A-Level History: Cold War Origins, 1944–53

Who started the Cold War? The historiographical question that once divided orthodox, revisionist and post-revisionist schools now structures every A-level course on the period, and answering it requires exact command of 1944-53. This quiz supplies the evidence base.

The conference questions test the wartime alliance's fracture points: Yalta's Polish agreement — the reorganisation of the Lublin government that Moscow honoured in letter and violated in spirit — and Potsdam's harder edges. Soviet consolidation is examined through salami tactics, tested for their actual mechanics of sliced-away opposition and captured interior ministries, culminating in Czechoslovakia in 1948.

The ideological framing gets its own questions: Kennan's Long Telegram of 1946 and its characterisation of Soviet conduct — the intellectual foundation of containment — and Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. Containment in practice follows: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan tested for its strategic logic of economic stabilisation against communist appeal, and the Soviet counter-moves of Cominform and Comecon.

The Berlin Blockade is examined causally — the Western currency reform as the immediate trigger — together with the airlift and the two outcomes of 1949: NATO's collective security with its permanent American commitment, and the division of Germany. The set closes with the Cold War's globalisation: the Soviet bomb, the Chinese revolution's shock to American policy and the domino logic it fuelled, and the Korean War's origins in Kim's ambition, Stalin's calculated approval and the perceived gap in the American defensive perimeter. Explanations frame each fact for the causation essay.

• Analyse the wartime conferences and their unresolved conflicts
• Explain Soviet consolidation of Eastern Europe through salami tactics
• Evaluate containment: the Long Telegram, Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan
• Explain the Berlin Blockade's causes and consequences
• Assess the Cold War's globalisation: China, the bomb and Korea

Covers the origins of the Cold War (1944–1953) as taught across A-level boards: the conferences, Soviet consolidation, containment, the Berlin Blockade, NATO, and the Korean War.