workers in every country would one day overthrow capitalism. Many people in the West feared exactly that. Soviet leaders, for their part, believed the capitalist countries wanted to destroy the only Communist state. So each side saw the other's actions as a threat, even when they were meant as defence.
The distrust began long before the Cold War. That is why historians call it a long-term cause.
In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR. In December the USA joined the war. Britain, the USA and the USSR now formed the Grand Alliance. They worked together because they had one enemy, not because they agreed. On the day of the invasion the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, promised to help the USSR but also said: 'No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years.'
There was real co-operation. Under a scheme called Lend-Lease, the USA sent the USSR about 11 billion dollars of trucks, food and weapons. But three quarrels kept the old distrust alive.
From 1941 Stalin asked Britain and the USA to invade German-held western Europe. This second front would force Hitler to move troops away from the USSR. In 1942 Stalin was led to expect it that year. Instead the Allies landed in North Africa (1942) and Italy (1943). The invasion of France, D-Day, came only on 6 June 1944.
In April 1943 the Germans announced they had found the graves of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn. They had been shot by the Soviet secret police in 1940. Stalin blamed Germany and broke off relations with the Polish government in London. In August 1944 the people of Warsaw rose against the Germans. The Soviet army was close by but did not come to their aid, and the rising was crushed.
The USA and Britain worked on an atomic bomb during the war. They kept the project secret from Stalin, although he was their ally. Soviet spies told him about it anyway, which made him trust his allies even less.
Churchill had reasons for the delay. An invasion of France needed huge numbers of trained men, ships and landing craft, and a failed landing would have been a disaster. But Stalin saw it differently. For three years most of the German army was fighting in the USSR, and about 27 million Soviet people died in the war. He came to believe that his allies were happy to let Germany and the USSR wear each other out.
The consequences were serious. Stalin ended the war sure that the USSR could rely only on itself for its safety. The Western leaders ended it doubting that Stalin would keep his word, above all over Poland. Once Germany was beaten in 1945, the common enemy that had held the Grand Alliance together was gone, and the rivalry that began in 1917 came back into the open. The wartime meetings of the three leaders are covered in The Big Three at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.
Don't say the Cold War began in 1917. The rivalry began then; the Cold War developed after 1945. Don't write that the Allies refused to open a second front: they delayed it until June 1944. And don't mix up the two words: Communism and Capitalism are ideologies, while the USSR and the USA are the countries that followed them.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
The Grand Alliance was never a friendship. It was a marriage of convenience, forced on three suspicious governments by a common enemy. Stalin begged for a second front for three long years while his people died in their millions, and he bitterly concluded that his so-called allies were content to watch. Britain and the USA, for their part, hid their atomic bomb project from him. Only Hitler held these reluctant partners together.
What impression does the author give about the Grand Alliance? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that the Grand Alliance was a false and distrustful partnership. This is shown by the language used. Calling it a 'marriage of convenience' between 'reluctant partners' suggests the three countries worked together only because they had to. The phrase 'so-called allies' suggests that Britain and the USA did not behave like real allies, and 'begged' makes Stalin's requests sound desperate and ignored. The author has also chosen to stress only the quarrels, the delayed second front and the hidden atomic bomb project, and says nothing about the help the Allies gave each other, such as American supplies sent to the USSR. This selection makes the alliance seem to have had no real trust at all.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations, and explains how the author's choice of words and of what to include and leave out creates that impression.
Don't retell the extract or add the story of the second front. Name the impression in your first sentence, then quote loaded words such as 'so-called allies' and say what each one suggests. Finish with what the author has left out.