The Cold War and the Iron Curtain

World War II has finally come to an end. Germany has lost. Europe lies in ruins, and the victors, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, are eying the continent with different perspectives. The once-united allies are now bitter rivals. The allies divide Europe into two major spheres of influence: the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc.

The Western Bloc, led by the United States and its future NATO allies, embraces capitalism, democracy, and free market economies. The Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union, adopts communism, one-party rule, and state-controlled economies. The Soviet Union installs communist governments in several countries in eastern Europe. These countries are technically independent, but heavily controlled by the Soviet Union. They are Soviet satellite states.

In 1946, British former prime minister Winston Churchill gives a speech talking about the big separation between Western and Eastern Europe. He calls it the "Iron Curtain". It is like an imaginary wall that divides the Western countries from the Eastern countries influenced by the Soviet Union. This Iron Curtain isn't just geographical; it shows how different the political, economic, and social systems are on each side. A year later, American President Harry S.

Truman declares that the United States intends to help stop the expansion of the Soviet Union’s communist influence. This is the start of a long-lasting standoff between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The clash lasts until the early 1990s. It is called the Cold War. No armed conflict ever breaks out – it is more like a global game of chess.

Both sides race for power and influence around the world, while each side carefully watches the other’s plans and tries to prevent them. To try and secure power, the two sides support different countries and groups in various conflicts. These conflicts often turn into wars. These wars are fought by others, like in Korea and Vietnam, but with the US and the Soviet Union backing opposing sides. These are called proxy wars.

To keep an eye on the other side, both superpowers place spies in various countries to gather critical information. These spies operating undercover in the shadows, employ a range of covert techniques. They use codebreaking to decode secret messages, deploy surveillance to watch their targets, and use discrete communication methods to send messages without being detected. The Cold War era becomes known as the ‘Time of Spies’. Both superpowers have their own spy agencies.

The United States’ is called the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, and the Soviet Union’s is the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or the KGB. Many other countries of the Western and Eastern block also have their own spy agencies and share their knowledge and intelligence with either the USA or the Soviet Union. But it’s not only on Earth the two superpowers compete for dominance, they also extend their rivalry into space, igniting the famous Space Race. It lead to significant achievements like the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin by the Soviet Union and the Apollo 11 moon landing by the U.S. In 1991 economic turmoil and the dissolution of its satellite states cause the Soviet Union to fall apart.

One of the two superpowers ceasing to exist brings an end to the Cold War. Yet the effects of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War have a much longer lasting impact.