So why did the USA and the Soviet Union hate each other so much? One of the most important reasons was that the two powers had opposing ideologies (by which we mean political beliefs and principles).

* The Soviet Union was the first Communist regime in the world. The main idea of communism was that the workers of the country were in charge, having overthrown the politicians, aristocrats, industrialists and religious leaders who had been controlling and exploiting them in the past. In the Soviet Union’s view, this sort of exploitation was exactly what happened in the USA.

* The USA followed an economic model called capitalism, where people have the freedom to create businesses and make a profit, deciding the wages that they paid their workers. This created a system where there were both rich and poor people. Communism was basically a rejection of capitalism.

* But don’t go thinking that the Communist system was great and the USA’s was one of exploitation. We need to take another ideal into consideration here: freedom. The USA was (and is) a democracy, where people voted for the politicians they wanted to represent them. Not only that, people were allowed to say what they wanted.

* Although the Soviet Union also claimed to offer freedom because it had rejected capitalism, in reality it was a dictatorship. One man ran the show: Josef Stalin. And he executed and imprisoned literally tens of million people for suspecting that they opposed him or the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union also having a vast network of secret police, people in the Soviet Union lived in fear of speaking out against the regime and had virtually no personal freedom.