The Search for Symmetry: a Tentative View of Trieste, the Soviet Union and the Cold War

Abstract

The post-war conflict over Trieste has been seen as significant by second-generation studies1 for two main reasons. It is seen as a test case of the early Cold War and later as a microcosm of the Cold War. So a source of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union (at least up to the split between Tito and Stalin in June 1948), and at the same time the battlefield of a domestic Cold War. At any rate, the issue is recognized as a minor issue rather than a major point of observation of the Cold War, as the first-generation studies preferred to see it.2 The second-generation studies have found, in US diplomatic history, the framework that was previously lacking, and have been strongly influenced by post-revisionist historiography. So the crisis of May–June 1945 has been portrayed as the first confrontation between the ‘Riga axiom’ and the ‘Yalta axiom’ or as a prologue of containment (the sources of inspiration of these interpretations are Daniel Yergin and John F. Gaddis respectively).3