America and Russia: From the Alaska Purchase to the Cold War
For most of the nineteenth century, the United States and Russia were distant near-friends — two sprawling empires with no shared border and no real quarrel, comfortable enough that in 1867 Russia sold America the whole of Alaska. Less than a century later they were the two poles of a divided world, each with enough nuclear weapons to end the other, fighting through proxies on three continents and rehearsing a war neither could survive.
This guide follows that arc in order: the long quiet before the rivalry, the hardening of the Cold War after 1945, the flashpoints where it nearly turned hot, and the slow thaw that ended with the Soviet flag coming down over the Kremlin. Each entry links to a full account; together they trace how the twentieth century's defining standoff began, escalated, and finally ended without the war everyone feared.
It is easy to forget that the two Cold War superpowers began as something close to friends. Separated by an ocean and a continent, Imperial Russia and the young United States had no border to fight over and a shared wariness of Britain to bind them. The clearest proof is the deal that opens this story: in 1867 Russia simply sold America its North American territory outright — a transaction unthinkable between the enemies they would later become.
The wartime alliance against Hitler dissolved almost the moment the shooting stopped. With Europe in ruins and Soviet armies occupying its eastern half, the question of who would shape the postwar world had no agreed answer — and within two years the United States had committed itself to a new doctrine of holding the line against Soviet power wherever it advanced. The entries here are the architecture of that decision: the strategy, the aid, the institutions, and the president who set it all in motion.
Containment meant the rivalry could erupt anywhere on the map, and for forty years it did — in a blockaded city, on a Korean peninsula, over a Caribbean island, even in orbit. None of these became the direct war between the superpowers that everyone feared, but each was a moment when it nearly did. Together they show how a "cold" war stayed cold only by repeatedly walking up to the edge of a hot one.
The rivalry did not end in a battle; it wound down, then fell apart. A cautious 1970s thaw gave way to renewed tension and then, unexpectedly, to genuine negotiation — and when the Soviet system finally buckled under its own weight, the wall came down without a shot fired between the two powers. These entries trace the long exhale of the Cold War and the unipolar moment it left behind.
The Soviet rivalry shaped nearly every other relationship of its era — compare the parallel arc with China, and see how the same Cold War logic ran through America's wars from Korea to Vietnam.