Soviet Union (USSR)

Soviet Russia demonstrated enormously greater fighting ability than has Red China, and yet even that temporarily invincible totalitarian regime is no more.

In 1961, Lee Edwards wrote from Germany, “If the United States and its allies do not stand firm, the concentration camp will soon add another two million inmates who presently live in West Berlin.”

Shoup’s actions during Christmastime 1955 offer an un-planned, un-staged snapshot of a political system and world view strikingly different from that of Lenin, Stalin, and Xi—a system founded on the freedom to believe in God or Santa or not, to believe in the meaning of Christmas or not, to believe in Immanuel or not.

“We have,” said an exuberant campaign orator in the recent campaign, “the moral leadership of the world. The whole world trusts in our devotion to freedom and expects us to save mankind from totalitarianism.” That is how we see ourselves, at least in our more complacent moods. The world does not see us as we see ourselves.

“The resistance to Russian expansion in Europe is right. The spectacle of American progressives supporting Wallace in opposing that resistance brings dismay to most European democrats.”

In a series of articles in the fall of 1946, Christianity and Crisis contributors offered reports based upon their travels, including from Reinhold Niebuhr and John Baillie in Germany.

Robert Morrison offers a testimony of serving as a Russian interpreter for the US Coast Guard in the Bering Sea during the Cold War and meeting the Soviet KGB.

In 1946 when the prospects for what would become the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) appeared dim, President Harry Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to a UN committee where she could promote universal human rights.

On March 5, 1946—75 years ago—Winston Churchill delivered the “Sinews of Peace” at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. “Special relationship” to describe US-UK relations and “Iron Curtain” both become household terms after the speech, and some point to this moment as the official start to the Cold War.