The richly detailed drama, which opened Monday night at Lincoln Center, is set in the spring of 1948, when the Cold War between former World War II allies America and the Soviet Union is under way.

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And Western Europe needed a U.S. presence against the Soviet Union from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first inhabited space capsule, Sputnik II, carrying a dog named Laika.

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The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the Free World that began after World War II almost started a quarter of a century earlier.

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Some historians suspect that Bose, an admirer of Stalin, might have escaped to the Soviet Union once he realized the Allies would win World War II.

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This is one of the reasons after WW II no country in the world outside of Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union had any gold.

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But to many, many others the explorer's courage, optimism and enthusiasm were the perfect distraction from a world still bruised by World War II and nervously watching the increasingly tense standoff between the United States and Soviet Union.

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