The wartime alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain had always been, at bottom, a marriage of convenience against a common enemy rather than any genuine ideological or strategic partnership, a fact that became obvious within months of Germany's defeat in 1945.
The Soviet Union had suffered catastrophic losses fighting Germany, more military and civilian deaths than any other combatant nation examined in the previous chapter. It was determined to establish a buffer of friendly, controlled states along its western border. It had, after all, been invaded from that direction twice within thirty years, in 1914 and again in 1941. The United States and Britain, for their part, were determined to prevent Soviet-style communist government from spreading further into a Western Europe already devastated and politically vulnerable.
Winston Churchill gave the emerging division its lasting name in a 1946 speech, warning that an iron curtain had descended across the continent, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, a phrase that captured, with more prescience than comfort, the durable geography that was already taking shape.
The immediate postwar years saw a series of specific crises through which the division moved from an uneasy wartime arrangement into a fixed and heavily armed frontier.
In 1948, Stalin blockaded the western-occupied sectors of Berlin. The city itself sat deep inside the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. He was attempting to force the Western allies out of it entirely. The Western response, an airlift sustaining the city's population with supplies flown in continuously for nearly a year, succeeded, and Stalin lifted the blockade in 1949, but the episode convinced both sides that permanent, formal division, rather than any hoped-for eventual reunification, was the only realistic basis for stability.
That same year, 1949, saw the formal creation of two separate German states, the Federal Republic in the west and the Democratic Republic in the east. It also saw the founding of NATO, a Western military alliance explicitly designed around collective defence against Soviet expansion. The Soviet Union answered six years later with its own Warsaw Pact alliance, binding its Eastern European satellite states into a parallel military bloc.
Yugoslavia is worth a specific exception here, having taken a genuinely independent path under its own wartime resistance leader Josip Broz Tito, who broke openly with Stalin in 1948 and thereafter pursued a distinctive form of non-aligned communism, neither joining the Warsaw Pact nor aligning fully with the Western bloc, a divergence that let it maintain considerably greater freedom of movement, travel and expression than its Warsaw Pact neighbours, while remaining, until its own violent disintegration examined in a later chapter, a single federal state.
The states of Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany itself, had by this point been reorganised, through a combination of rigged elections, the suppression of opposition parties, and direct Soviet military presence, into single-party communist governments closely aligned with and, in practice, substantially controlled by Moscow, the arrangement examined already, in its earliest phase, at the end of chapter forty seven.
The two halves of divided Europe diverged, over the following four decades, into genuinely different societies, and it is worth being concrete about what that divergence actually meant for ordinary people rather than only for the diplomats and generals.
Western Europe, aided substantially by American reconstruction financing under the Marshall Plan launched in 1948, rebuilt rapidly and, from the 1950s onward, experienced sustained economic growth, rising consumer living standards, and, in most though not all countries, functioning multiparty democratic government, a period sometimes remembered, with some retrospective idealisation, as a long postwar boom.
Eastern Europe, under communist central planning, achieved genuine gains in some areas: near-universal literacy, guaranteed employment, and heavily subsidised housing and basic goods. It also suffered chronic shortages of consumer goods, restricted freedom of movement and speech, and pervasive surveillance by state security services. The East German Stasi is the most thoroughly documented example. It maintained files and paid informants on a scale historians estimate may have involved a meaningful fraction of the entire adult population, either as subjects of surveillance or, in smaller numbers, as informants themselves.
Movement between the two halves became, over time, increasingly restricted and dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans fled west in the years before the border was fully sealed, a haemorrhage of population, disproportionately young and skilled, that the East German government regarded as an existential threat to its own economic and political viability.
By 1961, with an estimated three and a half million East Germans, roughly a fifth of the country's entire population, having fled west since the division began, East German authorities, with Soviet approval, moved overnight on the thirteenth of August to seal the border running through the city of Berlin itself, initially with barbed wire and, within days, with a permanent concrete wall.
The Berlin Wall became, more than any single treaty or diplomatic communique, the defining physical symbol of the entire continental division, a fortified barrier running directly through the middle of a single city, dividing families, streets and, in places, individual buildings, with a fortified death strip, guard towers, and shoot-to-kill orders for anyone attempting to cross without authorisation.
Not everyone who tried to leave went over or through the wall itself. Some tunnelled beneath it, others were smuggled across in hidden vehicle compartments, and a small number attempted improvised hot-air balloon flights over the border defences, escapes that became, on the rare occasions they succeeded, celebrated news stories in the West precisely because they illustrated how determined ordinary people were to leave a system its own propaganda insisted they had no reason to want to.
At least a hundred and forty people, and likely more given incomplete records, were killed attempting to cross the Berlin Wall over its twenty-eight-year existence, a toll that made the wall, for the Western states that publicised these deaths extensively, the single most potent propaganda symbol of the entire Cold War, and that made it, for the East German state that built it, an admission, however unstated, that its own system could not retain its population by consent alone.
One further feature of this period deserves its own attention, because it distinguishes the Cold War's fundamental character from every conflict examined earlier in this book: for the first time, the two rival blocs each possessed weapons capable of destroying the other, and much of the rest of human civilisation, within hours.
The United States had used the world's first atomic weapons against Japan in 1945, and the Soviet Union tested its own nuclear device by 1949, far sooner than most Western analysts had expected, in significant part through espionage that had obtained American nuclear secrets during the wartime alliance itself. Both sides expanded their arsenals rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s, developing hydrogen bombs many times more destructive than the weapons used against Japan, and the intercontinental missiles capable of delivering them within half an hour to any target on earth.
This produced a strategic condition analysts termed mutually assured destruction, deliberately abbreviated to the acronym MAD: since either side could annihilate the other even after absorbing a surprise first strike, neither side possessed any rational incentive to actually initiate a direct nuclear exchange, a logic that held, remarkably, for over four decades without a single direct military confrontation between the two superpowers themselves, even as their proxies fought openly in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The closest the two sides came to breaking that restraint was in October 1962, when American discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, within striking distance of most of the continental United States, produced a thirteen-day confrontation resolved only through secret backchannel negotiations, in which the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret, separately negotiated American withdrawal of its own missiles from Turkey.
Sealed borders did not eliminate internal resistance to communist rule within Eastern Europe itself, though every significant uprising during this period was, in the end, suppressed by Soviet or Soviet-backed military force.
East German workers rose in 1953 in a strike movement that spread to demonstrations across dozens of cities, crushed within days by Soviet tanks. Hungary rose far more extensively in 1956, briefly forming a genuinely independent reformist government that announced its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact entirely, before Soviet forces invaded in overwhelming strength, killing thousands and forcing over two hundred thousand Hungarians into exile within weeks.
Czechoslovakia's 1968 attempt at internal liberalisation, known as the Prague Spring, pursued a more modest goal, reform from within the existing communist system rather than withdrawal from it, and was crushed regardless by a Warsaw Pact invasion that August, an event that produced the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union's explicit assertion of a right to militarily intervene in any Warsaw Pact state whose communist government it judged to be under threat, a doctrine that would remain formally in force until Gorbachev's own reforms effectively abandoned it in the late 1980s, examined in the next chapter.
One further form of resistance deserves mention, quieter than open uprising but arguably more corrosive to communist rule over the long run: the growth, from the 1970s onward, of underground dissident intellectual networks producing and circulating banned literature, known as samizdat, through hand-typed and hand-copied manuscripts passed secretly between trusted readers, a slow-burning form of civil resistance that helped sustain, through the bleakest years of repression, the intellectual and organisational networks that would prove decisive when the opportunity for open change finally arrived.
Each of these suppressed uprisings deepened Western public disillusionment with any hope of near-term liberalisation from within the Soviet bloc, while simultaneously, within the affected countries themselves, hardening a durable popular resentment against Soviet domination that would resurface, with decisive effect, in 1989.
Firm: the diplomatic and military chronology, and the Berlin Wall's construction, operation and casualty figures, extensively documented since the opening of Eastern European state archives following the Soviet collapse examined in the next chapter, which allowed historians access to internal government records that were entirely unavailable during the period itself.
Soft: the precise scale of Stasi and other Eastern European security service surveillance and informant networks, where estimates vary considerably depending on how loosely or strictly informal cooperation with state security is defined and counted.
Contested: how much genuine popular legitimacy communist governments in Eastern Europe held among their own populations, as opposed to relying purely on coercion and the presence of Soviet military force, a question historians continue to debate using the newly available archival evidence, with answers that appear to have varied considerably by country and by decade.
A caution about symmetry. This chapter has, of necessity, described two opposing blocs in broadly parallel terms, since that is how the conflict itself was structured and understood by its participants. This should not be read as suggesting moral equivalence between democratic and authoritarian one-party rule, a judgment this book leaves to its readers rather than asserting directly, while still insisting that the economic and social achievements and failures on each side be stated plainly rather than flattened into simple propaganda from either side's own perspective.