Conclusion

Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 for his erratic policies and for the Cuban missile crisis. In his forced retirement, he expressed regret at his brutal treatment of Boris Pasternak: “We shouldn’t have banned [Doctor Zhivago]. There’s nothing anti-Soviet in it.” But the postwar decades were grim times. Two superpowers—the Soviet Union and the United States—each controlling atomic arsenals, overshadowed European leadership and engaged in a menacing cold war, complete with the threat of nuclear annihilation. The cold war saturated everyday life, giving birth to bomb shelters, spies, purges, and witch hunts—all of them creating a culture of anxiety that kept people in constant fear of war. Cold war diplomacy divided Europe into an eastern bloc dominated by the Soviets and a freer western bloc mostly allied with the United States. In this bleak atmosphere, starving, homeless, and refugee people joined the task of rebuilding a devastated Europe.

Despite the chaos at the end of 1945, both halves of Europe recovered almost miraculously in little more than a decade. Eastern Europe, where wartime devastation and ongoing violence were greatest, experienced less prosperity. In the West, wartime technology served as the basis for new consumer goods and welfare-state planning improved health. Spurred on by aid from the United States, western Europe formed the successful Common Market, which became the foundation for greater European unity in the future. As a result of World War II and the cold war, Germany recovered as two countries, not one. The war so weakened the European powers that they lost their colonies to thriving independence movements. Newly independent nations emerged in Asia and Africa, but they were often caught in the cold war and faced the additional problems of creating stable political structures and a sound economic future. As the West as a whole grew in prosperity, its cultural life focused paradoxically on reviving Western values while enjoying the new phenomenon of mass consumerism. Above all, the West—and the rest of the world—had to survive the atomic rivalry of the superpowers.