Back in 1962 Irish people were far more devoutly religious than they are today. In October of that year the confessionals in Catholic churches were overwhelmed with sinners seeking repentance. But this manifestation of piety stemmed not from the sermons of the blood-curdling preachers who abounded in those days. Its origins were in the atheistic citadel of the Moscow Kremlin.
The world was undergoing the Cold War’s most dramatic crisis. The Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, close enough to threaten devastation in the United States. A dramatic standoff between president John F Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev grabbed the world’s attention. The possibility of mutual annihilation loomed large or, in the more religious terms of the day, “The End of the World was Nigh”. I was just out of my teens at the time but I remember the fear clearly.
In The World of the Cold War, Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, recounts the crisis and the Cold War in general vividly. He has a unique perspective on the issue. Born and raised in Moscow, he has spent three decades of his life in the USSR and three decades in the West.
The Cold War may have ended more than 30 years ago but Zubok shows it is strongly echoed in today’s turbulent world. One striking instance is contained in the part dealing with the Cuban crisis.
In this part of the world we are inclined to concentrate on Europe’s Cold War ... But in the bloody stalemate in Korea, the allied defeat in Vietnam and a latter-day ‘Scramble for Africa’ the Cold War turned hot
Khrushchev, speaking to an Indian diplomat afterwards, noted that: “History tells us that in order to stop a conflict, one should begin not by exploring the reasons why it happened, but by pursuing a ceasefire.” That is precisely the opposite to the stance taken by Vladimir Putin on Ukraine.
Zubok initially deals with the question of how the Cold War began. How did the heroic wartime Soviet allies, led by “Uncle Joe”, become the West’s peacetime enemies? Zubok opts for a more concrete reason than a clash of ideologies: the struggle for Europe.
In 1815 the armies of Tsar Alexander occupied Paris but, satisfied with their victory, withdrew and went home. Stalin, recipient of a bejewelled sword from Churchill for his wartime leadership, did not withdraw. He kept his armies in situ, occupied East Berlin, East Germany as well as eastern and central Europe. Churchill’s adulation turned to nightmare. What if he moved further west? What if his forces glared across the channel at England?
In this part of the world we are inclined to concentrate on Europe’s Cold War. It was, after all, in Berlin and Vienna and Budapest and other European cities where the two sides were in closest contact. But in the bloody stalemate in Korea, the allied defeat in Vietnam and a latter-day “Scramble for Africa” the Cold War turned hot. It was hot too in Latin America where the US-backed right-wing general Augusto Pinochet overthrew the moderate socialist and democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
In the US itself and the USSR as well as almost everywhere else, fears of nuclear catastrophe abounded. They eased during the period of detente but it too was brought to an unwelcome conclusion.
And then it all came to an end. But when did this end take place? Some opt for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Malta summit of 1989 when George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War to be over. Others, including Bush in a U-turn on his Malta declaration, date it from the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
I lived through the latter period as this paper’s Moscow Correspondent and later as an observer for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in all the regions of the former USSR. I have met and spoken with leaders such as Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin as well as insiders including the consummate Soviet diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin, who played a part in defusing the Cuban crisis, and Georgy Arbatov, whose advice on the USSR’s future was spurned by Gorbachev.
I witnessed the failed putsch by hardliners against Gorbachev in 1991 and thanks to Western-inspired economic “shock therapy” saw ordinary Russians turn against democracy as they became destitute and insiders gained immense wealth.
I agree, therefore, with Zubok’s conclusions that the Western alliance played its part in creating the Russia we face today and hope, perhaps vainly, that he is wrong when he sums it up eloquently in these words: “The triumphalism of the liberal order and the mislearned or unlearned lessons of the past appear self-evident 30 years after the end of the Cold War. At the same time it would be another folly, perhaps the ultimate one, to assume that at any time, in any country, a new generation of political leaders can avoid the mistakes of the past purely by being excellent students of history”.
