[...] In March 1946, the former British premier Winston Churchill had declared that an "Iron Curtain" had descended across Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and it had divided the former allies into two distinct blocs. Churchill said this during a long speech in the United States, primus in­ter pares of the First World. This First World or the "West" was formed by states, notably the United States and those of Western Europe, that pledged themselves to partly regulated market capitalism and would, in 1949, form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The Second World rejected market capitalism for socialist planning, and it generally worked in collusion with the largest socialist state, the USSR. "Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia: all these famous cities and the populations around them," Churchill told the students at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, "lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."

The First and Second Worlds fell out openly when U.S . president Harry S. Truman announced his support for the anticommunist forces in Turkey and Greece (1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the conservatives defeat the popular Communists in the Italian and French elections of 1947, the USSR forced the Eastern European states into its orbit, and the animosity attained dramatic proportions during the First World's blockade of Berlin in June 1948. In this melee, an adviser to Truman (Bernard Baruch) used the term " Cold War" to describe the conflict, and a columnist (Walter Lippmann) made the phrase widely known.

[...]

The phrase "East-West conflict" distorts the history of the Cold War because it makes it seem as if the First and Second Worlds confronted each other in a condition of equality. In an insightful article from 1968, the Swedish sociologist Goran Therborn wrote, "The Cold War was a fundamentally unequal conflict, that was presented and experienced on both sides as being equal." The USSR and the United States portrayed each other as equivalent adversaries, although the former had an economic base that was far inferior to the latter. Despite the great advances of the Soviet regime in the development of the various republics, the USSR began its history with a battered feudal economy that was soon ravished
by a civil war and, later, the ferocious assaults of the Nazi war machine. In 1941, both the United States and the U S S R had populations of about 130 million, but whereas the United States lost upward of four hundred thousand troops in the war, the Soviets lost between twenty and thirty million troops and civilians. The Great Patriotic War devastated the USSR's economy, population, and capacity to rebuild itself. Further­more, the imperatives of rapid development tarnished the ideals of Soviet society since its population went into a severe program to build its
productive base at the expense of most internal freedoms. [...]