Cold War exam...

You will write this exam, then I will "get" to grade it on the long flights to and from the UK...a perfect antidote to Airplane Boredom.

History 466
Cold War
Midterm exam…for March 28, 2011


Directions Part I(100%): Prepare the following questions, taking care to support your answers with specific names, facts, dates, etc. On test day, you will answer ONE, but you do not know WHICH one, so prepare them both.


A)In the recent Ken Burns documentary covering World War II, “The War,” viewers learn about the titanic struggle between the US, Great Britain and the USSR on the one hand and Germany, Italy and Japan on the other in World War II. Victory was a team effort, requiring a common strategy, coordination and millions of casualties. How did it happen that this “marriage” ended in divorce, with victorious allies becoming bitter enemies, glowering at each other across barbed-wire borders, just a couple of years after that happy meeting in Berlin? In other words, how did we get a nasty, antagonistic Cold War after the successful conclusion of the Hot War?

b)Historians have argued since the beginning of the Cold War about which side started it. Residents of United States tend to believe the Soviet Union was most responsible, while citizens of the Soviet Union/Russia pin the blame squarely on their former allies, the United States and Britain. In a modern twist on the Twilight Zone, you are suddenly and unexpectedly transported across time and space to in the Court of History, with an interesting assignment. You have the brief for the Soviet Union, meaning you must argue before the Court that the United STATES bears the greatest share of the responsibility for the peace gone bad after l945. So do it!

c)Unlike many wars, the mathematics of the Cold War is not addition or subtraction, but DIVISION. Write an essay in which you address the role of division in US-USSR relations in Asia and Europe between l945 and l950.


No identifications this time, you will cover everything in these essays…

The image you see above is the Kremlin, where Stalin plotted and schemed throughout this period in question. Note the high walls...it says all you need to about the transparency, or lack thereof, of the Soviet and Russian governments.