Why did Russia and the United States compete in the Cold War?

For many years the USA and the USSR were the only countries that had nuclear weapons and they mistrusted each other. They were each afraid the other would use nuclear weapons to gain world domination.

The USSR wanted to spread communism throughout the world, starting with Europe. Also, a cold war is when opposing forces are not really fighting against each other, but officially they are still in the middle of a war. The USSR and the US were also on the middle of the arms race.

i could concentration on the repression interior the iron Curtain international places under soviet domination. McCarthy had rather little to do with the chilly war. McCarthy became the utilizing rigidity in the back of the pink scare yet there could have been a chilly war with or devoid of him. The chilly war began whilst Russia refused to permit jap eu international places self determination after WW2. in case you choose greater help e mail me. solid success, wish you get an A.

Easy. Because Josef Stalin threatened a world wide communist revolution in 1947 and specifically targeted western nations, like the United States, for communist infiltration.

In 1950 Stalin ordered communist North Korea to invade South Korea, the United Nations enforced both NSC-68 and the Truman Doctrine of 1950, establishing communist containment and confrontation.

The enforcement of communist confrontation and containment (NSC-68 and the Truman Doctrine) against aggressive communist imperialism compelled the political competition between the USA and the Soviet Union. The USA won.

FIRSTLY it was the USSR, not Russia in particular.

and obviously because the Soviets were Communist and tried to spread it across eastern Europe...

After the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, the USSR and the US saw each other as profound enemies of their basic ways of life. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some and maintaining others as satellite states, some of which were later consolidated as the Warsaw Pact (1955–1991). The US financed the recovery of western Europe and forged NATO, a military alliance using containment of communism as a main strategy.

also it was the borsht question. and a lot of bad feelings about flavored vodka. lol

Why did the USA and USSR become rivals in the period 1945 to 1949?

When you are thinking about the causes of the Cold War, the most important thing is to separate in your mind the long term underlying factors from the series of clashes and misunderstandings which actually triggered the breakdown in relations.

The USSR and the USA were separated by a huge ideological gulf. So the only thing that held the allies together was the need to destroy Hitler’s Nazis. Given their underlying differences – when Hitler was finally defeated in 1945 – a Cold War was perhaps inevitable. The USA was a capitalist democracy; the USSR was a communist dictatorship. Both sides believed that they held the key to the future happiness of the human race. Neither was conflict new to the two sides. Stalin could not forgive Britain and America for helping the Whites against the Bolsheviks in the Civil Wars (1918-1921), and he believed that they had delayed D-Day in the hope that the Nazis would destroy Russia. In the meantime, Britain and America blamed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 for starting the Second World War. Also, the two sides’ aims for Germany were different – Stalin wanted Germany to be ruined by reparations, and he wanted a buffer of friendly states round Russia to prevent a repeat of the Nazi invasion of 1941. Britain and America wanted a democratic and capitalist Germany as a world trading partner, strong enough to stop the spread of Communism westwards.

It is impossible to identify a time when the Cold War ‘broke out’. After 1945, a series of clashes and misunderstandings meant that the ideological differences widened more and more into open hostility.

Why did the USA and USSR become rivals

Yalta and Potsdam

Even at the Yalta Conference of February 1945 there were signs of conflict. The war was still going on, but it was clear that Hitler was going to be defeated, so the allies met to decide how they would organise Europe after the war. It was easy to agree to bring Nazi war-criminals to trial, admit Russia into the United Nations, and divide Germany into four ‘zones’, occupied by Britain, France, the USA and the USSR. But there was tension about two things: firstly, the kind of governments that would be set up in eastern Europe, particularly Poland (in the end the allies published a Declaration of Liberated Europe agreeing to set up ‘democratic and self-governing countries’ and to ‘the holding of free elections as soon as possible’; the fact that ‘democracy’ and ‘free elections’ meant different things to the two sides was passed over). The second source of conflict – reparations – was postponed by agreeing to set up a commission to look into the matter.

When the three met at Potsdam (July 1945), Hitler had been defeated. Also Roosevelt (who had liked Stalin) had died and been replaced as US President by Truman, who was aggressively anti-Communist, and who had the atomic bomb (when Russia did not). Most of all, Stalin had recently ordered the non-communist leaders in Poland arrested. So at Potsdam, the tensions below the surface at Yalta – about eastern Europe and reparations – came out into open disagreement. The Protocols agreed at Potsdam merely repeated the agreements at Yalta, except that Russia was allowed to take reparations from the Soviet Zone, and also 10% of the industrial equipment of the western zones as reparations.

Yalta and Potsdam

Salami tactics and the Fulton Speech

During the war, Stalin had trained eastern European Communists in Russia, and after Potsdam they returned to their own countries and began to take over. They took part in elections, and became government ministers, but then packed the army and police with communists, got non-communists discredited and arrested, and so took total control bit by bit – as Rakosi said in Hungary, ‘like slicing salami’.

By 1946, observers in the west were becoming alarmed. George Kennan, an American embassy official in Moscow, sent a ‘Long Telegram’ saying that the Soviets had to be stopped. On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech in Fulton in America in which he said that eastern Europe was cut off from the free world by ‘an iron curtain’, and was ‘subject to Soviet influence . . . totalitarian control [and] police governments’. The message was so clear that Stalin claimed that Churchill’s speech was a declaration of war.

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Communism and capitalism are dialectically opposed to one another. They don't mix well. Also communist rulers tend to be absolute dictators and the U.S. tends to frown on that kind of government. We both emerged after W.W. 2 as the most powerful countries and we just didn't trust each other.

The Russians wanted all the beetroot.