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Cold War:

Discussion in 'History Forum' started by Salty, Oct 23, 2016.

  1. Salty

    Salty 20,000 Posts Club
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    This is from WIKI:

    There is disagreement among historians regarding the starting point of the Cold War. While most historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began with the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 when theBolsheviks took power.[7]


    What say you
     
  2. rsr

    rsr <b> 7,000 posts club</b>
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    Well, you can make that case. The Western powers were profoundly disturbed by the victory of Bolshevism. You will remember that the American, British and Japanese sent thousands of troops to Siberia during the Russian Civil War to (from the Americans' point of view) to protect all the war materiel that had been shipped to Russia from the Allies and was being threatened with falling into the Reds' hands or (from the Japanese point of view) to protect Japanese interests in Manchuria that had accrued following their defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.

    Certainly the West eyed Russia with much concern following World War I, but it was tempered by three things: 1. Russia, weakened by the civil war and hobbled by collectivization, didn't seem an existential threat; it had been shorn of a good bit of territory, was diplomatically isolated and was an economic basket case. 2. The Great Depression, coupled with the bloodletting of World War I, prevented the Western Powers for pursuing any grand designs against the USSR; and 3. The rise of Nazism did constitute an existential threat to the West.Thus you could argue that the conflict of the West against the USSR was effectively delayed for a generation, by which time there was an entirely different situation on the ground.

    To wrap it up, you can make a case that conflict between the capitalist West and the communist Russians was inevitable in some form or another. That it took on the aspects it did is a matter of intervening history.

    You can also make the case that World War I was born in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War or the Napoleonic Wars or the War of the Spanish Succession ... or the Bolshevik Revolution was born in the French Revolution, which was encouraged by the American Revolution, which was a continuation of the British Civil War ... you get the idea.
     
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