Cold War

Border of NATO and Warsaw Pact in contrast to each other from the formation of NATO in 1949 to the withdrawal of East Germany from the Warsaw Pact on 1990.

The Cold War occurred between the end of World War II in 1945 and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was primarily fought between the United States of America and the Soviet Union as the world’s two foremost superpowers, but there were many other nations involved as part of either the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Soviet’s Warsaw Pact alliance of countries throughout Eastern and Central Europe. A great many other countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia also became drawn into the conflict and proxy wars between Soviet-backed communist movements and US-backed democratic/capitalist movements were fought in a wide range of countries, the most notable being in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Afghanistan. The Cold War was responsible for the migration of tens of millions of people overall, a central element of this being the Iron Curtain in Europe which was used to designate the Soviet’s efforts to restrict the free passage of people from its controlled areas in Eastern Europe into western-aligned nations.

Cold War chronology of events

During the Second World War, there was an uneasy alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies of Britain, the United States and other nations such as Canada and France. This was a marriage of convenience as both sides sought to defeat Nazism and the Empire of Japan, but as soon as the war ended in 1945, battlelines developed between the US and the Soviet Union, with dozens of other countries beginning to align themselves with one side or the other. In the case of the US, this materialized into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO, which included nations like Britain, France and Canada, while in the case of the Soviets, this materialized into the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance of the vassal communist states which the Soviets had established across Eastern and Central Europe in the aftermath of the war and which included nations like Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. These were the nations which stood behind the Iron Curtain as the former British wartime leader, Winston Churchill, characterized it in the aftermath of the war.

The Korean War.

The Cold War was a very complex event, one which never materialized into direct conflict between the US and the Soviets. This was owing to the fact that after the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic weapon in 1949, both sides had access to nuclear weapons and any war would involve a level of mutually-assured destruction. Consequently, it was fought as a series of proxy wars between the two sides. For example, in the early 1950s a conflict developed on the Korean Peninsula, wherein communists in the north were supported by the Soviets and communist China, while in the south, western-aligned elements were backed by the US and its allies. The Korean War would eventually result in a ceasefire, which remains in place today, and the development of communist North Korea and a western-aligned South Korea. Similar scenarios occurred in many other countries, the most well-known being Vietnam between the 1950s and 1970s and Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, but there were many other proxy wars fought in countries like Ethiopia, Angola and Cambodia, while the Middle East and Latin America were also pulled into the conflict.

Eventually, the Cold War began to wind down in the 1980s. This was owing to a number of factors: on one side, the Soviet Union began to fall drastically behind western nations when it came to its economic and technological development, while on the other side, Ronald Regan became determined as President of the United States in the 1980s to bring an end to the conflict. However, the foremost factor was that the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 onwards, Mikhail Gorbachev, was determined to reform the Soviet Union. In trying to liberalize it, he inadvertently brought about its destruction as most of the Iron Curtain nations in Eastern Europe threw off their communist regimes from 1989 onwards and the Soviet Union itself then collapsed in the early 1990s. When Gorbachev resigned as the last leader of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991, it signaled the end of the Cold War.

Migration during and after the Cold War

The Cold War led to immense levels of migration around the world over a period of four and a half decades. This was associated with different conflicts and parts of the Cold War. For instance, during the Korean War, about 10% of the entire population of the north of the peninsula fled to the southern half where they were decidedly freer than their northern counterparts, although South Korea too lived under a dictatorship throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Similar or even greater levels of displacement were associated with many wars such as that in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia and the Cuban Revolution. Similarly, millions of people fled from the Eastern Bloc countries which the Soviets took over in the course of 1944 and 1945. For instance, as many as eight million people moved from communist East Germany to Western Europe in the course of the Cold War. All of this points to the fact that tens of millions of people migrated from one region to another in the course of the Cold War owing to various regional conflicts and ideological issues.

Demographic impact of the Cold War

The demographic impact of the Cold War and its constituent conflicts has been felt all over the world. For instance, there are now millions of people who make up the Vietnamese diaspora globally, but particularly in countries like the United States, Thailand and Taiwan, as millions of people fled their homeland at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Similarly, there are millions of Afghans living in Pakistan today who are refugees or descendants thereof from the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. Similar examples can be pointed to in many other countries where conflict arose as part of the war.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Eastern and Central Europe and the Iron Curtain presented their own unique example of this. Take the example of Poland. The Soviets and the Western Allies had agreed prior to the end of the Second World War that this would become a sphere of Soviet influence after the war, but the Western Allies insisted that anyone who wished to leave the country to avoid living under communism should be allowed to do so. This led to the movement of well over one million Poles and ethnic Germans living within Poland to different regions, some behind the Iron Curtain still, though many remained in Eastern Europe.

Similar movements occurred from countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 the movement of people from behind the Iron Curtain to other countries was restricted much more closely. Overall, it is hard to quantify the demographic impact of the Cold War other than to say that today tens of millions of people live in countries other than those they or their parents or grandparents were born in owing to the impact of the conflict.

Another of the consequences of the Cold War in terms of its demographic impact was when the government of Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and allowed Jews to leave the country; it is estimated that between 1989 and 2006, about 1.6 million Soviet Jews, their spouses and relatives, as defined by the Law of Return, emigrated from the former Soviet Union. Of those, about 979,000, or 61%, migrated to Israel; another 325,000 migrated to the United States, and 219,000 migrated to Germany, which was in the middle of its process of reunification.

Explore more about the Cold War

• Vietnam Casualties, 1956 - 1998 record collection at MyHeritage
• Korean War Casualties, 1950 - 1957 record collection at MyHeritage
• U.S. Army Casualties 1961 - 1981 record collection at MyHeritage
• 4 Great Resources for Veterans Day History at the MyHeritage Blog

References

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