The Pre-Cold War Foundations of East-West Tension, 1917–1945

The fissures that would come to define the Cold War did not emerge overnight in the summer of 1945, when American and Soviet troops met on the Elbe River, or in 1947, when President Harry Truman declared his eponymous doctrine to contain Soviet expansion. Their roots reach back three decades, to the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and announced the birth of the world’s first self-proclaimed communist state. For the capitalist democracies of Western Europe and the United States, the Russian Revolution was not merely a local political upheaval: it was an existential ideological challenge to the very foundations of liberal capitalism, private property, and the global imperial order that had dominated the 19th century. For the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, the revolution was only the first step in a global proletarian uprising that would sweep away all capitalist regimes and establish a worldwide socialist system. This fundamental clash of worldviews, layered with the great-power rivalries of the interwar period and the brutal exigencies of World War II, created the fault lines that would carve the globe into two opposing blocs by the end of the 1940s.

To understand the Cold War, we must first unpack the origins of the East-West divide that predated the 1945 postwar settlement. This chapter traces four overlapping phases of tension between the Soviet Union and the capitalist West: the birth of ideological antagonism during the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath; the collapse of the fragile interwar multipolar order and the deepening of mutual distrust in the 1930s; the unlikely wartime alliance forged by the shared threat of Nazi Germany; and the final rupture of that alliance as the two sides fought for control of the postwar order in Europe and Asia. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to identify the core structural and ideological drivers of Cold War conflict, explain why the wartime alliance was inherently unstable, and trace how decisions made between 1917 and 1945 locked the world into a bipolar confrontation that would last nearly half a century.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the Birth of East-West Ideological Antagonism, 1917–1922

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not simply a change of government: it was a direct challenge to the entire global order that had been built by Western capitalist and imperial powers over the previous century. To understand Western hostility to the new Soviet state, and Soviet distrust of the West, we first have to situate the revolution in its global context.

The Pre-1917 Global Order and the Rise of Revolutionary Russia

In the decades before 1917, the global order was defined by three overlapping systems: the European Concert of Powers, a loose framework of great-power cooperation that had maintained relative peace in Europe since the Napoleonic Wars; a global capitalist economy dominated by Western European colonial empires and the rising United States; and a set of informal and formal imperial controls that subjugated most of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to European rule. Russia was a contradictory member of this order: it was a recognized great power, with the third-largest army in Europe and a sprawling imperial territory stretching from Poland to the Pacific, but it was also the most economically backward of the major European states, with a majority peasant population, minimal industrial base, and a political system crippled by the autocratic rule of Tsar Nicholas II.

Russia’s participation in World War I, which began in August 1914, exposed the rot at the heart of the tsarist system. By 1917, the Russian army had suffered more than 5 million casualties, food shortages were rampant in major cities, and public support for the war had collapsed. The February Revolution of 1917 forced Nicholas II to abdicate and established a provisional government led by liberal and moderate socialist parties, but the new government made the fatal decision to stay in the war, a choice that alienated soldiers, workers, and peasants who wanted an immediate end to the fighting. It was in this context that the Bolshevik Party, a small but disciplined radical socialist group led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in the October Revolution of 1917 (so named because it took place in November according to the Gregorian calendar used in the West).

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not see their revolution as a purely Russian event. In Lenin’s view, World War I had created the conditions for a global proletarian revolution: the war had devastated the capitalist economies of Europe, alienated working classes from their governments, and exposed the imperialist greed of the great powers. The Bolsheviks’ first priority after taking power was to withdraw Russia from the war, which they did via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918, ceding vast swathes of Russian territory in the process. But their second priority was to spread revolution beyond Russia’s borders. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks founded the Communist International (Comintern), an organization dedicated to coordinating communist parties worldwide to overthrow capitalist governments and establish socialist regimes. The Comintern’s founding document declared that its goal was “to fight by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.”[^1]

For Western governments, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Comintern were an existential threat. The idea that a radical movement would seek to overthrow not just the Russian state but every capitalist government in the world was anathema to the liberal and conservative elites who dominated Western politics. The threat was not merely ideological: in 1918 and 1919, communist uprisings broke out in Germany, Hungary, and Italy, and strikes and protests swept across Western Europe, fueled by war weariness and economic dislocation. Western leaders blamed Soviet agents for fomenting these unrests, even when the connections were tenuous. This fear of “Bolshevism” would shape Western policy toward the Soviet Union for the entire interwar period.

> Sidebar: Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920 In response to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s exit from World War I, 14 countries—including the United States, Britain, France, Japan, and Canada—sent more than 150,000 troops to Russia during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). The stated goal of the intervention was to support anti-Bolshevik “White” forces and reopen the Eastern Front against Germany, but many Western leaders also hoped to overthrow the Bolshevik government entirely. The intervention failed, but it left a permanent legacy of distrust: Soviet leaders saw it as proof that the Western powers would never accept a socialist state, and would use any opportunity to destroy it.

The Consolidation of Soviet Power and Western Isolation, 1922–1933

The Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War in 1922, establishing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a unified state. But the new Soviet state remained isolated from the West for most of the interwar period. The United States, Britain, France, and most other major powers refused to recognize the USSR diplomatically until 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended formal recognition in the hope of expanding trade and gaining a potential ally against rising Nazi Germany. Even after recognition, economic and political ties remained minimal: the U.S. did not establish full diplomatic relations with the USSR until 1933, and trade between the two remained low throughout the 1930s.

This isolation had two major consequences for the development of East-West tension. First, it reinforced Soviet paranoia about Western intentions. Soviet leaders, many of whom had lived through the 1918 Allied in