snow because there is less friction to cause orographic lifting. The country’s open western border, uninterrupted except for the low Ural Mountains, permits Atlantic winds and air masses to penetrate as far east as the Yenisey River. In winter, these air masses bring moderation and relatively heavy snow to many parts of the European lowlands and Western Siberia. Meanwhile, a semi-permanent high-pressure cell (the Asiatic Maximum) blankets Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. This huge high-pressure ridge forces the Atlantic air to flow northward into the Arctic and southward against the southern mountains. Consequently, little snow or wind affects the Siberian interior in winter. The exceptions are found along the east coast (Kamchatka, the Kurils, and Maritime province).
As the Eurasian continent heats faster in summer than the oceans, the pressure cells shift position: Low pressure dominates the continents and high pressure prevails over the oceans. Moist air masses flow onto the land, bringing summer thunderstorms. The heaviest rains come later in summer from west to east, often occurring in the harvest seasons in Western Siberia. In the Russian Far East, the summer monsoon yields more than 75 percent of the region’s average annual precipitation. Pacific typhoons often harry Kamchatka, the Kurils, and Sakhalin Island.
Winter temperatures plunge from west to east. Along Moscow’s 55th parallel, average January temperatures fall from a high of 22° F (-6° C) in Kaliningrad to 14° F (-10° C) in the capital to 7° F (-14° C) in Kazan to -6° F (- 20° C) in Tomsk. Along the same latitude in the Russian Far East, the temperatures reach low averages of -29° F (-35° C). Northeast Siberia experiences the lowest average winter temperatures outside of Antarctica: -50° F (-45° C), with one-time minima of -90° F (-69° C).
In July, the averages cool with higher latitudes. Thus, the Caspian desert experiences averages of near 80° F (25° C), whereas the Arctic tundra records means of 40° F (5° C). Moscow averages 65° F (19° C) in July. See also: GEOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borisov, A. A. (1965). Climates of the USSR. Chicago: Al-dine Publishing Co. Lydolph, Paul E. (1977). Climates of the USSR: World Survey of Climatology. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Mote, Victor L. (1994). An Industrial Atlas of the Soviet Successor States. Houston, TX: Industrial Information Resources.
CODE OF PRECEDENCE See MESTNICHESTVO.
The term Cold War refers to the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States that lasted from roughly 1945 to 1990. The term predates the Cold War itself, but it was first widely popularized after World War II by the journalist Walter Lippmann in his commentaries in The New York Herald Tribune.
Two features of the Cold War distinguished it from other periods in modern history: (1) a fundamental clash of ideologies (Marxism-Leninism versus liberal democracy); and (2) a highly stratified global power structure in which the United States and the Soviet Union were regarded as “superpowers” that were preeminent over-and in a separate class from-all other countries.
THE STALIN ERA
During the first eight years after World War II, the Cold War on the Soviet side was identified with the personality of Josef Stalin. Many historians have singled out Stalin as the individual most responsible for the onset of the Cold War. Even before the Cold War began, Stalin launched a massive program of espionage in the West, seeking to plant spies and sympathizers in the upper levels of Western governments. Although almost all documents about this program are still sealed in the Russian archives, materials released in the 1990s reveal that in the United States alone, at least 498 individuals actively worked as spies or couriers for Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930s and early 1940s.
In the closing months of World War II, when the Soviet Union gained increasing dominance over Nazi Germany, Stalin relied on Soviet troops to ocCOLD WAR cupy vast swathes of territory in East-Central Europe. The establishment of Soviet military hegemony in the eastern half of Europe, and the sweeping political changes that followed, were perhaps the single most important precipitant of the Cold War.
The extreme repression that Stalin practiced at home, and the pervasive suspicion and intolerance that he displayed toward his colleagues and aides, carried over into his policy vis-?-vis the West. Stalin’s unchallenged dictatorial authority within the Soviet Union gave him enormous leeway to formulate Soviet foreign policy as he saw fit. The huge losses inflicted by Germany on the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941-a pact that Stalin had upheld even after he received numerous intelligence warnings that a German attack was imminent-made Stalin all the more unwilling to trust or seek a genuine compromise with Western countries after World War II. Having been humiliated once, he was determined not to let down his guard again.
Stalin’s mistrustful outlook was evident not only in his relations with Western leaders, but also in his dealings with fellow communists. During the civil war in China after World War II, Stalin kept his distance from the Chinese communist leader, Mao Zedong. Although the Soviet Union provided crucial support for the Chinese Communists during the climactic phase of the civil war in 1949, Stalin never felt particularly close to Mao either then or afterward. In the period before the Korean War in June 1950, Stalin did his best to outflank Mao, giving the Chinese leader little choice but to go along with the decision to start the war.
Despite Stalin’s wariness of Mao, the Chinese communists deeply admired the Soviet Union and sought to forge a close alliance with Moscow. From February 1950, when the two countries signed a mutual security treaty, until Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Soviet Union and China cooperated on a wide range of issues, including military operations during the Korean War. On the rare occasions when the two countries diverged in their views, China deferred to the Soviet Union.
In Eastern Europe, Stalin also tended to be distrustful of indigenous communist leaders, and he gave them only the most tenuous leeway. At Stalin’s behest, the communist parties in Eastern Europe gradually solidified their hold through the determined use of what the Hungarian communist party leader M?ty?s R?kosi called “salami tactics.” By the spring of 1948, “People’s Democracies” were in place throughout the region, ready to embark on Stalinist policies of social transformation.
Stalin’s unwillingness to tolerate dissent was especially clear in his policy vis-?-vis Yugoslavia, which had been one of the staunchest postwar allies of the Soviet Union. In June 1948, Soviet leaders publicly denounced Yugoslavia and expelled it from the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), set up in 1947 to unite European communist parties under Moscow’s leadership. The Soviet-Yugoslav rift, which had developed behind the scenes for several months and had finally reached the breaking point in March 1948, appears to have stemmed from both substantive disagreements and political maneuvering. The chief problem was that Stalin had declined to give the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, any leeway in diverging from Soviet preferences in the Balkans and in policy toward the West. When Tito demurred, Stalin sought an abject capitulation from Yugoslavia as an example to the other East European countries of the unwavering obedience that was expected.
In the end, however, Stalin’s approach was highly counterproductive. Neither economic pressure nor military threats were sufficient to compel Tito to back down, and efforts to provoke a high-level coup against Tito failed when the Yugoslav leader liquidated his pro-Soviet rivals within the Yugoslav Communist Party. A military operation against Yugoslavia would have been logistically difficult (traversing mountains with an army that was already overstretched in Europe), but one of Stalin’s top aides, Nikita Khrushchev, later said he was “absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had had a common border with Yugoslavia, Stalin would have intervened militarily.” Plans for a full-scale military operation were indeed prepared, but the vigorous U.S. military response to North Korea’s incursion into South Korea in June 1950 helped dispel any lingering notion Stalin may have had of sending troops into Yugoslavia.
The Soviet Union thus was forced to accept a breach in its East European sphere and the strategic loss of Yugoslavia vis-?-vis the Balkans and the Adriatic Sea. Most important of all, the split with Yugoslavia raised concern about the effects elsewhere in the region if “Titoism” were allowed to spread. To preclude further such challenges to Soviet control, Stalin instructed the East European states to carry out new purges and show trials to
COLD WAR
remove any officials who might have hoped to seek greater independence. Although the process took a
