The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

“The Chance for Peace” failed to ease the cold war because Stalin’s death did nothing to alter the fundamental ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each superpower still saw the other as a looming threat to its security, its belief system, and its vision of the future. The ideological trenches were dug too deep, and the risks of appearing weak or engaging in appeasement were too great, for either side to commit to a genuine thawing of relations. The Soviet Union was now in the hands of a nervous team of men who had risen in the Soviet system by slavishly attending to Stalin’s every caprice. For a brief moment, Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria, and Nikolai Bulganin had hoped that a thaw with the West would buy them time to transition to a post-Stalin period of rule. But they dared not loosen the reins over the communist bloc for fear of letting it slip away.