The Age of Anxiety
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
Writers & Writing The Age of Anxiety By Robert V. Daniels The Cold War is becoming a dim memory for most of us. It was declared over in December 1989 by Presidents Mikhail S. Gorbachev and...
...If he really wanted to keep up good relations with the West, he persistently took steps out of fear or nationalism—especially clamping his grip on Eastern Europe—that made superpower collaboration impossible...
...He takes up in living detail five crucial “moments” in the history of the Cold War, “a history of lost opportunities,” to discover how the respective Soviet and American leaders reacted to each other and what chances they may have missed to avert or shorten this long tale of hostility on the brink of mutual destruction...
...Leffler’s work is an exciting recreation of all the tensions, fears and uncertainties that both superpowers suffered from in the Cold War years...
...Not to be underrated through all this were the political constraints on the respective leaders from the outside and the inside...
...The SovietGerman pact of 1939 and the enforced Soviet flip-flop of June 1941 are just a couple of the clearest examples of this behavior...
...the Americans could not fathom the Soviet perception of threat,” says Leffler when he comes to the Afghan crisis...
...From the professional standpoint, he marshals all the available literature in English, including American archive material and translations from the Soviet archives (he confesses his own limitations in the Russian language), backed by copious Notes and a careful Bibliography...
...In 1979 it was the United States’ turn to be embarrassed by challengers ranging from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Islamists in Iran, and for the Soviet Union to be tempted by opportunity in the newly independent Portuguese colonies in Africa...
...But more about that later...
...That kind of evenhandedness is unusual in works of this genre, and makes for an especially intriguing tale...
...Consistent with Leffler’s underlying philosophy, the decisive element was the leadership of Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan...
...Certainly while it was going on (and strikingly in its early phases), the Cold War was viewed by many of its protagonists as an epochal contest of beliefs, and there were multitudes of pro-Soviet Communists in the West who felt that way...
...He is an authority on U.S...
...Thus, “Leonid Brezhnev killed détente...
...But his remark was immediately seized upon by American commentators as an ideological imperative for a Soviet assault on the West...
...Leffler is impatient with grand theories of international competition and balance of power, preferring to concentrate on the leaders of the two principal states and how they arrived at the decisions that governed the world during their battle of wits...
...On the inside there were the pressures of domestic politics, even within the supposedly monolithic Soviet regime with its bureaucratic factions and interest groups...
...Was it all a matter of a Communist drive for world domination...
...LEFFLER’S STORY of Cold War suggests the old-fashioned motives of power politics, despite his (or perhaps his publisher’s) resounding title so redolent of religious war...
...There could be no real détente or peace so long as ideological presuppositions shaped the two sides’ perception of threat and opportunity,” says Leffler...
...Or “a struggle for the very soul of mankind,” as the elder Bush has described it...
...Now there is talk of a new one, as Russian President Vladimir V Putin speaks out with undiplomatic assertiveness and neoconservatives in Bush the Younger’s entourage vigorously apply the Cold War analogy to America’s conflict with extremists in the Muslim world...
...The Soviet archives, rich as they are in detail, do not tell us much about Moscow’s motives that was not known or surmised beforehand (other than the close correspondence of the leaders’ private remarks with their public pronouncements), but they do underscore the nationalist sensitivity, fear and defensiveness that constantly drove Soviet behavior (impulses that have resurfaced in Putin’s Russia...
...Winston Churchill, once again prime minister of Great Britain, was ready to respond but détente at this early juncture was quickly derailed by the antiSoviet uprising in East Berlin in June 1953, followed by the purge of Beria and the “soft on capitalism” ploy used by Soviet Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev to sideline Malenkov (ironic in the light of Khrushchev’s own subsequent ventures in détente...
...Leffler keeps stressing the ideology of the respective leaders, but in truth ideology was less a driving force for either side than a lens magnifying the perceived menace of the other in mirror-image fashion...
...More likely, the end of the Cold War is what opened the door for that bloodless internal upheaval...
...It addresses all the diverse pressures and temptations that beset the American and Soviet leaders...
...Bush, at their seasick summit aboard an American cruiser in the harbor of Valletta, Malta...
...Both leaders had to overcome a legacy of ideological suspicion and disgruntled colleagues, along with the difficult unfinished business of arms control...
...But it was not entirely smooth sailing...
...The ideological factor in Soviet policy has been widely and deeply misunderstood by American pundits and policymakers...
...How was nuclear war averted...
...By then the falling dominoes of Communist rule in Eastern Europe had reached to the Berlin Wall, having been fatally undermined by Gorbachev’s refusal to save them with military force...
...His major previous work, A Preponderance of Power (1992), focuses on the Truman Administration’s confrontation with the Soviets...
...Each episode is separately investigated in the sections that comprise the book: (i) The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-48: Stalin and Truman...
...Who started it...
...Next came Afghanistan, a neutral state unsettled by a fanatical new Communist leader, and Soviet intervention to depose him after what we now know to have been an agonizing debate in the Kremlin...
...But they were out of sync with the evolving reality of the Soviet system under Stalin...
...Leffler’s Chapter on the period following the Cuban missile crisis, the “retreat from Armageddon,” is his most complex investigation...
...Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union never had any real allies, only subjects and clients...
...Leffler, the Edward R. Stettinius Professor of Modern American History at the University of Virginia, is well qualified to address these questions...
...It is no accident that only Republican presidents could dare to pursue détente in the early ’70s, and to end the Cold War in the ’80s...
...Crowing about the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, Stalin invoked the doctrine of inevitable imperialist war to describe the one just concluded and to anticipate a future war among the capitalist powers...
...On the American front, politics were riven by unresolved partisan bitterness from the New Deal era, and the quick transfer of the national demonology from the Nazis to the Communists in a new Red Scare...
...without any stylistic pretentiousness, he probes deeply into the human complexities of all five of his episodes...
...During the brief leadership of Malenkov and Minister of Internal Affairs Lavrenti P. Beria the Soviets really wanted to ease tensions with the West, even to the extent of giving up East Germany...
...Gorbachev was able to persuade himself that the West was no threat to a tamer Soviet Union and that heavy-handed Soviet control of the East European security belt could be relinquished (a confidence that Putin later felt had been betrayed in the 1990s...
...If there was any symmetry, it lay more in the anxious self-righteousness that enveloped each of the major players...
...Western psychological projections from the traumas of 1940 and ’41 at the hands of Hitler and Imperial Japan would be a better explanation of this perception...
...Still, the restraint testified to the superpowers’ ultimate reluctance to let the Cold War turn into a hot war...
...v) The End of the Cold War, 1985-90: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush...
...Under Stalin, Marxist-Leninist ideology was always subject to reinterpretation to make it justify actions after the fact, rather than determine them a priori...
...iv) The Erosion of Détente, 1975-80: Brezhnev and Carter...
...quite the contrary...
...The End Of The Cold Ar collapse of the Soviet Union, a popular but facile explanation...
...Meanwhile the Eisenhower Administration wavered between exploiting Soviet weakness and minimizing the cost of foreign adventures...
...responses to Soviet Communism going back to the Russian Revolution...
...For ordinary readers, he digs in wherever the record takes him...
...In retrospect, Communist ideology looks more like another system of “false consciousness”—exactly what Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels said of freemarket ideology under capitalism...
...Robert V Daniels, a frequent Nl contributor, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and the author, most recently, of The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia...
...The Soviets could not fathom American fears...
...Josef V Stalin was an absolute dictator who, driven by his paranoid obsessions, already had the blood of millions of purge victims on his hands...
...If Stalin truly had an ideology of expansion, it was not Marxist but Pan-Slavist...
...What seemed to be a solid Soviet alliance with Communist China proved to be much more ephemeral than American Cold Warriors were prone to recognize at the time...
...Was the Cold War, then, a true contest to win ideological hegemony over mankind or only a trap that the superpowers fell into for more mundane reasons of material interest, egoism and security...
...In For the Soul of Mankind he examines the Cold War from start to finish giving equal weight to the Soviet and American sides...
...But the lessons of the original encounter are still hard to draw with any degree of consensus, despite the plethora of Soviet archive material that became available after the collapse of the regime...
...military spending drove the Soviet Union to the wall does not withstand close scrutiny...
...The conventional notion that U.S...
...Apart from the nuclear parity that the Soviets achieved by the 1970s, it should be noted the Cold War was never a contest between equals who differed only in their motives, as is commonly thought...
...In the United States from the 1950s on, the Democrats were always worried about Republican charges that they had “lost China” and could not be trusted with the nation’s security...
...ii) The Chance for Peace, 1953-54: Malenkov and Eisenhower...
...Given the realities of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors, its ideological appeal was always shaky...
...Their avoidance of open conflict over any of the sore spots, from Cuba to Germany to Vietnam, was remarkable...
...What ended the Cold War...
...He could have spelled out this point further by citing the 1954 Geneva conference on Vietnam (boycotted by the United States) and the sterile Geneva meeting in July 1955 of the U.S., Soviet, British and French government chiefs (the initial “summit” conference...
...To add to the confusion, Americans have usually misunderstood the literal meaning of Marxism-Leninism as applied to international relations, quite apart from any guiding role it may or may not have had...
...So much for those bones of contention that had contributed most to the onset of the Cold War...
...The Cold War was not predetermined,” Leffler says, though everything he writes about its roots shows that it would have been very hard to sustain the World War II cooperation of the two superpowers under the new “structure of the international system...
...In no case throughout the history of the Cold War, Leffler recognizes, did the leaders on either side enjoy complete freedom of action, though Stalin certainly came closest...
...Notably novel is Leffler’s appraisal of the immediate postStalin period—“the chance for peace,” he terms it—when Prime Minister Georgi M. Malenkov and President Dwight D. Eisenhower were the primary players...
...On the outside they had to consider the interests of allied and client governments, particularly the persistent problem for both superpowers of what to do about Germany...
...Sometimes the richness of detail turns into tangential distraction, but this only underscores the tangled realities that leaders of great powers have to deal with every day...
...They not only transcended the fears and obsessions that had imprisoned their predecessors, but actually came to trust each other...
...Of course, Gorbachev never intended the dismantling of the Soviet Union itself, but his democratizing reforms undercut Moscow’s control over the non-Russian minorities (the Achilles heel of liberalization), and ultimately cost the Russian Empire half the population base of its power...
...iii) Retreat from Armageddon, 1962-65: Khrushchev, Kennedy and Johnson...
...Or American imperialism...
...Whether or not Stalin may have had any such adventure in mind (and no evidence has come to light that he did), it would not have been based on any reading of Marxist ideology...
...In his new book, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (Hill and Wang, 586 pp., $35.00), Melvyn P. Leffler says without qualification: “It was Gorbachev who ended the Cold War...
...Leffler does not go into the pursuit of détente by President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, but his chapter on the breakdown of détente under President Jimmy Carter and General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev shows that the combined effect of fear and temptation on the part of each superpower could not be fully surmounted...
...It was declared over in December 1989 by Presidents Mikhail S. Gorbachev and George H.W...
...Karl Marx would never have stood in the way of SovietAmerican cooperation had Stalin been inclined to take that course...
...They have accorded Communist ideology far too much credence, both in the firmness of its meaning and in its capacity to determine Soviet behavior...
...There was also a lower limit to containing Cold War antagonisms, however...
...Besides, they were to one degree or another confined by their respective ideologies and experiences...
...Western worries to the contrary notwithstanding, the Soviet side was always inferior in power, resources and the scope of its alliances, if not in the number of boots on the ground...
...Time after time, much as the leaders of the moment may have wanted to ameliorate Cold War hostility, they had to work amid the realities of the power relationships between them...
...Why did it go on so long...
...But Brezhnev made the decision, probably the last he was mentally capable of before his death in 1982...
...To Leffler’s credit, For the Soul of Mankind is simultaneously an important scholarly contribution and a fascinating popular read...
...United States reaction to Stalin’s “election” speech of February 1946 is a case in point...
...Granted the Damocles Sword of possible nuclear catastrophe was an inhibiting factor, as were the leadership crises on both sides (the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, and the palace coup dumping Khrushchev in October 1964...
Vol. 90 • September 2007 • No. 5
