Ten years ago, a book on the Cold War would, in the words of the historian Vladislav Zubok, a record of “dangerous but ancient teresses”. Today, the United States has once again locked the rivalry with Russia And China, and sentences such as “sphere of influence” and “proxy war” in current use, it is in fact the holidays three decades from the high power confrontation that followed the 1989 autumn of the Berlin Wall which now seems to be the anomaly which needs an explanation.
The Cold WarMonumental and always very readable of Zubok history From the period of American-USR confrontation, explores how this conflict not only shaped the post-1945 world, but also parallels with the “New World Disorder” emerging today.
A large part of the ground – the Berlin flash points in Cuba in Vietnam – can be well covered. But interpretations – in particular how the Cold War started and how it ended – are still prosecuted by rival camps of experts. And, intelligently knitting the past with the present, Zubok's book brings a premonitory and fresh perspective.
Historian an emigrrated who teaches the London School of Economics, Zubok witnessed the Cold War on the Soviet side and distributes the book with personal anecdotes – as the moment when he was reported to the KGB by a teacher for a school presentation in the United States. Seeing the conflict on both sides is the strength of the book; Zubok pays attention to the unresolved flaws scholarships in the Cold War and their ideological implications these days.
Is the descent into the confrontation after the great alliance of the Second World War an avoidable result of American paranoia? Or Stalin, if he was left undisputed, would he have rolled a Soviet ideology throughout Europe? The answer can be relevant to the furious debate today on China.
Historians such as William Appleman Williams argued that the United States exaggerated the threat of communism, and Stalin asked for a balance in Europe, rather than domination. The opposing camp, led by John Lewis Gaddis and others, argued that Stalin's intentions were never a question of balance: his objective was rather “to dominate this continent as completely as Hitler had sought”, wrote Gaddis in his 2005 book Cold War: a new story.
Zubok Lands in the old camp, arguing that those who claim that America should act to save Europe from Stalin overestimated the threat it posed. The post-war USSR was weak and hungry, and Europe, despite the efforts of strong communist parties in France and Italy, was not interested in communism.
“I am sitting on those who claim that the Cold War was caused by the American decision to build and maintain a world liberal order, not by the Soviet Union's plans to spread communism in Europe,” he wrote.
In other words, it was Washington's Messianism, not that of Moscow, which turned the trend towards mutual paranoia. The United States – not unreasonably – considered that a world order based on the balance between the empires had failed on the continent and led to the Second World War. Washington wanted to replace a European system of balance of powers and spheres of influence with an effort to allow Europeans to freely choose their destiny, including Eastern Europe. Moscow saw this as a subversive effort to revise the Yalta Treaty from 1945 and grasp their hard -won area of influence. The Berlin blockade has put the conflict in the air and threw the Soviets as the villain.
Like some recent revisions in the history of the Cold War, notably Sergey Radchenko in his book To manage the worldZubok minimizes the role of ideology in the struggle between east and west, by focusing on the international power system of great power as a node of the conflict. “The spectrum of Mars, and not Marx, led the division of Europe to the east and the west”, as Zubok says. In other words, Russia has sought (and still seeks, most would say) a world order in which the interests of the great powers have been recognized and have taken priority on the aspirations of the less important nations.
This had been embodied by the 1945 Yalta conference, during which Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt divided Europe into zones, nourishing the coveted recognition of the Soviets of their equal status. “Stalin and his successors evaluated enormously” the order of Yalta “and considered it as the realization of the rocky substratum which made the Soviet Union a recognized world power,” writes Zubok.
“For the rest of the Cold War, each successive chief of the Kremlin would strive to reach this reference over and over again, each time against their main detractor, the United States.”
The thawing of the Cold War began with the trip of Richard Nixon in 1972 to China, where Zubok concentrated, counter-teethe but interesting, on the effect that it had on Brejnev, who feared to be overflowed in the east and launched a relaxation ultimately in the open to the President. As Zubok writes, Henry Kissinger, Nixon National Security Advisor, “used his opening in China to affect Soviet behavior, but he also managed Soviet fears and employed a great-channeau at the Kremlin for constructive negotiations.”
Zubok also shows how the obsession of Soviets for major cases, aimed at cementing their status, led to a visible objective: the Helsinki summit of 1975, which the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko considered as similar to the Congress of Vienna and a new “European concert”, a system of great power relations which defined a large part of the 19th century. Zubok shows how the emphasis put by the Helsinki final on human rights has become a new genius of American diplomacy.
“We know today that Brejnev's ambition to have a” Europe concert “turned against him, and his belief in a bilateral partnership with Washington has proven to be elusive,” writes Zubok. “The final act has indeed become the fundamental text of a new Europe, but not what the Soviets had hoped to see. Human rights, consecrated in the document, have become a writing of internationalist liberalism. ”
The global effect of Zubok's story is to realize how spontaneity and contingency that we once thought were leading human affairs during this period were hammered by bureaucrats of foreign policy in the saunas, hunting lodges and backs. Has the “power of the people” were assisted in Eastern Europe in 1989, in the end, the result of this American-Soviet affair?
The end of the Cold War is just as much a Rorschach test as the beginning, writes Zubok, inviting the rival camps of experts to see what they wanted. Western triumphalists argue that the resolution and pressure of the United States won an inevitable victory; Their opponents see Moscow as the main agent on his own fate.
“Historians can interrupt what came first, economic pressures and the Cold War that pushed (Mikhail) Gorbachev and his circle of reformers to dismantle the old Soviet system, or the idea of a revolution that led to the weakening of the Soviet Union,” writes Zubok. “My own point of view is the latter, but it is impossible to convince those who believe in the first.”
But one thing is “obvious”, he concludes: “The main engine of the multiple ends of the Cold War was at the Kremlin.”
The world of Cold War: 1945-1991 By Vladislav Zubok, Pelican £ 25, 544 pages
Charles Clover is the FT security and defense correspondent and a former Moscow office chief
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