The Australian National University Emeritus Faculty is organising and hosting a public lecture by Bruce Kent from the Centre for European Studies.

Many historians, perhaps influenced by Churchill’s opportunistic ‘Iron Curtain’ rhetoric, still depict the Cold War as an escalating ideological and strategic East-West confrontation from 1945. Such teleological explanations of the outbreak of the Cold War in terms of what it later became gloss over the common interest of the Big Three in eradicating German and Japanese ‘war power’ and devising an effective collective security system. This shared concern prompted the recourse of the victors in 1946 to the Council of Foreign Ministers and the United Nations to resolve friction over ideologically and strategically sensitive matters such as the political complexion of Eastern Europe and the international control of atomic energy.

To help explain why this early collaboration degenerated into toxic Cold War in 1947, the lecture highlights the growing tension between the Big Three about how the enormous burden of post-war reconstruction would be shared. It suggests that the Cold War division of Europe and the world was precipitated when Soviet leaders realised that their nation, which had borne the human and material brunt of the war, would be denied the western reconstruction assistance foreshadowed during the war. The changing priorities of the West were reflected in 1947 by its veto on German reparation deliveries to Russia and the unhelpful profile of the Marshall Plan. This deadlock with the West over postwar reconstruction was, it is argued, an important reason why the Soviet Union ushered in the Cold War by subjugating and exploiting its hitherto relatively permeable Eastern European ‘sphere of influence’.