The Origins of the Cold War: Viewed from the Three Schools of Thought

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Introduction
The term “Cold War” refers to the second half of the 20th century, usually from the end of the World War II until 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Since the 1940s and 1950s the scholars have disagreed on the topic of the origins of the Cold War. There are several groups of historians and their interpretations are very different, sometimes even contradictory. The three main schools are the orthodox, the revisionist and the realist. The classification is not completely accurate because we can find several differences in theories of scholars within the same group and often the authors reevaluated their ideas over time.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze each of the three main schools; to introduce their main ideas and show the differences of opinions within each of them and also between the groups as whole. To give some order to the individual ideas of each school, I’ve chosen four main points that will help me understand the approach of each school: 1) Who is, according to them, responsible for the start of the Cold War 2) Where do they see the start of the Cold War 3) How they view the U.S. foreign policy? 4) Dissenting opinions within each group. 5) The main authors and their ideas.
I will include only the Western perspective. To cover the opinions of historians from around the world would be really difficult in such small space as this short essay.

As I already mentioned, there are three main schools. However, I liked to briefly mention ideas and authors that don’t belong to any of these. Some writers are looking for the origins of the Cold War in events that happened long before World War II. Desmond Donnelly interprets the Cold War as an imperial struggle. He finds its inception in the British-Russia...

... middle of paper ...

...ular and respected during the late 1940s and 1950s when the tensions began to intensify. This view dominated the public opinion and scholars views in the West until 1960s and it helped to justify the U.S. foreign policy.
On the other hand, revisionists found the cause of the after-war tensions in the steps of the United States that was unnecessarily aggressive.
The third school is so called “realist”. Scholars of this school don’t put blame for the escalation of tension after World War to on one side. They the actions of both states as logical actions made in order to keep and improve their position.
There are also other schools that emerged after the fall of the Iron Curtain and after the end of the Communists rule in the Soviet Union. There is still new information appearing in the long closed archives. And to many of them historians still don’t have access.

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