Latest news with #Zubok
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Who started the Cold War?
Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the 'valiant Russians' who had fought alongside Britain and America had 'transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation'. So begins Vladislav Zubok's thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides's formulation – are now very contemporary questions. 'The world has become perilous again,' writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West: Diplomacy ceases to work; treaties are broken. International institutions, courts and norms cannot prevent conflicts. Technology and internet communication do not automatically promote reason and compromise, but often breed hatred, nationalism and violence. Historians tend to be wary of drawing direct parallels between the present and the past, and Zubok is too wise to arrive at any glib conclusions. The bulk of this concise, pacy book is a narrative history of the postwar world and the great superpower rivalry that defined it. Yet, as we face a new period of strategic realignments, it's inevitably to the dynamics of the Cold War we must look for a mirror of our times. There are many surprises – one being that Joseph Stalin and his entourage had been expecting their wartime alliance with London and Washington to be followed by a period of cooperation. 'It is necessary to stay within certain limits,' recalled the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. '[If you swallow too much] you could choke… We knew our limits.' Stalin, unlike his rival Trotsky, had never been a believer in world revolution and indeed shut down the Communist International during the war. Zubok argues that the Cold War was caused by 'the American decision to build and maintain a global liberal order, not by the Soviet Union's plans to spread communism in Europe'. Yet nearly four years of nuclear imbalance between Hiroshima and the first Soviet A-bomb test fuelled Stalin's paranoia. And a bloody hot war in Korea could very easily have escalated into a third world war had Douglas MacArthur been given his way and dropped nukes on Pyongyang. Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, revived international communism as a fifth column weapon against the capitalist world as the Cold War got into full swing. The great power rivalry became the wellspring for every post-colonial conflict, from Cuba to Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador and the rest. Zubok argues that the Cold War was caused by 'the American decision to build a global liberal order' But what is surprising is that, despite propagandists' eschatological framing of the conflict as a fight to the death between rival worlds, there were always pragmatists at the pinnacles of power in both Moscow and Washington. Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, vice president at the time, had heated but cordial man-to-man debates in an American show kitchen at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Even the arch-apparatchik Leonid Brezhnev became 'a sponsor and a crucial convert from hard line to détente' early in his career, writes Zubok. And the great Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was a surprising champion of jaw-jaw over war-war. Some of Zubok's assertions are puzzling. Rather than the USSR simply 'running out of steam', its collapse was 'triggered by Gorbachev's misguided economic reforms, political liberalisation and loss of control over the Soviet state and finances'. But that formulation suggests that it was Gorbachev's choices that crashed the ship of state – and raises the possibility that had he not embarked on his reform programme the fate of the USSR might have been different. But Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's economic reformer-in-chief, demonstrated in his classic 2007 study Collapse of an Empire that the implosion followed the iron laws of capitalism. The leaky bucket of the Soviet economy had been kept artificially full by high post-1973 oil prices but began to drain fatally after the Saudis collapsed prices a decade later. The USSR could not feed itself without buying US and Canadian grain for petrodollars. Gorbachev or no Gorbachev, the economy was doomed once the oil money dried up. Where Zubok gives Gorbachev credit is in the relative bloodlessness of the loss of the Soviet empire, a world-historical achievement that has long been ignored by modern Russians. Today, Gorbachev is reviled by his countrymen as a traitor and a fool who allowed himself to be taken in by American lies. Yet it is he who is the truly vital character on which any useful comparison between the first and (possibly) second Cold Wars hinges. The first Cold War was, as the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has argued, born of the 'Thucydides Trap', whereby war emerged from the fear that a new power could displace the dominant one. But Gorbachev envisioned a world where competition for influence and resources would be replaced by cooperation. Rivalry did not have to mean enmity. Zero sum can be replaced by win-win. Sadly, neither Vladimir Putin (who is merely cosplaying as a superpower leader) nor Xi Jinping (who actually is one) have shown anything like Gorbachev's collaborative wisdom. But we can only live in hope that The World of the Cold War is 'a record of dangerous, but ancient times', as Zubok puts it, rather than a warning for the future. Often seen as an existential battle between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism, the Cold War has long been misunderstood. Drawing on years of research, and informed by three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, Zubok paints a striking new portrait of a world on the brink.
Telegraph
13-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
America, to blame for the Cold War? Please
It is an opportune time to publish a history of the Cold War, dealing with global Russian influence and that country's relationship with the West. Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, is Russian and, having been born in 1958, saw the Cold War at close quarters. He muses on whether he should have called his book The First Cold War. Given Putin's conduct, he has a point, though whether in a second such conflict America would be Russia's enemy, its ally or a mere spectator remains, in the Trump era, unclear. The World of the Cold War is, in terms of research, immensely scholarly, and its sweep is considerable. At its heart are the tensions over the Soviet bloc, that great swath of Eastern Europe that Stalin's Soviet Union effectively annexed after 1945. Zubok reminds us, however, that the Cold War also manifested itself in proxy wars and other stand-offs around the world. There was Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, and tussles in Africa and South America. These conflicts are meticulously described and set in their particular context: Zubok has complete command of his narrative, based on a deep knowledge of his subject. He also deals extensively with China and the saga of its relations with America and the Soviets, especially the visit of Richard Nixon in 1972, and Mikhail Gorbachev's revealing comment as his own regime imploded in 1989 that he did not want a repeat of Tiananmen Square in its Red counterpart. Yet all history, never mind how factually accurate and comprehensive, must rely on the interpretation the historian places upon those facts. Zubok occasionally presents his readers with assertions that some might feel take interpretation to an extreme that is beyond interesting. For example, early on in the book, he says: 'I side with those who claim that the Cold War was caused by the American decision to build and maintain a global liberal order, not by the Soviet Union's plans to spread communism in Europe.' This is a highly questionable judgment, to put it mildly. The great summit meeting that shaped the post-war world, at Yalta in February 1945, had relatively little to do with the foundation of a global liberal order, and much to do with Stalin's determination to extend the Soviet empire – a determination that was realised in his ruthless colonisation of eastern Europe. The doctrine of Marxist revolution was not, after all, to be confined to the Soviet Union, but exported to the workers of the world. At Yalta, Roosevelt was fading – he was mere weeks from death – and caved to Stalin on the re-drawing of eastern Europe's boundaries. The Red Army had swarmed over those territories, and Stalin was determined not to give up the gains. If this book has a hero, it is Gorbachev, who four decades later saw the writing on the wall and realised that the Soviet empire, like all empires, was of finite duration. He sacrificed it, and his own position, to come to an accommodation with the inevitable. Throughout The World of the Cold War, Zubok is quick to highlight the mistakes the Americans made during the period, though the attempted foundation of a global liberal order should not be considered to be one of them. Vietnam was certainly an act of insanity, and many thought so without the benefit of hindsight; and some of the sabre-rattling with Cuba was ill-advised, though it's clear that Kennedy won the Cuban Missile Crisis, which contributed directly to the ousting of Khrushchev, who was erratic and frequently drunk. Zubok does refer to the distinct advantages of life in the West: freedom, democracy, choice – not merely choice between political parties at elections, but choice of where to travel, what to read and write and say, and of what to spend money on. But at times one does sense that he seeks to establish some sort of moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States. If that sense is mistaken, it's an easy mistake to make, given the assumptions behind some of what Zubok writes. For example: in dealing with that apparently crucial Cold War event – the 1984-85 miners' strike – he writes that 'Thatcher used force to close the unprofitable mines and ignored miners' strikes.' The phrase 'used force' may suggest to the unwary some sort of armed or military intervention, which never happened: history relates that the mines closed as a matter of course, not by force of arms. Nor did Mrs Thatcher ignore the strike, either then or in the case of an earlier dispute: it was precisely because it had taken such notice of the first strike that her administration stockpiled coal at power stations and caused it to be victorious in the second. One senses that Zubok is no admirer of capitalism, despite its inextricable link to freedom. Writing about the Yeltsin era, he argues that 'Russia… attracted primarily American seekers of quick profit, not serious investors.' There is no contradiction between being a serious investor and seeking a quick profit: quite the opposite. If you share such assumptions, this is the book for you. If you don't, grit your teeth.
