(q) Early Cooperation: American Famine Relief

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the ensuing Civil War produced acute food shortages in southwestern Russia. Several volunteer groups in the United States and Europe had organized relief programs, but it became clear that help was needed on a larger scale because an estimated 10 to 20 million lives were at stake.

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(r) Early Cooperation: Economic Cooperation

During the 1920s and early 1930s, tensions between the Soviet Union and the West eased somewhat, particularly in the area of economic cooperation.

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(s) Soviet and American Communist Parties

The Soviet Communist party evolved from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party's Bolshevik wing formed by Vladimir Lenin in 1903.

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(t) World War II: Alliance

Despite deep-seated mistrust and hostility between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 created an instant alliance between the Soviets and the two greatest: Britain and the United States.

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(u) World War II: American POWs and MIAs

Soviet archival documents -- from an earlier era after World War II -- reveal that Americans were detained, and even perished, in the vast Soviet GULAG.

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(v) Cold War: Postwar Estrangement

Joseph Stalin deepened the estrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union when he asserted in 1946 that World War II was an unavoidable and inevitable consequence of "capitalist imperialism" and implied that such a war might re-occur.

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(w) Cold War: Soviet Perspectives

After World War II, Joseph Stalin saw the world as divided into two camps: imperialist and capitalist regimes on the one hand, and the Communist and progressive world on the other.

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(x) Cold War: Cuban Missile Crisis

According to Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, in May 1962 he conceived the idea of placing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba as a means of countering an emerging lead of the United States in developing and deploying strategic missiles.

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Revelations from the Russian Archives

Library of Congress Soviet Archives Exhibit presents a virtual glimpse into the entire range of Soviet history from the October Revolution of 1917 to the failed coup of August 1991.

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