Timetable of the Cold War
This page
is currently under complete revision
The generally held view is that the Cold War started at some point following the end of World War II, and that it ended in 1991. That view is a bit of a fallacy as far as I am concerned.
| """Winston Churchill "Iron Curtain Speech, 1946)" |
The view of communist Russia was that it started on 25th October 1917 (according to the old Russian calendar, or 7th November according to the modern calendar), with the October Revolution. This would place it some thirty years prior to Winston Churchill's famous Iron Curtain Speech of 1946.
Nobody was perhaps more surprised
than the Bolsheviks, to find themselves in power, none more so than
Lenin himself. But even the 1917 Revolution was not the start. There
had been a previous revolution in 1905 which started, according to
most accounts with Bloody Sunday, a culmination of discontentment with
war, hunger and rights, occurred; thousands died or were wounded.
Within eighteen months it was regarded as a failure, and the
discontent remained.
By 1917, things came to a head in the January, with a strike of
140,000 workers. By the middle of February more than 100,000 were
still on strike and the new Revolution was to begin, with the Duma, or
lower house of parliament, attacking the government for failing to
respond to food shortages. Strikes expanded over the next few days,
until 25th February when the Tsar ordered troops to fire on the
strikers,and the dissolution of the Duma. Within days a provisional
government was formed and quickly recognised by Britain and France.
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