AQA A-Level History: The Cold War c1945–1991

Read the three sources below and then answer the question that follows.

Source A — written for this exercise in the style of a confidential telegram from a Western ambassador in Moscow to his foreign ministry, March 1946.

I must report that the mood here has hardened beyond anything we anticipated at the close of the war. The Soviet leadership appears convinced that capitalist states are by their nature hostile and that lasting agreement with them is neither possible nor desirable. Their conduct in Poland and the lands they now occupy admits of only one reading: a determination to ring themselves with subservient governments and to extend their system wherever their armies stand. They will not be moved by appeals to the spirit of the wartime alliance, which they regard as a marriage of convenience now ended. We deceive ourselves if we imagine that further concessions will buy goodwill. Only firmness, patiently and consistently applied, will check an expansion that flows not from any specific grievance but from the settled assumptions of the regime itself.

Source B — written for this exercise in the style of an internal report by a senior Soviet foreign-affairs official to the Politburo, late 1946.

The conduct of our former allies since the surrender of Germany leaves no room for illusion. American capital, swollen by the war, now seeks markets and dependencies across the globe and dresses this ambition in the language of freedom and open trade. Their monopoly of the atomic weapon they brandish as an instrument of pressure, and their refusal to honour understandings reached at Yalta concerning reparations and the western frontier exposes their true purpose. We did not fight and bleed as no other nation bled in order to surrender the security our sacrifices have earned. The friendly governments we require on our borders are not aggression but the elementary precaution of a state twice invaded through these very lands within a single generation. It is they, not we, who have abandoned cooperation.

Source C — written for this exercise in the style of an editorial in an unaligned European newspaper, early 1947.

Across our exhausted continent the same question is whispered: which of the two giants is to blame for the gathering quarrel? The honest answer is that neither is innocent and neither alone is guilty. Washington speaks of liberty while extending its economic reach; Moscow speaks of security while imposing obedient regimes upon its neighbours. Each acts as a great power has always acted, mistaking its own advance for self-defence and its rival's for aggression. The wartime alliance was always a thing of necessity, and necessity has departed with the common enemy. What remains is the old logic of suspicion, magnified now by the dreadful new weapon and by ideologies that each side believes destined to triumph. We who must live between them gain nothing by pretending that virtue lies wholly on one side of the line now descending upon Europe.

Question: With reference to these sources and your understanding of the historical context, assess the value of these three sources to a historian studying the question of responsibility for the origins of the Cold War in the years 1945 to 1947. [30 marks]

To what extent was the Berlin Blockade of 1948 to 1949 a turning point in the division of Europe? [25 marks]

How far was the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 the result of American strength rather than mutual compromise? [25 marks]

'The détente of the 1970s failed because it was built on foundations that neither superpower truly accepted.' Assess the validity of this view. [25 marks]

How important were the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev in bringing about the end of the Cold War in the years 1985 to 1991? [25 marks]