Prior to American involvement in World War II relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States had been wary and unfriendly. For a period of 16 years following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the U.S. refused even to extend diplomatic recognition to Russia. Even after recognition neither country trusted the other. When the United States was thrust into the war after Pearl Harbor it found itself allied with the Soviet Union against a common enemy -Germany. The relationship which developed was that of a strained alliance. It was at best a marriage of convenience, not a love match.
Yet the United States and the Soviet Union did cooperate diplomatically and militarily during the war out of necessity. In conjunction with England they hammered out a number of agreements at war-time conferences. Because German troops were besieging Russian cities at time of American entry in the war, the Soviet Union's major diplomatic objective was to get an Allied promise to launch an immediate cross-channel invasion to open up a massive second front in western Europe. This would force some German divisions to leave the Russian front. President Roosevelt pledged that we would do so by Fall, 1942. When the invasion did not take place until June, 1944 Russian mistrust and suspicion of the United States intensified.
At the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war the "Big Three" (the U.S., England, and the Soviet Union) agreed to concentrate on the military defeat of Germany, and worry about Japan later. This focus on Germany's defeat was clearly reflected at the Casablanca conference in North Africa when the Big Three agreed to fight until Germany surrendered unconditionally. Since Germany posed the greatest military threat to both England and the Soviet Union (which was not even at war with Japan), the decision was understandable. But critics have argued that demanding unconditional surrender prolonged the war because Germany had nothing to gain by surrendering.
Another wartime conference of the Big Three, at Yalta in the Crimea (part of Russia), had important post-war implications as well as wartime goals. At Yalta, under urging by the United States, the Soviet Union agreed to enter a post-war association of nations (the U.N.), and to go to war against Japan within three months of the defeat of Germany. In return the Soviet Union was to receive part of Sakhalin Island near Japan, and was allowed to maintain troops in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, provided that Russia would permit free elections in all those countries immediately after the war was over. The Soviet Union's violation of the pledge of free elections in Eastern Europe following the war was a harbinger of the "Cold War."
Indeed, when the war ended the fundamental disagreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union involved the question of who would control Europe. Russia, in order both to expand Communism and establish a safe "buffer zone" of Soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe, consolidated its control over those countries. This led to what Great Britain's Prime Minister during World II, Winston Churchill, called the descent of an "iron curtain" over all of Eastern Europe. This issue was compounded by Russia's fear of an American monopoly of nuclear weapons. When the U.S., through the Baruch Plan, offered to turn its atomic technology over to a U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, provided no other country tried to develop an atom bomb, Russia refused.
As the Soviet Union consolidated its control over Eastern Europe and put pressure on other countries, the Truman adminstration developed what has become known as the policy of containment. This policy, developed by 1947 by George Kennan and other State Department leaders and experts, was intended to halt the outward flow of Soviet power. The U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, according to Kennan, should be one of long-range, patient, but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies. Containment was to check the spread of communism, but not to provoke war or try to "roll back" the iron curtain. "Long-range" and "patient" were the operative words.
