ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the variety of conflicts that took place in the period between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Two major political contexts the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR), and the unraveling of Western colonial empires intersected with the development of nuclear weaponry to shape the tensions of this age. In 1944, the Ingushetians and the Chechens, with whom they shared a so-called autonomous republic, were among several ethnic groups of the Caucasus that were forcibly relocated to the eastern regions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). An analysis of the Second World War that attributed the war and Hitler's initial successes to appeasement only reinforced the determination to contain the USSR. The Warsaw Pact represented the USSR's response in kind.
