In our previous program we talked about the roots of the Cold War between Russia and the United States. The confrontation was set off by the speech Winston Churchill made at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. A year later, US President Harry Truman unveiled his doctrine regarding relations with the Soviet Union as a global rivalry. For nearly 45 years, until its demise caused by the Soviet collapse on December 8, 1991, the Cold War never once degenerated into a full-scale confrontation even though the two sides prepared for war building up their military muscle and challenging each other in every part of the globe. As a result, Russia and the United States have stockpiled enough weapons to destroy all life on Earth many times over. And still, neither side ever dared to use its deadly might against the other. How come?
Initially, neither Russia nor the United States really wanted to fight. When the confrontation became a hard fact, neither country was 100 percent sure it would win if a nuclear war actually broke out. This uncertainty fueled the superpowers' desire to perfect their arsenals to obtain an additional edge over each other.
The emerging Cold War split the whole world into two rival military, political and economic blocks, two political systems. It was a bipolar world now governed by a simple logic where countries were either friends or foes…
One result of that global confrontation in Russia was the campaign against the so-called "cosmopolitans", that is anyone taking interest in western literature, music and art. It culturally isolated the Soviet people from the rest of the world. Always eager to minimize his people's contacts with the West, Josef Stalin banned all marriages with foreigners.
On June 5, US Secretary of State George Marshall called for urgent economic assistance to strengthen the European democracies. The Soviet Union saw it as an American attempt to economically enslave Europe and pressured its eastern European allies to reject the Marshall Plan.
The United States established the Central Intelligence Agency and the Czechoslovak capital Prague hosted the First World Youth Festival for peace and friendship between peoples. In Israel, archeologists unearthed a trove of ancient scrolls including copies of the Old Testament written a thousand years before the oldest ones existing to date. The scrolls once belonged to a monastic commune dispersed by the Romans.
Also in 1947 they found and published the famous Anne Frank diary. When the Jewish girl was four, her family moved from Germany to the Netherlands, away from Nazi anti-Semitism. When the Germans occupied Amsterdam, Anne's family were hiding in a local friend's house. Someone tipped off the secret police and Anne, her parents and relatives wound up in a death camp where she died not living to celebrate her 16th birthday… Her diary later served as a material for a play and was also put on film depicting the terrible suffering millions of people went through under Nazism.
1947 is the birth year of the famous American movie director, author and producer, Steven Spielberg whose Jaws and Jurassic Park blockbusters have packed movie theaters all around the world. Schindler's List, Spielberg's first Oscar-winning effort, brings up the painful subject of the Holocaust.
Another prominent newborn of the year was the great Spanish opera singer Jose Carreras whose repertoire spans the distance from Georg Hendel to Leonard Bernstein. Partnering with the equally outstanding tenors Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, he recorded the very best arias…
In 1947 the famous Norwegian scientist Thor Heyerdahl crossed the oceans on board Kon Tiki - a flimsy-looking reed replica of an ancient Peruvian boat…

THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.


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