Curated playlist
Soviet Union–United States relations
- Cold War1947–1991 geopolitical rivalry between US and USSR
- Baruch PlanOn the 14th of June 1946, Bernard Baruch walked into the first meeting of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and offered the world a bargain that had never been offered before. The United States, the only nation on earth with a…
- Four PolicemenFranklin D. Roosevelt first voiced the idea of a global police force in August 1941 during his initial meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He envisioned a trusteeship led by great powers to oversee smaller nations rather…
- Communist Party USAThe Communist Party USA entered 2026 claiming 20,000 members, a figure it had not approached in generations. That number sits at the end of a long story. It runs through a Russian Revolution, a Great Depression, a Second World War, and a…
- Kennan InstituteThe Kennan Institute carries a name that belongs to two very different men, separated by nearly a century and connected by blood. One George Kennan explored the wilderness of Russia and Siberia in the nineteenth century. The other shaped…
- Reagan DoctrinePresident James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 to establish a new boundary for American foreign policy. Theodore Roosevelt followed with his own corollary in 1904 that expanded U.S. intervention rights in the Western Hemisphere.…
- Outer Space TreatyThe Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the 27th of January 1967, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union all signing on the same day. That date fell squarely in the middle of the space race, just months…
- Truman DoctrineThe Truman Doctrine began with an eighteen-minute speech. On the 12th of March 1947, President Harry S. Truman stood before a joint session of Congress and declared that the United States must support free peoples resisting subjugation by…
- Evil Empire speechRonald Reagan gave the Evil Empire speech on the 8th of March 1983. Speaking before the National Association of Evangelicals, the American president called the Soviet Union 'the focus of evil in the modern world.' The Cold War was grinding…
- 1980 Summer Olympics boycottThe 1980 Summer Olympics boycott began at a NATO meeting on the 20th of December 1979, just days after Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. In a matter of weeks, what started as a diplomatic discussion among Western governments would grow…
- Able Archer 83Able Archer 83 was a NATO military exercise that began on the 7th of November 1983, and it nearly ended the world. For five days, military commands across Western Europe rehearsed the procedures for launching a coordinated nuclear strike.…
- Korean Air Lines Flight 007Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departed Gate 15 of John F. Kennedy International Airport on the night of the 31st of August 1983, bound for Seoul. It never arrived. Somewhere over the dark waters northwest of Japan, a Soviet interceptor fired…
- Stalin NoteThe Stalin Note reached representatives of the United States, Britain, and France on the 10th of March 1952. Andrei Gromyko delivered it on behalf of the Soviet Union, then occupying half of a divided Germany. In plain terms, the document…
- Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to GermanyOn the 1st of August 1945, the Potsdam Agreement established provisional terms for governing Germany after World War II. This accord created an Oder, Neisse line that awarded most of Germany's former eastern provinces to Poland and the…
- Miracle on IceThe Miracle on Ice was an ice hockey game played on the 22nd of February 1980, at Lake Placid, New York, between the United States and the Soviet Union. With 10 minutes left in the third period, a 25-year-old team captain named Mike…
- Space RaceThe Space Race was a contest between two superpowers that began not in the stars but deep underground, in the firing pits of missile test ranges. When the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon in August 1949, the United States…
- Nuclear arms raceThe nuclear arms race began not with a treaty or a speech, but with 187 liters of heavy water smuggled out of Norway ahead of a German invasion. That single cargo -- secured by a French intelligence agent in early 1940, routed through…
- NSC 68NSC 68 opened with a stark warning: the issues at stake were momentous. As the document itself put it, they involved "the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself." Presented to President Harry S.…
- Tear down this wall!At 2:00 p.m. on the 12th of June 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, shielded from East Berlin by two panes of bulletproof glass, and issued a direct challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Mr.…
- 1960 U-2 incidentOn the 1st of May 1960, a United States spy plane took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, bound for a mission the American government would spend days desperately pretending had never happened. The pilot was Francis Gary Powers. His aircraft was…
- Berlin Crisis of 1961The Berlin Crisis of 1961 brought the Cold War closer to open conflict than any event since the Second World War ended. At its peak, American and Soviet tanks faced each other loaded with live munitions, just 50 to 100 metres apart, at a…
- Jackson–Vanik amendmentThe Jackson-Vanik amendment started as a wager about human nature. A Senate staffer named Richard Perle explained the thinking behind it in an interview. "If people could vote with their feet, governments would have to acknowledge that and…
- X ArticleThe Sources of Soviet Conduct, known as the X Article, ran in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, signed only with the letter X. A year earlier, Time magazine had called a Kremlin speech the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any…
- Elbe DayElbe Day, the 25th of April 1945, began with a small boat crossing a river in Germany. First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue paddled across the Elbe near Strehla with just three men from an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon. On the far…
- Radio Free Europe/Radio LibertyRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was born out of a calculation that the Cold War would ultimately be decided not by armies, but by ideas. When the National Committee for a Free Europe was formed in New York City in 1949 by Allen Dulles, few…
- Sputnik crisisThe Sputnik crisis began on the 4th of October, 1957, when a Soviet satellite the size of a beach ball began beeping its way around Earth. In the weeks that followed, The New York Times mentioned Sputnik 1 in 279 articles between the 6th…
- We will bury you"We will bury you!" rang through the Polish embassy in Moscow on the 18th of November, 1956. Nikita Khrushchev stood before the assembled Western ambassadors and declared: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side." His personal…
- Strategic Defense InitiativeThe Strategic Defense Initiative arrived in the public imagination on the 23rd of March 1983, when President Ronald Reagan looked into a camera and asked America's scientists to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The speech…
- Turkish Straits crisisThe Turkish Straits crisis began in the summer of 1946 when the Soviet Union handed Turkey a note demanding that the rules governing the narrow waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean be torn up and rewritten. Two thin…
- Lend-LeaseLend-Lease was not charity. It was not a loan in any conventional sense. When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act into law on the 11th of March 1941, he handed himself the power to "sell, transfer title to, exchange,…
- Persian CorridorThe Persian Corridor carried 45 percent of all American Lend-Lease aid shipped to the Soviet Union during World War II. That works out to 7.9 million long tons, out of a total of 17.5 million, moving through a single neutral country most…
- Samantha SmithSamantha Reed Smith was ten years old when she looked at the cover of Time magazine and asked a question that would change her life. It was November 1982. Yuri Andropov had just become leader of the Soviet Union, and the Western press was…
- Apollo–SoyuzApollo-Soyuz brought together the two most powerful space programs on Earth for the first time in July 1975. On the 17th of July, an American spacecraft and a Soviet capsule drifted toward each other in orbit, their hatches opened, and two…
- Partial Nuclear Test Ban TreatyOn the 5th of August 1963, three governments gathered in Moscow to sign a document that had taken nearly two decades of argument, scientific dispute, and near-catastrophe to produce. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty forbade nuclear…