The “Long Cold War” Perspective
The National Institute for Civil War Studies (NICWS) presents this timeline as a comprehensive record of the “Long Cold War”—a struggle that began not in 1945, but in 1917 with the Bolshevik rise to power. This period was defined by a unique ideological premise: the Soviet Union’s commitment to a worldwide overthrow of the existing order to usher in a global “proletarian” age.
While the decades that followed consisted of provocations and reactions from both Communist and non-Communist powers, there was no true equivalency in their objectives. The non-Communist world largely sought the stability of the status quo, whereas the USSR’s very existence was predicated on its eventual expansion. This timeline categorizes events into Proactive and Reactionary stances to illustrate this asymmetry.
By analyzing the era through the lenses of political, military, economic, social, and cultural developments, we see that the Cold War was not a mere diplomatic disagreement, but a total conflict of systems. Its conclusion was not marked by a treaty, but by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself—proving that the conflict was inextricably tied to the ideological ambitions of the Bolshevik state.
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