The worst cold war tl cliches

In the spirit of previous worst cliché threads what are the worst cold war clichés

Soviet coup then invasion
Soviets act like idiots
The western left acts as a fifth column
the US wins and spreads democracy and freedom (tm).
 
WWIII ends in a Korea-style ceasefire, nevermind the fact that both sides would rather settle with Germany in their spheres of influence before the war ends.

Also, WWIII must end up becoming some nuke-fest in the end that somehow kills off humanity.
 
Henry Wallace is a mindless drone who will do nothing but serve the interests of the Soviet Union. No matter what happens he will never change his mind on the subject and he can never be influenced or forced into even the slightest anti-Soviet action by those around him.

A KMT led China is a paradise of capitalism and democracy. It apparently ceases to be a corrupt military dictatorship the moment it wins the civil war.

And the worst cliche of all is that the Soviets are capable of winning with just the slightest change. If there is a tiny chink in the American resolve, if they failed to Stay the Course in Vietnam or Korea or wherever then scores of third world countries will turn communist, western Europe will suddenly decide to elect communist governments (even though in most countries the Communists are either irrelevant or not subservient to Moscow) and all the Soviet problems that made their economic and political systems so dysfunctional will disappear.
 
Worst clichés?
  • That the Soviets would attack first/invade, in and of itself. No one ever reasoned on the huge, undescribable trauma that was WWII for the Soviet Union and its leaders, old men who had lived through it, often losing friends and relatives to war, genocide, hunger, illness and internal political repression.
  • That the Soviets would find willing agents and complicits in the West in the socialist-communist Left. I actually think they'd precisely be among the few to try some form of resistance in the unlikely scenario of a Soviet occupation!
  • That America would win hands on a nukeless military confrontation, due to its vastly superior military and logistical machine, eminent control of seas and airspace. Were things to deteriorate to the point of a shooting conflict (unlikely, but frighteningly not impossible), nothing short of the massive us of nuclear weapons would defeat the Red Army.
  • That in case of war Eastern Europeans would rebel en masse, with entire armies turning their weapons against the Russkies and embracing the American liberators. For how much the Soviet yoke was resented, and for how much today certain European countries like to picture themselves as oppressed democrats of a lifetime under the iron heel of Moscow and its Communist henchmen, the memory of WWII was still alive enough that no one wanted even to entertain the notion of having armed Germans around in places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is often overlooked. Rebellion came, after a fashion, in peacetime: as soon as the Soviets showed themselves unable/unready to do the dirty work of repression or support anymore their puppet regimes, the Warsaw Pact came down crashing.
 
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orwelans II

Banned
There must be a compensation for one side for the success that the other one got in a region that it didn't get in OTL. For example, if there's an event that brings Saudi Arabia into the Soviet camp in the 50s, then some event must also stop Egypt from joining the Soviets or prevent the Libyan Revolution. If the Cuban revolution is crushed, the one in Venezuela or Brazil or wherever in Latin America will establish this TL's Castro equivalent.

There will always be a Tito-Stalin split. There will always be a Sino-Soviet split. In the event of an east-west war, these two countries will either both rejoin the Soviets or be invaded by the Soviets.
 
To be fair a lot of the cliches listed above were actual fears at the time and only after the fact do we realize some where overblown, some were improbable or impossible and the Soviet Union was not the scary giant we all thought

But a hell of a lot of people in positions of authority and people who elected them believed it then.

Of course during that time, for much of it, we thought the Chinese and Russians were working together when we should have realized that was far from the truth.
 
Worst clichés?
  • That the Soviets would attack first/invade, in and of itself. No one ever reasoned on the huge, undescribable trauma that was WWIII for the Soviet Union and its leaders, old man who had lived through it, often losing friends and relatives to war, genocide, hunger, illness and internal political repression.
  • That the Soviets would find willing agents and complicits in the West in the socialist-communist Left. I actually think they'd precisely be among the few to try some form of resistance in the unlikely scenario of a Soviet occupation!
  • That America would win hands on a nukeless military confrontation, due to its vastly superior military and logistical machine, eminent control of seas and airspace. Were things to deteriorate to the point of a shooting conflict (unlikely, but frighteningly not impossible), nothing short of the massive us of nuclear weapons would defeat the Red Army.
  • That in case of war Eastern Europeans would rebel en masse, with entire armies turning their weapons against the Russkies and embracing the American liberators. For how much the Soviet yoke was resented, and for how much today certain European countries like to picture themselves as oppressed democrats of a lifetime under the iron heel of Moscow and its Communist henchmen, the memory of WWII was still alive enough that no one wanted even to entertain the notion of having armed Germans around in places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is often overlooked. Rebellion came, after a fashion, in peacetime: as soon as the Soviets showed themselves unable/unready to do the dirty work of repression or support anymore their puppet regimes, the Warsaw Pact came down crashing.

German reunification was not greeted with unrestrained joy by the rest of Europe as I recall when it finally happened
 
German reunification was not greeted with unrestrained joy by the rest of Europe as I recall when it finally happened

In Italy actually we simply shrugged, or were even pleased. The bad blood towards Germans was forgotten surprisingly quick here, once they began to came here unarmed and with pockets full of clinking Marks. The tourist Wehrmacht was appreciated more than its military avatar.
 
Post 1968 the US will either slide into civil war black versus white, hippies versus Vietnam veterans.
Otherwise it will dissolve in a gaggle of successor states worse then OTL Soviet Union. Of course Texas will be independent again and populated by the worst cowboy cliches
 
The cold war will go on forever, or at least for as long as the crusades did. Eventually it will play out in space and you will have Communist and Capitalist spheres of influence on the moon or even Venus and Mars.

Another cliché I often came across in reading 1970's Science Fiction is that the West would loose all of Asia, but regain all of Germany. For some reason that was considered a draw...
 
Henry Wallace is a mindless drone who will do nothing but serve the interests of the Soviet Union. No matter what happens he will never change his mind on the subject and he can never be influenced or forced into even the slightest anti-Soviet action by those around him.

The fact that he asked the KGB to finance him and wanted to appoint Soviet intelligence assets as Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasure isn't a good look.

In the spirit of previous worst cliché threads what are the worst cold war clichés

Soviet coup then invasion
Soviets act like idiots
The western left acts as a fifth column
the US wins and spreads democracy and freedom (tm).

Worst clichés?
  • That the Soviets would attack first/invade, in and of itself. No one ever reasoned on the huge, undescribable trauma that was WWII for the Soviet Union and its leaders, old man who had lived through it, often losing friends and relatives to war, genocide, hunger, illness and internal political repression.
  • That the Soviets would find willing agents and complicits in the West in the socialist-communist Left. I actually think they'd precisely be among the few to try some form of resistance in the unlikely scenario of a Soviet occupation!
  • That America would win hands on a nukeless military confrontation, due to its vastly superior military and logistical machine, eminent control of seas and airspace. Were things to deteriorate to the point of a shooting conflict (unlikely, but frighteningly not impossible), nothing short of the massive us of nuclear weapons would defeat the Red Army.
  • That in case of war Eastern Europeans would rebel en masse, with entire armies turning their weapons against the Russkies and embracing the American liberators. For how much the Soviet yoke was resented, and for how much today certain European countries like to picture themselves as oppressed democrats of a lifetime under the iron heel of Moscow and its Communist henchmen, the memory of WWII was still alive enough that no one wanted even to entertain the notion of having armed Germans around in places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is often overlooked. Rebellion came, after a fashion, in peacetime: as soon as the Soviets showed themselves unable/unready to do the dirty work of repression or support anymore their puppet regimes, the Warsaw Pact came down crashing.

The Soviets attacking first out of the blue is the one thing here I wonder about. IIRC the Soviets definitely seriously considered a preemptive strategic nuclear exchange several times (Able Archer for sure, maybe Cuban Missile Crisis, and I think other times have come to light). It seems logical to me to think that anyone who would consider jumping straight to the top of the escalation ladder wouldn't consider any lower rungs to be above consideration (I speak thinking of a conventional invasion of Germany and the other relevant NATO states). What they needed was a sufficient feeling of being in a corner and feeling that was an option that could benefit them. That wasn't likely, but I think it was far from impossible. The Soviets were a very paranoid power and they frequently drew inaccurate conclusions from their data since they viewed it through the tint of their own propaganda (which a lot of them had grown up with, particularly by the time Andropov came to power).

I agree that a lot of the portrayals of the NATO left as a Soviet fifth column are overdone, and the genre isn't particularly balanced in terms of scenarios where the Soviets win.

However, there is little doubt in my mind that NATO would be greeted as liberators in the Soviet satellite states (most people there were intellectually advanced enough to understand NATO was not the second coming of the Third Reich).
 
I think the attitude towards NATO troops would very depending on the country-Poland would probably greet them while Ukraine would attack them.
 
The fact that he asked the KGB to finance him and wanted to appoint Soviet intelligence assets as Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasure isn't a good look.
Except that he also fired communists from the Department of Agriculture, opposed recognition of the USSR in 1933 and wrote a book about how he was wrong to oppose Truman's foreign policy. For that matter he criticised the Soviets in the same speech as he talked about the necessity of withdrawing from Europe.
In addition TL's featuring Wallace the Soviet Puppet make the assumption that he'd act exactly the same as he did in 1946-1948 OTL despite being a president of the Democratic party instead of the candidate of a small time third party dependent upon Communist support. Even if he doesn't confront the Soviets at first, political necessity will force him into it. Plus his OTL 1948 views were influenced by bitterness over being dumped by FDR and fired by Truman.

He was undoubtedly naive and his '48 platform was heavily influenced by the Communists but he wasn't the brainless dupe he tends to be depicted as.
 
Except that he also fired communists from the Department of Agriculture, opposed recognition of the USSR in 1933 and wrote a book about how he was wrong to oppose Truman's foreign policy. For that matter he criticised the Soviets in the same speech as he talked about the necessity of withdrawing from Europe.
In addition TL's featuring Wallace the Soviet Puppet make the assumption that he'd act exactly the same as he did in 1946-1948 OTL despite being a president of the Democratic party instead of the candidate of a small time third party dependent upon Communist support. Even if he doesn't confront the Soviets at first, political necessity will force him into it. Plus his OTL 1948 views were influenced by bitterness over being dumped by FDR and fired by Truman.

Yeah, I'll grant that he was a complicated guy. I think he was entirely too pro-Soviet, but yes, he could also have gone that way I suppose.
 
The cold war will go on forever, or at least for as long as the crusades did. Eventually it will play out in space and you will have Communist and Capitalist spheres of influence on the moon or even Venus and Mars.
That sounds awesome, and I'm disappointed there's no TL on it.
 
The cold war will go on forever, or at least for as long as the crusades did. Eventually it will play out in space and you will have Communist and Capitalist spheres of influence on the moon or even Venus and Mars.

That's a classic science fiction trope, and I love it because of the retro feel it gives whatever work it shows up in.
 
To be honest - I'm pissed that the Soviet Union is portrayed as an "Empire of Evil" and Eastern Europe only as a zone of Soviet occupation. There was a lot of shit, but not so scary. And the dogmatic Honneker, the despotic bastard Ceausescu and the cunning Kadar are not the same.
 
It drives me up a wall when people's analysis of a conventional war in Germany boils down exclusively to comparisons of equipment; 'this tank is better than that tank, this jet is faster' etc. etc. etc. I attach a lot more importance to things like reserve pools, divisional firepower, number of maneuver battalions, and divisional slices. No amount of POMCUS and Abrams-wanking can measure up to the Soviets' 100-20 superiority in divisions against the major NATO powers and 40 million trained reservists.
 
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