Putting the Cold War on the Couch

That is, instead of pursuing anti-capitalist ends or even pro-communist alliances, Soviet leadership found itself propelled primarily by the pursuit of status and stature, from late Stalinism all the way through Mikhail Gorbachev’s final days.

To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, Sergey Radchenko, Cambridge University Press, 768 pp., $35, May 2024

It’s a bold reformulation of the entire Soviet standoff, and one that would be nearly unrecognizable to most of those who lived through the Cold War. But Radchenko, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University specializing in Sino-Soviet history, at least recognizes the stakes of such a reformulation.

He admits at the outset of To Run the World that his argument is a “radical new interpretation of the underlying motivations of Soviet foreign policy”—a massive, almost encyclopedic effort to slog through the sloganeering about Leninism and class warfare to get to what, at heart, motivated Soviet leadership through the apocalyptic heights and sudden denouement of the Cold War. Moscow believed “that the Soviet Union for one reason or another deserved its high perch in the global order,” Radchenko writes. “Being recognized by others as legitimately occupying this perch was a central preoccupation of Soviet foreign policy from Stalin to Gorbachev.”

There’s certainly merit to the argument, as Radchenko unflinchingly details throughout the book. The product of a decade’s worth of work translating archival material in places such as Moscow and Beijing, Radchenko’s read provides unparalleled insights into the Soviet leadership’s decision-making processes. Not only has it surpassed anything yet written, but given the archival access that Radchenko obtained—and the fact that such access has disintegrated in the face of President Vladimir Putin’s return to a totalitarian Russia—this book will also likely be the standard-bearer for years, and potentially decades, to come.

And, in many ways, rightfully so—though not necessarily for the reasons that Radchenko argued. The book advances an argument about Soviet leaders’ political motivations. But if anything, it is Radchenko’s psychological excavation of figures including Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Gorbachev himself—their intentions, their ignorance, their ignominies—that not only separates this book from any others assessing Soviet strategy during the Cold War, but also reframes the entire Cold War itself.

Leaders Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union (right) and Fidel Castro of Cuba shake hands at a meeting in Moscow, seen circa 1963.Bettmann Archive/via Getty Images

There is, for instance, the groundbreaking work Radchenko has done on unearthing Khrushchev’s decision-making in the lead-up to the Cuban missile crisis. Instead of U.S. weakness providing an opening for Khrushchev to pepper Cuba with nuclear weapons, as is popularly remembered in the West, Radchenko traces Khrushchev’s moves to a fear of a renewed U.S. invasion of the island.

And understandably so; not only was the Bay of Pigs fiasco fresh in Moscow’s minds, but American influence and infiltration of the island also had, at that point, a decadeslong pedigree. In Khrushchev’s mind, shipping nuclear weapons to Cuba was never about pressing Soviet advantages in the Caribbean—but about impeding the United States’ pending reinvasion.

And in Khrushchev’s mind, the gambit arguably succeeded. Not only did the Americans refrain from any invasion redux, but Khrushchev convinced the White House to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, restoring a semblance of parity to both superpowers’ nuclear capabilities. Khrushchev’s gamesmanship may have brought the world closer to a nuclear Armageddon than ever before (and potentially after)—but, in many ways, it was a gamble that redounded to Khrushchev’s benefit, at least in the short term. (Along the way, Radchenko also makes sure to reinforce Khrushchev’s colorful, even off-kilter communication, such as when he frothed to the Albanian defense minister, “You will be spat at in the Soviet Union and you will drown in spit!”)

Of course, Khrushchev’s blush with the apocalypse hardly assured others in the Kremlin that he was the stabilizing force required for the era. An internal putsch soon placed Brezhnev in power, and his so-called Brezhnev Doctrine brought a range of the Soviet Union’s most striking victories, not least in thwarting reforms in places such as Czechoslovakia.

But it is in widening the Cold War’s aperture—moving far beyond the checkpoints in Berlin or the tanks in Prague—that makes Radchenko’s work on Brezhnev stand out. Rather than the stale, staid leader of memory, Brezhnev’s nimbleness as Soviet premier shines through in his efforts in Asia, in relations with both Beijing and Hanoi. Radchenko’s beat-by-beat navigation of Brezhnev’s tactical decisions in the region, especially as the Vietnam War began splitting open, paints the Soviet premier in a far more flattering light than he’s otherwise been remembered.

Outflanking both China and the United States, Brezhnev saw arguably his greatest strategic victory on the beaches and battlefields of South Vietnam, at least in terms of expanding Soviet interests. (Not that the Americans necessarily made it difficult; as a perplexed Brezhnev once said, “I just can’t figure it out: have the Americans become so stupid that they can’t understand that bombs will not solve the Vietnamese problem?”)

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (left) talks with U.S. President Richard Nixon at the White House in Washington, D.C, on June 18, 1973.Consolidated photo/AFP via Getty Images

Nor is it just Brezhnev’s strategic successes that Radchenko recovers. It’s also his rote racism—and how that racism, rampant among Soviet leadership, played a role in the Sino-Soviet split. “Brezhnev’s depictions of China and the Chinese were shockingly racist,” Radchenko writes, pointing to Brezhnev’s claims that the Chinese were “treacherous,” “exceptionally sly,” and brimming with “perfidy” and “hypocrisy.” At one point, Brezhnev—who freely claimed the Soviet Union was a “European” country—claimed that Europe has the “most civilized society” in the world. Small wonder that Chinese leader Mao Zedong, in whispers behind Brezhnev’s back, would complain of Moscow’s tsarist-era annexations of swaths of traditional Chinese territory. “We have yet to settle this bill with them,” Mao menaced.

Brezhnev, of course, eventually shriveled—both physically and mentally—while the Kremlin squandered what geopolitical advantages it may have gained by its bungling into Afghanistan. By the mid-1980s, it was clear that the Soviet project was failing both within and without. Hence, the rise and reforms of Gorbachev—and, within a few years’ time, the dissolution of not only the Soviet empire, but the Soviet Union itself.

But as Radchenko retraces Gorbachev’s faltering, he also presents as useful corrective to Western remembrances of Gorbachev’s leadership and his legacy. While the former Soviet premier is broadly remembered, even celebrated, for a supposed aversion to violence, Radchenko surfaces a wealth of evidence to the contrary. While Gorbachev may have refrained from siccing tanks on protesters in Warsaw or Bucharest, he nonetheless led bloodied crackdowns on the Soviet populace itself, from Kazakhstan to Lithuania to Georgia, all in the name of shoring up the crumbling Soviet edifice.

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And while he never went as far as his Chinese counterparts—not least Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw the slaughter of thousands of protesters at Tiananmen Square—Gorbachev let any pacifist mask slip when speaking about the Chinese crackdown. As Radchenko writes, when “presented with the evidence that the [Chinese] army massacred 3,000 students in Beijing, Gorbachev privately remarked: ‘We must be realists. They, like us, have to hold on. Three thousand… So what?’”

Radchenko’s interventions, be they personal or political, are all welcome, deepening our understanding of both the psychological and geopolitical contours of the Cold War. But the question remains: Was prestige really at the heart of the Soviet Union’s entire postwar project? The answer—disappointingly both for us and the book—is: It depends.

There were, to be sure, myriad instances in which prestige propelled the Kremlin’s decisions. The search for stature, the almost pathetic pleading for respect as a superpower, laces decisions ranging from Brezhnev’s calls for a Soviet-American “condominium” overseeing global affairs to Gorbachev’s at-times-unilateral push for arms reductions. But as the single force—as the central factor around which Soviet officials organized their latticework of decisions—prestige falters.

Go back, for instance, to the Cuban missile crisis mentioned above. While prestige may have played a role in Khrushchev’s initial decisions—especially when it came to wanting to be seen as the protector of nascent communist regimes in places such as Cuba—the end of the crisis illustrated that security concerns would, in the end, always trump prestige. Khrushchev ended the crisis with a clear tactical success, forcing the Americans to stand down from housing nuclear weapons in Turkey, strengthening Soviet security that much more. But the secrecy of the deal’s details meant that Khrushchev’s supposed pursuit of prestige was fatally undermined. Even Khrushchev recognized as much, with the Soviet premier “acutely aware of the blow to his global prestige,” Radchenko notes.

Or fast-forward a few decades, as the walls closed in on a flailing Gorbachev. While the final Soviet leader may have initially seen prestige as a foreign-policy motivator, by his latter years he’d clearly transformed into a figure who gave equal, if not greater, weight to regime security Cracking down on anti-regime protesters in a number of colonies agitating for independence, Gorbachev revealed himself as a leader happy to resort to violence if the Soviet Union’s internal colonies ever agitated for independence, regardless of the cost to his prestige in the West.

A crowd of demonstrators gathers to protest against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, seen in Manezh Square, Moscow, in February 1991.Alain Nogues/Sygma via Getty Images

If anything, elevating that search for prestige points the way to a far more interesting book, buried underneath Radchenko’s granular psychoanalysis. As Radchenko aptly frames, the Cold War was never one thing, catapulting one bloc against another. It was never even something you could properly boil down to capitalism versus communism. Rather, as Radchenko outlines, it’s perhaps better understood as capitalism versus communisms, with regimes such as Beijing and even Havana charting their own courses, refracting Soviet designs to pursue their own paths—and undercutting Soviet demands for prestige, and for recognition of status, in the process.

After all, arguably the single greatest Western success of the entire Cold War period—the Nixon administration’s peeling-off of China, gutting any Soviet pretensions to hegemony in Asia in the process—came as a direct result of Moscow’s pursuits of both prestige and power. Without the Soviet demands that China, as Khrushchev said, recognize the Kremlin as the “first fiddle” of the communist world, and without concomitant tensions and outright violence playing out from the Sino-Soviet border all the way down to Vietnam, Beijing never would have considered entreaties from the Americans. Thanks directly to the Soviet pretensions of superpower status, Beijing dove directly into U.S. arms.

The Soviets were, naturally, aghast at China’s lurch toward the United States. But that did little to deter Moscow from continuing to pursue the same kinds of prestige and power elsewhere—all of which, whether in the wastelands of Afghanistan or the walls in Berlin, ended up decimating not only the Kremlin’s pretensions to global status, but imploding the Soviet Union as a whole.

Khrushchev may have believed, perhaps correctly, that the Chinese were “haunted restlessly by the mania of greatness.” But it was the Soviet Union that was haunted by a search for both prestige and power—and that, in the end, ended up with neither.