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This article discusses the issues related to the Cold War. More than twenty years have passed since scholars and journalists began their examination of the Cold War to explain its existence between the United States and the Soviet Union, which has been the central fact of international life, perhaps no less so than the British-French struggle for world leadership in the second hundred years war. The conflict between two giants, always diplomatically unsettling and potentially disastrous, led the existence of cold war. Those who attribute the cold war to ideology--be it the Soviet-based doctrines of communist expansion and revolution or the anti-Soviet attitudes which such doctrines produced--discover the origins of the Cold War in the second Russian revolution. Soviet penetration of Europe to the river Elbe in April 1945 upset western calculations on two fronts. Germany's total destruction, the high purpose of Allied wartime policy, had permitted the Red Army to challenge the traditional European balance of power. Secondly, Soviet military dominance of Slavic Europe, the result not of aggression but of victory, gave the Soviets the power, if not the intention, to impose their will on the states of eastern Europe.