Following on from my previous ask, I'm creating a work of fiction which I want to make as accurate and faithful as possible. I've been doing research and I think I'm largely correct but if I could get any confirmation or pointers I would be very grateful.
So the UK, US and USSR had just defeated Nazi Germany. Victory! God knows how many millions had been spent by each faction and they all had a people to feed and nation to rebuild. Staying on good terms with each other wasn't a good way to fill the power vacuum, and another all out war just wasn't going to happen. But still no one wanted to do nothing. So as the fight between fascism and democracy became a fight between capitalism and communism, the use of bombs and firearms became the use of spies and information. Now that Germany wasn't the enemy, the West and the Soviets were going at each other to stake the now empty claim.
Obviously there was stuff going on all around the world and there was so much more nuance. All in all, would this be an accurate description of the times? Minor details aside, is this faithful to history? Anything else I should know? Because I think this is enough for what I need but I'm not a historian myself and I can't be certain I've been looking up everything I should be.
Thank you so much in advance.
It's probably an okay description for most purposes! As a fellow writer, research can be both fun and inspiring but ultimately fiction will never be 100% accurate, and you don't want to get too tripped up trying to get everything right.
With that said, I do think your description is missing that the US/UK and the USSR were at each other's throats before WW2 as well. Stalin tried to side with Germany first, and the USSR invaded Poland alongside the Nazis. The first Red Scare in the US was in 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution happened. And before that, there's a long history of Cold War-esque scheming between the British and Russian Empires.
I also don't know that I think it was all about the power vacuum - I really do think it was about the ideology for a lot of people on both sides. Stalin was, uh, bad, so I sympathize with the desire to work against that, but also for a lot of American conservatives, anti-communism was part and parcel with pushing back against progressive causes in the US. And I think that both nations sort of propped up their own national egos by setting each other up as this vast and terrifying existential threat, if that makes sense.
If you're writing something set in the early Cold War era, I've done research on this for my own project and can probably help some with recommending books you might want to read or possibly answering questions directly. I'm not a real historian tho, just a guy with a library card and a half-finished spy novel.