From the end of World War II, the United States and its Western European allies were involved

in a nearly half-century long, Titanic struggle with the Soviet Union known as the Cold War.

It was cold only in the sense that the Russians and Americans never came to direct blows,

but it was certainly not cold for the Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others who got called

up in the communists' relentless drive to destabilise the free, democratic, capitalist world.

There were, to be sure, many morally complex moments during this long struggle, but the

Cold War was, at its core, as clear a conflict of good versus evil as World War II had been.

Just like that war, the Cold War was a death match between the forces representing freedom

and the forces representing totalitarianism.

Because hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, died in it, the Cold War can, with good reason,

be described as the Third World War.

The instigator of this war was Joseph Stalin, the mass murdering dictator of Russia,

and of the many non-Russian peoples he had incorporated into what was known as the Union

of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union for short.

Stalin knew that his Soviet armed forces could not take on the might of the free West.

Instead, he decided to wage this fight through the use of proxies and by a massive use of

disinformation and misinformation.

His initial prey was Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia,

as well as Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.

Stalin had troops in all these countries at the end of the war.

Despite what he promised American President Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta conference,

the Soviet leader had no intention of removing them and gaining control over their governments

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