50 Cold War figures

Leaders, soldiers, spies, defectors, thinkers and a sprinkling of walk-on players who later took starring roles in world affairs… (Not in chronological order)

Quiz by

Rate:

Last updated: March 9, 2023

You have not attempted this quiz yet.

More quiz info >>

First submitted	January 11, 2022
Times taken	513
Average score	46.0%
Report this quiz	Report

Quiz and answer stats >>

Friends stats >>

10:00

Enter answer here

/ 50 guessed

The quiz is paused. You have remaining.

Scoring
You scored / = %

    This beats or equals
    % of test takers
    also scored 100%
    
The average score is 

      Your high score is
      
    
Your fastest time is 
more stats >>
friends stats >>

Keep scrolling down for answers and more stats ...

Hint	Answer
Said an 'Iron curtain' was slamming down	Winston Churchill
Imposed Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe	Joseph Stalin
His ‘Little Red Book’ permeated a communist superpower	Mao Zedong
Warned against a US "military-industrial complex"	Dwight Eisenhower
Balkan communist leader who defied Soviet influence	Josip Tito
U.S. president who set up the CIA	Harry Truman
Soviet secret policeman who killed and imprisoned millions	Lavrenty Beria
His dystopian novels warned against totalitarianism	George Orwell
Led his country's communist north to armed standoff on 38th parallel	Kim Il-sung
American general whose aid plan propped up European democracies	George Marshall
Smuggled the West's nuclear secrets to Moscow	Klaus Fuchs
His 'politics of grandeur' complicated West's Cold War ties	Charles de Gaulle
Cosmonaut whose flight accelerated the space race	Yuri Gagarin
Declared himself a Berliner on Cold War's chilliest front line	John Kennedy
Led his southeast Asian country in Cold War's biggest proxy conflict	Ho Chi Minh
Brandished his shoe at the U.N. general assembly	Nikita Khrushchev
The CIA may have planned to sabotage his cigars	Fidel Castro
His 'red scare' Senate hearings tried to weed out communists	Joe McCarthy
East German leader who had the Berlin Wall built	Walter Ulbricht
CIA chief who staged coups in Iran and Guatemala	Allen Dulles
The KGB's 'third man' in MI6 before he defected to Moscow	Kim Philby
American general who urged US to nuke China during Korean war	Douglas MacArthur
Chinese premier masterminded Beijing’s Cold War diplomacy	Zhou Enlai
CIA accused of killing this leader to stop Congo turning communist	Patrice Lumumba
Maniacal scientist who learned to stop worrying and love the bomb	Dr. Strangelove

Hint	Answer
American surveillance pilot downed over USSR	Gary Powers
Crystalised Cold War Mideast splits by nationalising Suez Canal	Gamal Abdul Nasser
He went to China, upending US policy	Richard Nixon
French thinker who quit Communist Party after Hungary rising	Jean-Paul Sartre
Revolutionary pin-up shot dead in Bolivia	Che Guevara
Star Soviet dancer who defected in Paris	Rudolf Nureyev
Soviet leader who sent Red Army into Afghanistan	Leonid Brezhnev
Marxist fugitive who kidnapped OPEC ministers	Carlos the Jackal
Middle East president who gave USSR a Mediterranean naval base	Hafez al-Assad
American practitioner of realpolitik who sought Soviet detente	Henry Kissinger
He installed a pro-West dictatorship that ruled Indonesia for decades	Suharto
Soviet writer whose novels exposed Gulag prison system	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Elected South American leader ousted by CIA-backed general Pinochet	Salvador Allende
He refused early release from 'Hanoi Hilton'	John McCain
Staged a communist coup in Ethiopia and declared "red terror"	Mengistu Haile Mariam
'Solidarity' union leader who led his country after Cold War	Lech Walesa
His “Star Wars” programme threatened new arms race near Cold War end	Ronald Reagan
His Cold War spy novels showed moral ambiguities of conflict	John Le Carre
Brought free market reforms to communist power but no political relaxation	Deng Xiaoping
Saudi who helped West-backed rebels battle the Soviets in Afghanistan	Osama bin Laden
His reforms as economy declined could not avert Soviet collapse	Mikhail Gorbachev
World leader who served as a KGB spy in Cold War Dresden	Vladimir Putin
She said of the last Soviet leader: “We can do business together”	Margaret Thatcher
Warsaw Pact leader summarily executed as his regime fell in 1989	Nicolae Ceausescu
Reunified his country as the Cold War ended and iron curtain fell	Helmut Kohl

Suggested Quizzes See all >>

World Capitals Quiz

Countries with the Most Tourists Quiz

Top World Languages

World Map Without 20 Random Countries