The Breakdown of the Grand Alliance: 1945–1948

Identify the Big Three leaders who met at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (United States), Winston Churchill (Great Britain), and Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union).

State the agreement reached at Yalta regarding the postwar governance of Germany and the city of Berlin.

Germany and Berlin were to be divided into four military occupation zones, administered by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France.

Explain why Joseph Stalin prioritized Soviet political control over Poland after 1945.

Stalin sought a defensive buffer zone against future invasions from the west, as foreign armies had invaded Russia through the Polish corridor twice in thirty years, costing tens of millions of Soviet lives.

Explain how the successful Trinity atomic test in July 1945 altered President Harry Truman's diplomatic approach toward the Soviet Union at Potsdam.

The atomic bomb gave Truman immense military leverage, making him less reliant on Soviet entry into the war against Japan and far more assertive in challenging Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe.

Describe the main objective of the Marshall Plan (1947) and explain how the Soviet Union reacted to it.

The Marshall Plan provided American economic aid to rebuild European infrastructure and prevent communist gains fueled by poverty. The Soviet Union rejected the funds as dollar imperialism and forbade its satellite states from accepting aid.

Read the following viewpoint: 'The Cold War was caused solely by Stalin's unrelenting desire for world communist revolution.' Evaluate this claim using one argument from revisionist or post-1991 historians.

The claim is too simplistic. Revisionist and post-1991 historians note that Stalin's actions were driven heavily by traditional Russian security fears rather than an immediate plan for global conquest, and that aggressive American economic pressure and atomic monopoly provoked defensive Soviet hostility.