Blog

The Cold War Was Fought in Stadiums, Arenas, and Olympic Villages Too.

For decades, the United States and the Soviet bloc battled for influence around the world. They competed in military power, technology, space exploration, propaganda—and sports.

To communist governments, an Olympic medal represented far more than athletic achievement. Victory offered evidence that their system could produce stronger athletes, better teams, and a superior society. Governments invested enormous resources in...

The Iron Curtain was the political, military, and ideological barrier that divided Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the democratic nations of Western Europe during the Cold War. It consisted of communist governments, closed borders, censorship, secret police, military alliances, and physical barriers that restricted contact between East and West.

Winston Churchill made the expression famous in 1946 when he warned that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. His words described a...

The Cold War entered the living room

When I watched Rocky and Bullwinkle as a child, I laughed at a dimwitted moose, a clever flying squirrel, and two spies who could never make a plan work. I did not think about ideology, psychological warfare, or the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. I simply knew that Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale came from the wrong side of the Cold War, and Rocky and Bullwinkle stood on ours.

That simple division reveals how deeply the Cold War...

On August 17, 1962, eighteen-year-old Peter Fechter lay bleeding beside the Berlin Wall and cried out for help. People watched from both East and West Berlin, but no one reached him. After approximately fifty minutes, East German border guards finally carried him away. He died shortly afterward.

Photographs of the dying teenager traveled around the world. They exposed the Berlin Wall not as a defensive barrier protecting East Germany from an outside enemy, but as a prison wall intended to...

The Cold War did not begin because of a single speech, conference, disagreement, or act of aggression. It emerged from a much deeper conflict between two incompatible ways of life.

On one side stood the United States and the democratic nations of the West. Their societies were built—however imperfectly—around representative government, private property, religious liberty, individual rights, and market economics. On the other side stood the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship committed to...