In this week of the course, you will be studying the Cold War, the long period of hostilities between the communist bloc and the democratic world from 1945 until the 1990s, although you could easily make the case that the Cold War continues to this day. Many historians find the origins of the Cold War in the nature of the wartime alliance against Hitler. The countries of that alliance, the United States, France, England and Russia were not on exactly friendly terms before the war had begun and, in fact, if you remember the Soviet Union actually had a treaty of non-aggression with Hitler when Germany attacked Poland in September 1939--the Soviet Union even participated in the partition of Poland with Germany. The alliance stayed together because of the common evil of Hitler, and to a lesser extent Japan, and it also stayed together because of the personal, forceful decision of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill to see the war to a victorious conclusion. By the time the war had ended, the foe which had brought the alliance into existence, Hitler, was dead; Japan had been defeated; Roosevelt was dead; and Churchill was soon to be ousted from office. Only Stalin remained. It should have been very clear that future relations between the Western democracies and Russia were going to be thorny. Probably the most immediate cause of the Cold War was the Soviet Union's actions in Eastern Europe, and most specifically in Poland. After all, Poland had been where World War II began, and it would also be where the Cold War ended with the creation of Solidarnosc at the end of the 1970s; Poland was where the Cold War began. The fact of the matter was that since the Soviet Union occupied most of Eastern Europe with its army after the war, the Soviet Union took every step possible to install communist governments in those countries. This was something to which the Western democracies objected, and gradually relations deteriorated between East and West, culminating in 1948 with the Soviet attempt to force England, France and United States out of West Berlin by blockading land access to Berlin. The West averted a major conflagration by using an airlift to supply the city. The Cold War waxed and waned in intensity in the fifty years after World War Two. There were times of extreme tension, for example the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; and there were times of less tension, for example detente in the 1970s. There were times when the rivalry between Russia and the United States was fought through proxies, for example in 1973 in the Middle East; and there were times when Russia and the United States forced proxies to come to peaceful terms, for example in Korea. Your assignment for this week is the one-page paper based on the reading of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This is a powerful novel, based on personal experience, of life in the Russian GULAG, the prison camp system. The specific question is: How was Ivan Denisovich able to resist the dehumanizing aspects of camp routine? Please remember that you are reading Solzhenitsyn as a historian and not as a literary critic; you are looking for specific areas of how Ivan was able to survive, such as his work or the errands that he ran. Please do not just provide a list of Ivan's mannerisms, but provide in-depth explanation/analysis of just a few of the most important. Before writing the paper, you should review the style rules for history papers in the course. Your paper should include an introduction, paragraphs (each of which deals with a specific point you are trying to make) and quoted evidence from the text to support your analysis.