‘The World of the Cold War’ by Vladislav Zubok–book review
A section of the Berlin Wall, February 2023 © James Rodgers
IN HIS IMPRESSIVE NEW HISTORY of this ‘confrontation–the greatest that the world has seen so far’, Vladislav Zubok shows us a leader in the Kremlin who ‘assumed he could act like the Russian tsars had done in the past.’ It is an accusation that might be made of the current occupant of the seat of Russian power, though Zubok is writing here not of Vladimir Putin, but of the 20th century Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. ‘He wanted,’ Zubok tells us, ‘to have a territorial buffer of dependent states and statelets along the Soviet borders.’
In consequence, after the Second World War, which had ended with the Soviets as allies of the United States and United Kingdom, the countries around Russia suffered the cost of the dictator’s territorial ambition. Soon wartime allies were postwar foes. Europe was divided into zones where different ideologies dominated–backed by massive military might.
So it was for most of the rest of the century. Berlin, formerly the capital of Nazi Germany, became the strongest symbol of the standoff between capitalism and communism. The wall the Soviets built there was a physical symbol of a continent ill at ease, and fearing the return of the kind of wars that had stained its history.
Nor was the confrontation confined to Europe. Zubok reminds us how it spread to Asia–most bloodily in Korea and Vietnam–as Washington and Moscow sought to curb each other’s influence, with each at different times seeking to work with China to further their aims. These aims were not always well defined. The two sides–enemies as they were–tried to understand each other but often knew little. The Soviet leadership that came after Stalin, Zubok writes, ‘did not even realize how much fear they evoked in the US State Department and in American society.’ At the same time, while John Foster Dulles, then U.S. secretary of state, ‘kept citing Lenin as a warning to Americans that history was on the side of the Soviets, the Kremlin potentates were not confident about it at all.’
A memorial to U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam war. U.S. support for the government of South Vietnam was ‘a self-inflicted nightmare for Washington’, Washington D.C., July 2024. Photo © James Rodgers
Looming over the conflicts in which Washington and Moscow found themselves on different sides–not only in Asia, but in Africa and the Middle East–was the fear that the Cold War confrontation might lead to nuclear war.
This came closest over Cuba, in 1962, when, Zubok chillingly relates, ‘chances of accidental use of nuclear arms multiplied by the minute.’ The sense of catastrophe narrowly avoided is strengthened by Zubok’s accounts of those senior commanders in both the American and Soviet militaries who believed that one side might actually ‘win’ such a war. At a time when communication was so important to avoiding the apocalypse, it is remarkable to read–in our hectic media environment–that President John F. Kennedy was was able to ask ‘his friends in the media to give him a week to deliberate.’
Zubok’s earlier work, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, his magisterial account of the end of the USSR (which I reviewed for History Today), means he is on firm ground when he reaches that stage in this story. Zubok returns to that period to challenge the idea that U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who famously described the USSR as an ‘evil empire’, ‘outspent and bankrupted the Soviet Union’–an idea that Zubok calls a ‘myth’. Instead, Zubok argues, ‘the idea of a new revolution’ (in the shape of the perestroika ‘reconstruction’ reforms introduced by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev) ‘led to the weakening of the Soviet Union’.
This weakened Soviet Union might still have had the strength to crush opposition to communism in its satellite states when challenges to Moscow’s authority arose in the late 1980s. Yet Gorbachev decided not to send in the troops, as his predecessors had done against Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968. This was a different era, one in which the Soviet Union ‘would cut its military presence in Europe’, and where its leader proposed at the United Nations ‘a new world order where wars and any use of force must be outlawed.’
This of course is not the way that things turned out. Zubok writes that, by 1990, with the Berlin Wall no more, ‘many senior military and KGB officers viewed the past year as a geopolitical catastrophe’. One not-so-senior KGB officer, then stationed in Germany, shared their dismay. As president, he would use the same phrase in 2005–and then go on to show in Georgia in 2008, and in Ukraine from 2014 until the present day. Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin clearly does not share Gorbachev’s dream of a world where wars and use of force are no more.
Zubok has written a compelling and engaging account of this colossal confrontation, the aftershocks of which are still felt today, in Ukraine, of course, in Finland and Sweden’s membership of NATO, and in Europe’s debate about rearmament.
Zubok’s decision to divide the Cold War into eras named for Roman gods ties the World of the Cold War to human conflict throughout history. His modest and wise conclusion dismisses as folly the assumption that, ‘a new generation of political leaders can avoid the mistakes of the past purely by being excellent students of history.’ Reading The World of the Cold War will still help that new generation of leaders navigate their way through the storms that seem to lie ahead.
The World of The Cold War is published by Penguin.
The monument to The Conquerors of Space, Moscow, March 2019, © James Rodgers