Not Corrupt Enough

‘The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.’ The subtitle of Sergey Radchenko’s book makes it sound like an aspirant bestseller from the height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only from the American side. A ‘Russian perspective’ is quite different from a pro-Russian bias, which neither book has. It means showing how things look from the other side, and thus avoiding the confusions that arise from misunderstanding.

Zubok and Radchenko are both Russian-born scholars who have been based in the West since the 1990s and are just as at home with the Western arguments and sources as they are with the Russian. But they are of different generations and have different backgrounds. Zubok, now a professor of international history at the LSE, is a product of perestroika whose personal and political account of the Gorbachev period, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, was a hit a few years ago. Born in 1958 into a family from the Moscow intellectual elite, he began working at a famous Soviet think tank, the Institute of the USA and Canada, just at the time when Soviet ‘Americanists’ began talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad at the LSE, then returned to the US as a professor at Johns Hopkins in 2021. Of the two, Zubok, always sensible, has the better feel for political and foreign policy debates in the US, as well as understanding their Soviet counterparts, while Radchenko, lively and engaging but sometimes a bit off the wall, draws on exhaustive research in Russian archives and is particularly good on the ways in which the presence of China affected relations between the superpowers.

The Cold War dominated world politics for most of the second half of the 20th century. In American understanding, it was an ideological confrontation between freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other – a ‘war’, which implied that ultimately there would be a winner, but a ‘cold’ one fought by diplomatic and propaganda means rather than with military force. The Soviets, by contrast, saw their relations with the US as a conflict or competition between capitalist imperialism and communism. They did not describe the conflict as a ‘war’ (as Zubok notes, ‘cold war’ was not a term in Soviet academic or political discourse, being used only in quotation marks when citing the West) and were generally more preoccupied with the goal of winning the US’s respect than of any outright victory. This was partly because, despite being one of the two superpowers capable of destroying the other with nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was self-evidently weaker than the US in economic, diplomatic, reputational and (for most of the period) military terms. That inequality, and Soviet resentment of it, is at the heart of the stories Zubok and Radchenko tell.

Looking back wistfully to the days of the Grand Alliance, when the Big Three led the Allied wartime effort and jointly made plans for the postwar world at Yalta in February 1945, Stalin and his successors never quite forgot that there was an alternative model to the Cold War. But that idea had much less traction in the US, where ‘Yalta’ quickly became a dirty word, and postwar alarms that the Soviets were out to conquer the world connected seamlessly with earlier ‘Red Scares’ about the menace of international communism dating back to the Russian Revolution.

The Grand Alliance broke down almost immediately after the end of the Second World War. Much ink has been spilled on the question of who was to blame (not a major preoccupation of either author, though Zubok leans slightly to the Americans, Radchenko slightly to Stalin), but in reality it would have required some very fancy diplomatic footwork to avoid such an outcome. Europe was in ruins, with the Soviet army occupying its Eastern half, up to and including Berlin, and Allied (American and British) forces under Eisenhower’s command occupying or controlling the West. Perhaps, had the US decided to withdraw quickly from Europe, as it had done after the First World War, a ‘spheres of influence’ deal between great powers, on the lines informally agreed by Churchill and Stalin at Moscow in 1944, might have worked. But an impoverished Britain was no longer in any shape to play the great power in Europe, and the US, fired up with liberal internationalism, was congenitally opposed to the cynical spheres of influence approach.

The biggest issues in the first years of the Cold War were Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and the atomic bomb. In the American view, including that of the ethnic groups lobbying on behalf of a free Latvia, Ukraine, Poland and so on, Moscow’s insistence on making the whole region a Soviet sphere of influence was only the first step in a campaign to subjugate all of Europe. From the Soviet standpoint, with the experience of the First and Second World Wars vividly in mind, a Soviet-friendly Eastern Europe was a sine qua non as a buffer against possible future attack from the West. As for the bomb, the Soviets saw its sole possession by the US as an intolerable threat, while the Americans viewed Soviet efforts to catch up and acquire the bomb themselves (as they did in 1949) in similar terms.

Stalin’s Marxist-Leninist analysis led him to the not unreasonable assumption that the capitalist powers, notably the US and Britain, were bound to quarrel about division of the spoils. Unfortunately for the Soviet Union’s hopes of diplomatic advantage, this never happened. Instead, the US, having bailed out Britain, came in with the Marshall Plan in 1948, making itself the linchpin of (Western) European recovery for the foreseeable future. As Churchill had said in 1946, an ‘iron curtain’ had descended on Europe, separating West from East along the lines of military control established in the closing stages of the war. US largesse extended only to the West, leaving the Soviet Union and its emerging satellites in Eastern Europe out in the cold. Nato was created in 1949 as a military alliance guaranteeing (Western) Europe’s security, with the Soviet Union as the unnamed threat; the US and Canada were members, along with West European states including, from 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany. Nato’s Eastern counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, came into existence shortly afterwards.

This sequence followed a fairly standard Cold War pattern in which the Soviets reacted to an American initiative rather than taking the initiative themselves. This was essentially because the Americans were stronger and richer. Drawing on Thucydides’ dictum that strong and rich states do what they want and poor states do what they must, Zubok concludes that ‘the Cold War emerged in the way it did largely because the Americans “did what they wanted” and Stalin refused to “do what he must”’ (except, of course, when he did do what he must and backed down in the face of Western resistance, for example on Iran in March 1946). Each side saw the other as an expansionist power opposed to the status quo, all the more dangerous for its sense of having God (history) on its side. ‘The Anglo-Americans are aggressive and are trying to impose their domination on the entire world,’ Stalin told Enver Hoxha in July 1947. The American view of the Soviet Union was a mirror image. Both governments stirred up alarm about the threat from the other. The hysterical anti-communism of the McCarthy years had its counterpart in postwar Soviet xenophobic campaigns (which included a prohibition on Soviet citizens marrying foreigners), though with the important difference that the US elites and public bought into anti-Sovietism much more enthusiastically than their Soviet counterparts bought into anti-Americanism.

The Cold War survived Stalin’s death in 1953, but under his successors it evolved. Khrushchev remained preoccupied, as Stalin had been, with the perennial grievance about inequality and lack of respect. His famous shoe-banging at the United Nations in 1960 accompanied an angry complaint that ‘the Americans don’t want a situation of equality. On our part, we are no longer willing to accept a situation of inequality.’ The ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West that he sought was a new term in the Soviet lexicon. Yet at the same time, Khrushchev engaged in many more interventions in the Third World than Stalin ever had. These foreign adventures, continuing from the late 1950s to the 1980s, were an anomaly, given that they unfailingly provoked the West, with which Stalin’s successors were generally trying to find a modus vivendi. Neither Zubok nor Radchenko gives much credence to the idea that Soviet activity in Asia and Africa was ideologically based, motivated by the aim of spreading communism throughout the world. Rather, they both see the Soviet Union as being in the grip of what Zubok calls a ‘revolutionary-imperial paradigm’ based on an inherent contradiction. To match the US as a superpower with a quasi-imperial reach, the Soviet Union had to acquire its own clients and exert influence in the Third World – which ‘meant, for instance, being involved in the Middle East for the sake of being involved’. But, as a regime with revolutionary (anti-imperial) origins, simultaneously engaged in competition with China for moral leadership in the communist world, it had to couch its activities in the language of communist anti-imperialism – which, as it happened, had considerable appeal in the Third World in an era of decolonisation and national liberation movements.

The first serious attempt to end the Cold War, going under the name of détente, involved a joint effort in the early 1970s to lower political tension by bringing the nuclear arms race under control and increasing contacts of all kinds between the two states. It was the product of an unlikely partnership between Richard Nixon (flanked by Henry Kissinger) and Leonid Brezhnev. There were ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ in the foreign policy establishments of both countries by this time, but in the Soviet Union détente also had support from non-doves such as Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB (who thought it would bring greater access to Western technology), and Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister (who hoped for a return of the wartime Grand Alliance, when the big Three – now reduced to a big Two – would hold the world’s future in their hands), as well as from Brezhnev, for whom it became a personal cause. Soviet ‘Americanists’ and their think tanks were solidly committed to détente, which was quite a contrast, though not one drawn by Zubok or Radchenko, with American ‘Sovietologists’, a fractious and, by the 1970s, politically diverse group with institutional roots in the Cold War 1950s.

Early in 1973, Brezhnev expressed his happiness that the ‘Cold War’ was finally over. This turned out to be premature, as Watergate and Vietnam were about to undo Nixon’s presidency, and with it détente. In any case, perhaps détente, as a steady state in superpower relations, was a long shot. For one thing, there was the tendency, particularly in Washington, ‘to view the international power struggle as a zero-sum game’, as Zubok puts it, ‘where each side could either win or be defeated’. The American political system, with its regular election campaigns and talk of the US ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ on specific issues, made this hard to finesse, especially for administrations on the defensive following the success of the Soviet space programme and widespread domestic criticism of America’s role in Vietnam. In 1961, in the wake of Sputnik, the American political scientist D.F. Fleming even published a book explaining ‘Why the West Lost the Cold War’ (the title of the penultimate chapter in his The Cold War and Its Origins). This argument was an outlier, but American public opinion would have found such a perceived outcome even harder to accept than the ‘loss’ of China at the end of the 1940s.

The collapse of détente in the second half of the 1970s owed much to a new phenomenon on the American and international political scene: the issue of human rights, which Zubok characterises as a ‘highly successful transnational ideology for the entire West’, but particularly useful for the US since it ‘helped the American political elites to overcome the Vietnam syndrome … and become once again a shining beacon of freedom and democracy for the whole world’. The Soviets had signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975 in the expectation of gaining increased international legitimacy and respect. But this backfired, since the accords included Western language on human rights that left the Soviet Union open to criticism for not, in practice, providing such rights to its citizens. In an odd turnaround, rights-oriented American liberals and European leftists – previously natural doves – now found themselves in a de facto alliance against détente with Cold War hawks. Jimmy Carter, taking office in 1977, had not run on an anti-détente platform, but was a supporter on principle of human rights and immediately engaged on the issue by writing to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Brezhnev’s outrage. The situation had become more fraught as the discussion focused on the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate.

The Soviets were bewildered and embarrassed by this turn of events. Their extreme sensitivity to anything that smacked of condescension meant that Carter’s preaching on human rights was greatly resented. As Radchenko puts it, Soviet leaders ‘felt that they were being forced into a humiliating position of delinquents, being presently taught by someone who (in all truth) was also not beyond reproach … Such a teacher-student relationship was fundamentally incompatible with the Soviet sense of self-importance.’ At least until perestroika, the Soviets found no way of recovering the moral high ground, either with the West as good international citizens (the aim of signing the Helsinki Accords) or with the Third World as anti-imperialists (given the competition from China and Cuba).

The revival of Cold War ideology in the US associated with Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ rhetoric in the 1980s came as a further nasty surprise for the Soviets. Margaret Thatcher had to explain to Reagan, having learned it from the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, that the Soviets were spooked when the US stationed Pershing II missiles in the UK and Germany: they were genuinely afraid of attack. The upside of this for Reagan was the realisation that the Soviets were just as afraid of the Americans as the Americans were afraid of them. It was the prelude to a series of sharp turns in the international situation that left the world agog and within a few years ended the Cold War.

The first of these turns was the arrival in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev – who looked to the old men of the Politburo like a solid standard-order Soviet politician, a younger and healthier version of themselves – was not selected as a reformer, and his emergence as such took everybody, inside and outside the Soviet Union, by surprise. As Zubok puts it, assuming that power corrupts, ‘it remains an enigma why it did not corrupt Gorbachev enough.’ In domestic affairs, he embarked on a radical programme of political reform, issuing a call for open discussion of the country’s problems that was enthusiastically answered (and arguably proved disastrous, leading to the Soviet Union’s collapse in December 1991). In international affairs, Gorbachev’s approach was equally remarkable. He offered more than just rapprochement and arms control, the old staples of détente: what he proposed, in Zubok’s summation, was ‘a radically idealistic joint project’ with the West for ‘a nuclear-free world and a “common European home”’. At Reykjavík in 1986, Reagan responded so warmly to Gorbachev’s proposal to get rid of nuclear weapons that both sets of advisers went into panic. Three years later, Gorbachev did the unthinkable and walked away from Eastern Europe, abandoning the premise of the Soviet need for a buffer that had led his predecessors to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. For Radchenko, this was finally a ‘moment of international glory’ for the Soviet Union. ‘Moscow briefly shone as a city on the hill, showing the way to a brave new world.’ Zubok, perhaps because his personal memory is longer, is more cautious: in his reading, this grand gesture made Gorbachev an international superstar and moral example – but it applied only to him personally, not his country.

The sacrifice of Eastern Europe, allowing for Germany’s unification and its membership of Nato without firm guarantees against an expansion of Nato eastwards (which at the time the Washington policy elite thought unwise in any case), left everyone open-mouthed. Radchenko sees this in terms of Gorbachev’s desire to offer international moral leadership, ‘showing a good example to the world by doing things others would deem naive, or even dangerous’. Gorbachev ‘knew he was losing clients’ in giving up Eastern Europe, ‘but he hoped that he was gaining the world.’ This was, of course, an abnegation of the Cold War, looking towards a future in which the international community would not be divided by superpower conflict. But it can also be seen as the latest, and most successful, of a long line of Soviet attempts to be recognised as America’s equal. When Gorbachev ‘put himself forward as the moral leader of a new Europe and hoped to obtain Washington’s endorsement of this vision’, Radchenko argues, he was continuing his predecessors’ efforts but with a new moral twist: together the two superpowers should lead the world to a better future, working in concert to address abuses and economic disparities – in short, sharing ‘a special, increased responsibility for the fate of the world’.

It didn’t work (surprise?). This wasn’t only because the Americans, as usual, were having ‘a hard time comprehending the new world, new values’ and still had ‘strong pretensions to be a world gendarme, aspirations to impose their opinion onto others, attempts to dictate’ (as Gorbachev commented to Canada’s prime minister, Brian Mulroney, late in 1989), or even (as he complained to Italy’s prime minister, Giulio Andreotti) that they were ‘trying to convince their public opinion that the US won the “Cold War”’. The problem was that, as Gorbachev was cheered by crowds in the West, at home things were spiralling downwards towards an outcome almost nobody had imagined a few years earlier. As Zubok puts it, ‘Gorbachev, who had sought to end the Cold War so that his country could be part of an undivided international community, sacrificed his power to achieve this objective. He ended up without a country or a job.’

While the end of the Cold War is variously dated (Reykjavík in October 1986, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Malta Summit a month later), it was indisputably over when the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991. Foreign policy old-timers in the US warned against crowing about Cold War victory, but of course the political temptation was too strong. ‘By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,’ George H.W. Bush said in his State of the Union address in January 1992. It was ‘the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives’.

It was a message that was hard to swallow in Moscow. Andrei Kozyrev, foreign minister of the new Russian Federation, told colleagues that Russia still had to be America’s ‘primary partner’: if not, ‘nothing will remain from [our] great power status.’ In a striking echo of Gorbachev, President Yeltsin wrote to President Bush early in 1992 expressing the hope that Russia and the US would become ‘special allies’ in the building of ‘a new world order based on common human values’. But what was in it for the United States? It had won the Cold War, after all. Bush’s rejection of Yeltsin’s overture was polite, but Barack Obama would later spell it out more crudely: with its superpower days behind it, Russia was not even a great power but a mere regional power that the United States did not have to take seriously.

That implausible Soviet/Russian aspiration ‘to run the world’, for the world’s good, in tandem with the US, is what Radchenko is alluding to in his title. The phrase comes from Kissinger, in the notes he made, for Nixon’s eyes only, on his conversations with Brezhnev in Moscow in 1973. In Kissinger’s summation, Brezhnev’s message was essentially: ‘Look, you will be our partners, you and we are going to run the world.’ ‘You and we’, not just ‘we’ – there’s quite a difference, which makes Radchenko’s title a bit of a cheat. Of course, the whole idea of a benevolent duopoly was fantasy as far as Kissinger and Nixon were concerned. From their standpoint, the Soviet Union was not an equal partner, and equality would in any case have been unacceptable. The US had to be stronger.

There are some postscripts to the Cold War story. Resentment at not being treated as an equal hasn’t gone away just because the Soviet Union is no more. Vladimir Putin took office in 2000 denouncing US ‘tutelage’ and double standards (‘we can do it, but you can’t’) no less, and probably even more, than Stalin and Khrushchev. He saw himself, Radchenko suggests, ‘as the leader of a great power, one that, although not nearly America’s equal by most measures, nevertheless had the means at its disposal to destroy the United States’. In announcing the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Putin let loose some barbs at the US: ‘Where does this insolent manner of speaking from the position of your own exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? Wherefrom comes that condescending, arrogant attitude towards our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?’ Radchenko calls this ‘raving’, and it certainly sounds a bit unhinged in his translation (which substitutes the pedantic and grandiose ‘wherefrom’ for a simple Russian construction with no such connotations). But it is the same complaint, phrased in very similar terms, which, on Radchenko’s own account, was made by all of Putin’s predecessors, from Stalin to Yeltsin.

Given the state of the world in 2025, there is also the question of whether we can be as confident that the Cold War has ended as Bush was in 1992. ‘Should this book have been called The First Cold War?’ Zubok asks in his conclusion. Perhaps, but if we are now looking at a Second Cold War, the main protagonists have changed. It’s not the Soviet Union that is now seeking superpower equality with the US but China. The best role Russia can hope for is the one China has vacated, that of the not-quite-invited guest, hovering restlessly at the edge of the charmed circle of superpower bipolarity. But perhaps that wouldn’t be such a new role for Russia – the same old yearning for equality and respect as in the First Cold War, only now experienced at least one level down in the hierarchy of powers, and all the bitterer for the demotion.