Lessons from the New History of the Cold War

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE NEW HISTORY OF THE COLD WARTHE END OF THE COLD WAR HAS BROUGHT A WEALTH OF MEMOIRS, materials, and revelations from the former Soviet empire that has opened a world that Westerners thought might be closed from view forever. As more of the 'missing pages' of cold war history are found, important questions have been resolved, startling secrets have been revealed, and vexing debates have been settled. What we have found has been on occasion amusing: Leonid Brezhnev's diaries, for example, show that he thought a great deal about his weight, the number of animals he hunted, his naps - and precious little about running a nuclear superpower. Too often, we have encountered the bizarre and tragic: the suspicions about steroid use by the hulking women of the East German Olympic teams turned out not only to be true, but sadly to be only a small part of a larger programme in which innocent children were routinely marinated in dangerous drugs simply for the greater glory of the German Democratic Republic. And at times stories have emerged that are terrifying in their implications: the previously censored pages of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs tell us that even as he was trying to extricare himself from the Cuban crisis in 1962, Fidel Castro was urging him to launch an all-out nuclear attack on American cities.We now have answers - to borrow a phrase from John Gaddis, 'we now know' - but what have we learned? To judge by the reaction of some, particularly in the academic community, we've learned little indeed. While these new revelations have led some to a final overcoming of denial about the dangerous and aggressive nature of Soviet communism, for others they have led to a revisionist retrenchment, in which East and West are somehow both at fault, and that in the end 'we all lost' the cold war. (Obviously, very few Russian communists would accept this relativistic formulation; much of their anger at the regime of Boris Yeltsin is grounded in a distinct feeling that the United States inflicted a humiliating defeat on their Soviet motherland.) Whatever one makes of them, the archival materials pouring out of eastern Europe tell stories of terrible brutality and paranoia behind the former Iron Curtain. Most people seem to have accepted them as establishing beyond doubt the terrible nature of Soviet communism. Those who have not are probably beyond convincing.But there is more to the new history of the cold war than a simple catalogue of Soviet crimes. As morally satisfying as it might be to traditional cold warriors, it is time to forgo debate with the remaining revisionists - who, like the last barricaded Japanese soldiers of World War II, refuse to accept the undeniable - and move on to consider what we might learn, and what lessons we might apply in the future, from the Soviet-American conflict of 1945-91. The end of the cold war does not mean the end of 'cold wars': where conflicting ideologies make confrontation inevitable and nuclear weapons make global war unthinkable, a new cold war can emerge. An obvious possibility is with the People's Republic of China, but there are many other states whose beliefs, combined with the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, could present the West with the need to 'fight' yet another cold war in the near future. It is, therefore, imperative for policy-makers and academic specialists alike to pause at this point in history and to reflect on the origins of the most dangerous struggle in human history and how the West eventually achieved victory in it.LESSONS OF THE COLD WARThree propositions about fighting and prevailing in a 'cold war' emerge from the Soviet-American experience. First, revelations about social and political life, within the Soviet bloc, taken in light of its eventual collapse, suggest that these closed regimes were not only more odious than we knew, but less stable than we assumed. The West, when faced with such opponents, should not miss opportunities to exploit a clear internal weakness: the relationship between the state and society. …