The answer to this is the subject of considerable debate among Cold War scholars. Some would even argue that the roots of the Cold War stretched all the way back to 1919, when the United States and other Western countries gave their support to the forces opposing the Bolsheviks. But most would accept the Potsdam Conference (July 17 to August 2, 1945), when Truman and Stalin (or Stalin's foreign minister, at least) clashed over what...
The answer to this is the subject of considerable debate among Cold War scholars. Some would even argue that the roots of the Cold War stretched all the way back to 1919, when the United States and other Western countries gave their support to the forces opposing the Bolsheviks. But most would accept the Potsdam Conference (July 17 to August 2, 1945), when Truman and Stalin (or Stalin's foreign minister, at least) clashed over what would happen to Poland. The war against Germany was over, and Soviet troops occupied that nation. At the Yalta Conference earlier in the year, Stalin had promised President Roosevelt that he would allow democratic elections in Poland. But when the war came to an end, it appeared certain that he would install a communist government there. Truman and his advisers interpreted this as aggression, though documents made available to historians since then suggest that Stalin saw it as a defensive measure after being invaded through Poland at the start of World War II.
In any case, representatives from the two sides clashed on this issue, and the fact that Truman found out while at Potsdam that the United States had successfully tested the atomic bomb at Los Alamos caused further tensions (though Stalin knew about the program already, having found out through his network of spies). Within two years, Americans were beginning to recognize that the World War II postwar order would be a "Cold War" between the United States and the USSR. Potsdam, in a sense, was the moment that the tensions that characterized the Cold War began to emerge.
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