Do we remember the Cold War properly? The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, when the median-aged New Zealander today was 2 years old.
We may have been raised on stories of bomb drills, sabre rattling and missile crises, but most of us do not remember them first-hand. The wars we recall were warmer but less all-engulfing – more readily contained in either the Middle East or now Eastern Europe.
Yet, as the Cold War recedes into history, it is clear this 46-year period still structures so much of our everyday world and the thinking of our leaders. Vladimir Putin is the most obvious example of a leader scarred and shaped by it, but he is far from alone. It is hard not to see a Cold War nostalgia in the way Washington treats Beijing, or indeed to miss the references our own Foreign Affairs Minister – named after one of the original Cold Warriors – makes to the period.
The new book by Soviet scholar Vladislav Zubok is perfect as both a primer and an antidote. It’s just the right length (544 pages) to give you a brisk rundown of how the Cold War started, its leadership-driven cycles of détente and hostility, and how it ended, all without testing your patience too much.
Zubok writes with a kind of confident speed that assumes his readers are adults and happy to not get too bogged down in names and dates when they aren’t particularly relevant.
But even if you feel you know quite a bit about the Cold War already, the book is valuable, too, as a challenge to many of the legends that surround it. For example, many believe former US president Ronald Reagan spent so much on the military that the Soviet states collapsed trying to match him.
Zubok ably busts this myth, pointing out that US defence spending rose from 4.9% of GDP to only 5.8% across his two terms, and that the rising dollar Reagan produced may have actually done more to destabilise the USSR. Indeed, Zubok’s book continues a strong case he made in his longer treatise, Collapse, in 2021 that a large part of the peaceful end to the Cold War came down to the idealism of its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Zubok is himself Russian and started his career in the USSR before moving to the West. This, combined with all the archival access that was possible following the war, gives the book far more information on what was going on within Soviet politics than politics buffs may be used to.
He notes, for example, that most Russian people and leaders thought (and hoped) they would stay in an alliance with the Allies following World War II. He divines that Joseph Stalin’s actions in this crucial period were chiefly about him acting like an imperial tsar of old, creating a border region of buffer states that he could control rather than immediately moving to institute world communism.
This intimacy with the other side of the Cold War does not blind Zubok to the victims of Stalinism or the lack of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. After all, he was born into that world and tried to be an academic within it. Instead, it gives readers a far fuller picture, one where nuance generally wins out over grand narratives, where individual leaders and the choices they made have a huge role. This may frustrate some readers, as they finish the book with many simple ideas about the Cold War made complicated.
Yet myths are powerful things. Zubok posits in his conclusion that the US myth of Russia as an essentially evil state, one that was “beaten” at the end of the Cold War but remained inherently chauvinistic and dangerous, may have become self-fulfilling. If you treat a state that way is it that much of a surprise when they react in kind? He contrasts this with another myth that the Russians who did much to end the conflict peacefully tried to spread – that Russia and the West had jointly “won” the war against communism. If that myth had won out, would we be where we are today?
Zubok isn’t so presumptuous as to think that a slightly better understanding of history would necessarily alter global events, or that his history is the only one possible. He hedges somewhat, calling it simply an “interpretation” in the final pages and cautioning against didactic lessons from the past. There is no “perfect theory” that would suddenly make world leaders avoid all trouble in international relations, he notes, and the condition of leadership is generally one of stumbling around in the dark. On that cheery note, he wonders whether the book should have been called The First Cold War. Ouch!
The World of the Cold War 1945-1991, by Vladislav Zubok (Penguin, $65 hb), is out now.
