As an internationally influential expert on Russian politics and the author of nearly 20 books, he has shaped our understanding of the Cold War since the 1960s. Before we dive into the subject, could you put on your historiographer’s hat and tell us about the forces that affected the way cold war history has been written?
There are writers on the cold war who believe that the internal politics of the countries involved are of little importance. all that really matters is the relative military and economic power of the antagonists. To the extent that I have added anything to the debate, it may be by arguing that internal political change may be of decisive importance and that, in the case of the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1980s, it was. There is some excellent writing by scholars in different countries, with notable contributions from the United States as well as some leading Russian scholars. however, there is no shortage of writings on the cold war, which are heavily tinged with illusions and national prejudices.
You are reading: Best books about the cold war
thus, there are authors who argued that change within the soviet system was impossible until it happened and that the soviet union would never accept the independence of eastern european countries until it happened. after these things happened, what was previously impossible became inevitable. The Soviet Union simply couldn’t keep up, we were told, so they had no choice but to give in. That raises many questions, including why Russia, minus the other fourteen republics that made up the Soviet Union, is much less of an international cooperative partner now than it was in the late 1980s.
In Russia itself, there is, paradoxically, a partial convergence with American triumphalist accounts of the end of the cold war. The contemporary Russian trend line is that the United States won the cold war, but they did so because the United States was determined to destroy the Soviet Union and because Gorbachev ignored the advice of the Soviet military-industrial complex, betrayed Russian national interests, and was a weak leader. some Russian writers even call him a traitor.
Contemporary intellectual fashion and political conformity can, of course, influence the way history is written. there are authors on both sides of the old cold war divide who transcend these national (and sometimes nationalist) narratives, with their simplifications and distortions, but too many who do not.
the rise and fall of communism, his magnificent survey of issues, had a great impact. what did you set out to write it for?
my goal was to produce a thoroughly researched but readable history of communism from its intellectual origins to the 21st century, showing the various ways in which communist systems arose in different places, why they lasted so long, and why and how they came to be. end, as they have done almost everywhere. The most important of the few remaining communist states is, of course, China. it is still very authoritarian but, in important respects, it is a hybrid system. the characteristic political power structure of communism has been preserved. but the economy is very different. If Marx, Lenin, or (more to the point) Mao could see it, they would be appalled at the extent to which a communist party has turned to the market and allowed the growth of a substantial private sector.
“there is no shortage of writing on the cold war that is heavily tinged with illusions and national prejudices”
I might add that I was quite well prepared for the task of writing the rise and fall of communism. He had been teaching courses on the comparative study of communism, first in Glasgow and then for 34 years in Oxford. I also had a lot of experience living and talking to people in communist countries (at one point I spent an entire year in Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union).
the human factor, the title of his latest publication, is a phrase that gorbachev uses frequently. tell us about the history of the phrase and the book about it.
the fact that gorbachev often used the term “human factor” (chelovecheskiy faktor in Russian) was a reason for choosing that title. It is worth noting that in emphasizing the importance of the individual in Soviet society and the importance of human relations between leaders on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, he was, as in so many other respects, moving away from Marxism-Leninism and the soviet orthodoxy. .
but the main reason I think the title is apt is that individual leaders really were instrumental in bringing the cold war to an end when it did, peacefully and through negotiations. that ronald reagan preferred the judgment of george shultz to that of caspar weinberger that the us commitment to the soviet union really mattered, and that margaret thatcher was the foreign leader whose judgment he most respected was also of great importance. She reinforced his inclination to negotiate with his Soviet counterpart and helped persuade him that Gorbachev was a very different kind of Soviet leader from his predecessors and was serious about changing the system he had brought about. inherited. She was a notable counterweight to those in the Reagan administration who were unconvinced that more than cosmetic change was taking place in Moscow.
Most importantly of all, none of the realist alternative soviet leaders to mikhail gorbachev would have tolerated, let alone promoted, free speech, legitimization of dissent and contested elections in the soviet union or risked to generate expectations in Eastern Europe. . Those who think that any Soviet leader would have had to follow Gorbachev-like policies due to military or economic necessity are deeply mistaken.
making your list of five books on the cold war will be an honor for the authors listed. Before we talk about your books, tell me about the criteria you used to choose.
For Americans, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was the central feature of the Cold War. the rest of the world was also greatly affected by that relationship. had it ended in all-out nuclear war, the very survival of humanity would have been in jeopardy. It is not surprising, then, that two of the five books I chose focus on the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union (those by Leffler and Matlock). but the cold war affected all parts of the world, albeit to varying degrees. The real fight did not take place on the territory of either of the two superpowers, but mainly in Asia. Therefore, it is important to see the Cold War in its entirety, which is what Westad’s book does. however, the most visible manifestation of the cold war throughout its history was the division of europe. therefore, a book that focuses on eastern europe and how the division of the european continent (lévesque) was overcome is a central part of the story.
“at times of high tension during the cold war, the world was closer to a catastrophic nuclear war than most people thought at the time”
Ideas, as well as leadership and power, mattered. That is particularly true of the ideological shift in the Soviet Union: the origins and development of what, in the Gorbachev era, became known as “new thinking,” and underlying radically new policies. That is why I include academic study for English. I have also consciously chosen three books that deal with the cold war period as a whole, and two (by lévesque and matlock) that focus on its end.
let’s start with the cold war: a world history by oarne westad. how did this book expand our understanding of the cold war?
See Also: Anne of Green Gables Books in Order | Ultimate Guide
The strength of the book is its breadth. Some look back to the Cold War period with some nostalgia, thinking that it was a time of careful and disciplined rivalry in which there were rules of the game that governed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. There’s some truth to that last point, but it’s also true that sometimes only good luck prevented a devastating nuclear war that neither side wanted.
what westad’s book describes is the cold war as a whole, not only in the places where most studies have focused (united states, soviet union and europe), but also in asia, Africa and Latin America. he challenges the view that it was a “long peace”. It was not a long peace for the Koreans and the Vietnamese, nor for the Americans who died in those wars far from their native shores. not many academics know Russian and Chinese, write in English and have a native language that is different again. Westad, a Norwegian, is one such scholar, and his book has the added merit of being very readable.
westad makes it clear that the cold war shaped politics in all parts of the world. How can we pass on the scope and influence of the Cold War conflict to recent generations? Why is it important that we never forget?
I’ve already touched on that. At times of high tension during the Cold War, the world was closer to a catastrophic nuclear war than most people thought at the time. the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is the best known example. If Nikita Khrushchev had not been prepared to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba, and if President Kennedy had been less patient, or unwilling to make his own concessions, we might not be here having this conversation today.
there were other times when it appeared that soviet missiles had been launched against the united states and when (at another time) american missiles were apparently headed for the soviet union. all were the result of technical failures or human error. we trusted more than we realized at the time in the cool heads and prudent judgment of officers on both sides who had to tell their military superiors whether the attack was real or a false alarm.
For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War by Bancroft Prize-winning historian Melvin Leffler is your next pick. tell us.
I have chosen books that combine strong scholarship with readability. Melvyn Leffler’s book meets those criteria admirably. covers the cold war from beginning to end, but focusing mainly on the relationship between the united states and the soviet union. he is particularly strong on the American side of the story, having done a great deal of fruitful archival research, including the archives of all the relevant presidential libraries. he combines that with a wide reading of memoirs and specialized academic literature. there is a lot of debate about the cold war, especially about its end. Leffler’s judgments on controversial issues are among the strongest and wisest.
In his chapter on the Cambridge history of the Cold War and more extensively in his new book, he argues that Gorbachev played the most crucial role in ending the Cold War. why do you keep that?
There is a widespread view that US military superiority, or its inability to keep pace with the West economically, forced the Soviet Union to admit defeat in the Cold War. While that is tempting to many in the West, it slides into the fact that when, in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the United States had undoubted military superiority over the Soviet Union, communism continued to spread. Since the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had achieved rough military parity with the United States, and that was still the case in the mid-1980s, despite Reagan’s increased military spending. Given that each military superpower had the means to completely destroy the other, why should the Soviet side be forced to make concessions at a time of parity that it did not when it was manifestly the weaker of the two rivals?
then there is the deterministic economic explanation for the end of the cold war. While it is true that the Soviet economy lagged behind its Western competitors (and was being overtaken by newly industrialized Asian countries), it was not in crisis in the mid-1980s. the system remained stable, and the soviet state could have muddled through economically for decades to come, maintaining the censorship, highly authoritarian system, and the image of the united states as a dangerous enemy (against which citizen unity and eternal vigilance were mandatory).
“While it is true that the Soviet economy lagged behind its Western competitors, it was not in crisis in the mid-1980s”
The economistic argument fails because Gorbachev proceeded to give radical political reform (which did nothing to improve economic performance) much higher priority than the commodification of the economy. he embraced the market principle only in his last two years as Soviet leader, until 1990, and even then it was only in principle. his intellectual acceptance that a market economy would do more to raise living standards than the centralized command economy could achieve did not lead him to risk the transition to the market, since in the short term this would have added to the economic problems of the world. country and popular rejection. unhappy.
gorbachev’s fundamental difference from his predecessors and from any of his possible rivals for the soviet leadership in 1985 lies in his commitment to radical reform of the soviet political system (by the summer of 1988 that meant systemic change for him) and to end the cold war. Reagan’s policies, which for other Soviet leaders were reasons to further increase Soviet military spending, were for Gorbachev simply further proof of the need to end the senseless arms race. he had to overcome resistance from the country’s vast military-industrial complex and from skeptical colleagues in the highest echelons of the party. with great political skill, sometimes taking a step back before taking two steps forward, he persuaded or cajoled the politburo into accepting fundamental changes to the political system and foreign and defense policy, despite the fact that most members of the that superior policy-making body harbored serious doubts about what they were signing up for.
then you have chosen an intellectual history of robert english. please tell us about russia and the idea of the west.
This book is, in a sense, the odd one out of the five. it is more of a specialized job. it is well written, but very detailed in its description of the gradual emergence of new ideas in small-circulation Soviet books and magazines long before the perestroika years (1985-1991). These ideas were strengthened and radicalized after the arrival of Gorbachev in the Kremlin.
The other books on my list have much to offer specialists, but are consciously aimed at a broader audience. Robert English’s account of how a minority of intellectuals within the Communist Party were developing radically new ideas may have too many unfamiliar names and concepts to appeal to many general readers. But many writers on the cold war have little understanding of what he persuasively argues for, particularly those who think it ended with a combination of ronald reagan’s military preparedness and his belligerent rhetoric, such as describing the soviet union as a ‘evil empire’, or that they imagine there was cause and effect between his speech at the brandenburg gate in berlin (‘mr gorbachev, tear down this wall!’) and the fall of the berlin wall.
we must understand that there were different lines of thought within the soviet communist party and that new ideas emerged long before reagan entered the white house, but, as the english makes clear, it was only with the succession of gorbachev in the leadership of the party that (to quote the title of its penultimate chapter), ‘new thinking comes to power’. There was influence from the West during the post-Stalin decades, but within the Communist Party it came from Western culture, contacts between Soviet and Western intellectuals, and the attraction of a growing number of Soviet citizens to democracy combined with increased prosperity. they were least influenced by the strident anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Canadian political scientist Jacques Lévesque’s 1989 enigma is your next pick. tell us.
Levesque’s starting point is that there really is a puzzle to be solved: how is it possible that something Western leaders had long accepted was non-negotiable for their Soviet counterparts: the continued existence of a bloc in Eastern Europe? this one whose leaders preserved the communist party’s monopoly on power and loyally supported Soviet foreign policy—could it be dissolved in the space of a year in the late 1980s? lévesque conducted many interviews with leading political players in the soviet union and eastern europe in the first half of the 1990s, when his memories of recent events were still fresh. His book was first published in French in 1995 and in English translation in 1997.
See Also: Best Machining Books [ CNC or Manual ] – CNCCookbook: Be A Better CNC’er
although gorbachev’s strong preference was for a social democratization of the communist parties in eastern europe, which was the direction in which he was trying to take his own party, he paid less attention to the sovietized part of the european continent than what made it to western europe. he would much rather talk to western leaders than to “comrades” from central and eastern europe. his position was, however, that the governments and peoples of eastern europe had to settle their relations, peacefully, on their own. those eastern european communist leaders who were willing to use force to quell their internal opposition, if only they could get soviet approval for repression, not only did they not get it, but they got news from moscow strongly discouraging them from resorting by force.
Gorbachev, in a speech to the UN in December 1988, said that the people of each country had the right to decide for themselves what kind of system they wanted to live in, and characterized the use of force in international relations as obsolete in the nuclear age. in 1989 he stayed true to those principles. The surprisingly calm response of Gorbachev and his leading foreign policy team to seeing the abandonment of communist rule must also be understood, as Lévesque observes, in the context of its social democratization. An important reason why the political transformation of Eastern Europe, which would have seemed like the end of the world to his predecessors, was not seen in such apocalyptic terms by Gorbachev and his closest associates was because, as Levesque rightly points out, the idea of the socialism had become for them ‘increasingly open, elastic and eclectic’.
Why did the collapse of communism take the world by surprise?
part of the answer is that ever since europe was partitioned at the end of world war ii, the united states and its allies had considered that the soviet union would not allow defection from their camp, and that for the west to try to prevent them from taking To crack down on independence movements in a client state would be to risk catastrophic nuclear war. thus, western countries condemned the soviet invasion of hungary in 1956, of czechoslovakia in 1968 and the martial law imposed on poland in 1981 (for a long time it urged the leadership of the polish party for moscow). however, they took no concrete steps to try to “roll back communism” in eastern europe, despite rhetoric about doing so that surfaced from time to time in the united states.
A minority view among Western leaders was that engagement with Soviet and Eastern European countries at all levels would ultimately promote internal change there. Willy Brandt in West Germany was the most notable exponent of such a strategy. but none of them expected it to happen as quickly as it did. Soviet non-intervention was the big surprise for the rest of the world. eastern european countries would have become non-communist and independent decades earlier had it not been for their assumption, correct until gorbachev entered the kremlin, that this would not be tolerated by moscow and that they would be making the situation worse.
Another part of the answer is a lack of understanding by Western leaders and the public that behind the monolithic facade of most of the ruling communist parties lurks an enormous diversity of opinion. Certainly, that was true for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Since he knew very well how the “Prague Spring” came about, which grew out of a reform movement within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he was open to the idea that something similar could happen within the CPSU. Others, including some who understood the process of change within the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, were skeptical that anything remotely similar could happen in the Soviet Union. they assumed, and there was some basis for such an assumption, that the Czech and Russian political cultures were very different.
an eyewitness account of the final chapters of the cold war is his final choice. please tell me about reagan and gorbachev about jack matlock.
jack matlock’s book, like lévesque’s, is about the end of the cold war, but it is quite different in that it is overwhelmingly concerned with relations between the united states and the soviet union. It differs in another respect from the other four books I have discussed in that it is written by an insider: a participant observer in the policy process. Reagan and Gorbachev is one of three valuable books Matlock has written since he retired from government service. now 90 years old, he was a career diplomat who played a significant and very constructive role in the process by which the cold war was ended. In 1983 he succeeded Richard Pipes as the top Soviet specialist on Reagan’s National Security Council.
His political preferences were very different from those of his predecessor. Pipes believed that nothing good could come of Reagan talking to Soviet leaders and was highly skeptical of the value of compromise. Matlock, on the other hand, believed that it was necessary to participate and fully supported Reagan’s desire to meet his Soviet counterparts. From Washington, Matlock moved to Moscow, serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991. He was a rare example of a Reagan Administration foreign policy appointee who retained his position after George H.W. bush made it to the white house.
matlock’s book is based on a great deal of first-hand knowledge, on the careful records he kept at the time, and on the research he has conducted since leaving government service. Although aware of Ronald Reagan’s intellectual shortcomings and blind spots, Matlock has a very positive view of him and the role he played in ending the cold war. he deplores, as does george shultz, the fact that the bush administration has taken so long to pick up where reagan left off, thereby losing momentum in the ussr-ussr relationship and weakening gorbachev’s position. Matlock recognizes the indispensability of Gorbachev for the cold war to end so peacefully and in such a short time.
Margaret Thatcher sought his advice to help her navigate the triangular relationship with the Soviets and the Americans that led to the end of the Cold War. What did her involvement teach you about the role of experience in statecraft?
margaret thatcher had many flaws. She tried to do too much for herself, bullied her ministers, particularly Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, and became overconfident that she was always right. but her role in the end of the cold war was greater than has been recognized and greater than the disparity between British military power and that of the American and Soviet superpowers would lead a “realist” to expect. p>
one of thatcher’s strengths was doing his homework. he held many seminars on different aspects of politics to which he invited outside experts. she tried very hard to be well informed. I took an active part in three of these seminars: two at the Prime Minister’s official country residence, Checkers (in 1983 and 1987), and the other in a much more informal discussion at 10 Downing Street in December 1984, the night before mikhail gorbachev arrived for his first visit to britain, three months before he became soviet leader. I had been invited to brief him specifically on Gorbachev, whom I had first brought to his attention in an article I wrote for the seminar on September 8, 1983. The most important of these seminars was the one in 1983. As government documents clearly show now declassified, led to a change in British foreign policy, to what the documents describe as “a new policy” of engagement with communist europe (both the ussr and eastern europe).
“margaret thatcher had many flaws. . . but his role in the end of the cold war was greater than has been recognized ”
Until then, the prime minister had been skeptical about the idea that anything good could come from engaging with the “evil empire”. His views on this issue had remained close to Reagan’s. The British Foreign Office (our equivalent of the State Department) was worried that the Cold War was getting dangerously colder. They were keen to improve East-West relations, but Thatcher was deeply suspicious of the Foreign Office as an institution, believing that they were too willing to compromise. the fact that academic experts at the 1983 seminar were even more in favor of engagement with the soviet union and eastern europe—at all levels, we urge, from dissidents to general secretaries—helped tip the prime minister behind of a policy that the foreign ministry had so far failed to get it to adopt.
thatcher prepared extraordinarily thoroughly for each meeting with gorbachev who, for his part, was very impressed by how closely he had been following soviet developments. they argued vigorously, but with mutual respect, which developed into a surprising friendship. The fact that she was Reagan’s favorite foreign leader (he referred to her as a “soul mate”) made her all the more important in Gorbachev’s eyes, as she wielded real influence with Reagan personally and in his administration. /p>
the prime minister’s official foreign policy adviser at 10 downing street, sir percy cradock, was concerned that despite the ‘iron lady’ image, gorbachev had become ‘something of an icon ” for her and that “it acted as a conduit for gorbachev”. to reagan, selling him in washington as a man to do business with, and acting as an agent of influence in both directions’. cradock disapproved of that, but I take the opposite view. In contrast to much of his diplomacy in Western Europe and his hostility to German unification, he played a valuable and constructive role in the changing relationship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
it’s to thatcher’s credit that she worked so hard to be well informed. She was able to assimilate knowledge to a much greater extent than Reagan, although he, too, was assiduously preparing for the summits. Gorbachev gradually came to respect Reagan and shared a desire (not endorsed by Thatcher) to rid the world entirely of nuclear weapons, but he, too, found the president obtuse. Thatcher, by contrast, with her vigor in the debate and the relevant facts at her fingertips, kept the Soviet leader on his toes. not only reagan, but also gorbachev at times, he was influenced by her.
As the coronavirus pandemic reaches its peak, after decades during which authoritarianism seemed to be on the rise, his words in the myth of the strong leader seem so prescient that I must quote them: “when shortcuts are taken because a leader is sure he knows best, problems arise, and they can be on a disastrous scale.” Describe the myth of the strong leader and its relevance to the 2020s.
My academic interests have always been much broader than Soviet, Russian, and Communist politics and have included other countries and other topics. A recurring theme of my research and writing has been political leadership. the first really substantial article I published in an academic journal (in the 1960s) was on the powers and leadership styles of British prime ministers. the book you mention, the myth of the strong leader, deals with political leadership worldwide, focusing mainly on the 20th and 21st centuries. I stress the danger of heads of government concentrating too much power in their hands and believing that they alone have the right to make all important decisions. while that especially applies to authoritarian regimes, where more collective leadership is often a lesser evil than personal dictatorship, it also applies to democracies. dangerously stupid risks are taken when a president or prime minister surrounds himself with people who are afraid to disagree with him or her, and when groupthink takes the place of uninhibited discussion in which neither senior colleagues nor advisers experts are afraid to air contrary views. of the top leader.
Leaders who suffer from the illusion that they always know better and that their intuition is worth more than the professional knowledge or political savvy of little mortals are especially dangerous during a pandemic. Britain has not done well during the coronavirus health crisis. There are many reasons for this, but one is that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has never shared Margaret Thatcher’s concern with mastering policy details and was all too ready to believe his own rosy rhetoric.
but johnson looks less bad compared to a president of the united states who is manifestly out of his depth in that role, but he doesn’t realize it. Confronted with fundamental global problems that cannot be solved by building walls or populist invective—the coronavirus and, more importantly, climate change—an America First policy is as dangerous for America as it is. It is for other countries. it also greatly damages the reputation of the united states in the rest of the world. Even as recently as 2017, in only two of the 37 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center, Donald Trump was rated ahead of his much more esteemed predecessor, Barack Obama. (The two exceptions were Russia and Israel).
As the spread of the coronavirus has been especially rapid and severe in the United States, compared to many Asian and European countries that have adopted more stringent, consistent, and rational policies since its inception, Trump’s reputation has plummeted further. . he is, I am sorry to say, a prime example of the “myth of the strong leader”: a leader who likes to appear tough, enjoying the power of following his own whims, regardless of the evidence. this appeals to a segment of the population that admires that kind of “strength” in a leader, although there are other, and much more desirable, qualities that we wish a head of government possessed, including integrity, intelligence, empathy, collegiality, diligence and (if we are lucky) vision. Presenting oneself, with grandstanding and bravado, as “strong” may be of some use to a president who is perpetually running for re-election, but it is no way to run a great country.
See Also: How Many Harry Potter Books Are There? 2022 Must-Read Guide