‘The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991’ by Vladislav Zubok review

In Vitaly Mansky’s wistful 2020 documentary Gorbachev. Heaven, which depicts the last months of the former Soviet leader’s life, Vladimir Putin plays the role of a ghost. While Gorbachev responds to Mansky’s questions about the current Russian leader in typically evasive and capricious fashion, Putin’s image lurks constantly in the background, an almost constant fixture on television screens in Gorbachev’s house and elsewhere.

Gorbachev’s refusal to condemn Putin hid a strained relationship between the two. As political figures, they could not be more different. Perhaps more than any other historian (with the exception perhaps of his biographer, William Taubman) Vladislav Zubok has contributed to an image of Gorbachev as a hopeless idealist. In his new history of the Cold War, Zubok, working on the assumption that power corrupts, remarks that ‘it remains an enigma why it did not corrupt Gorbachev enough’. Putin, however, has been described by his former political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky as someone who sees ideology as secondary to power, who thought that the fault of the Soviet Union was trying to build a fairer society rather than ‘making more money than the capitalists’.

Despite these differences, Gorbachev and Putin’s stories are closely linked. Putin’s political life has been defined by the Cold War. His experience of the conflict’s collapse defines his worldview. As a KGB agent in Dresden, he was shocked by Moscow’s failure to prevent the collapse of the East German state. He later recalled his disbelief that Moscow was ‘silent’ in response to calls for help in the face of a growing protest movement. It is easy to read Putin’s revanchism as a direct response to the collapse of the Soviet empire, as well as Russia’s subsequent fall into chaos in the 1990s. Without Gorbachev there is no Putin.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked renewed interest in the Cold War. Some suggest that we are living through a new iteration of the conflict, others its continuation. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine seems redolent of the proxy conflicts that in part defined it. The Cold War is thus more important than ever as an object of historical study: to ascertain the true nature of the relationship between contemporary events and the Cold War past, it is necessary to first establish what we mean by the latter.

Zubok seems well placed to deliver such an assessment. While he has lived in the West since the 1990s, he was born in the Soviet Union, and his early professional life was spent in Moscow working for a Soviet think tank devoted to the study of the West. Building on two decades of research into the Soviet side of the Cold War, his new book is short, readable, and aimed at a broad audience. It is timely: the last ‘popular’ short narrative history of the Cold War was John Lewis Gaddis’ 2005 The Cold War: A New History, and since then historians have cast the war in new light, emphasising its global nature and ascribing more and more importance to the roles of non-superpower actors. Incorporating these new findings, Zubok’s new narrative is a welcome corrective to Gaddis’ triumphalist, US-centred history.

This is not, however, a book that radically redefines our image of the Cold War. If there is a consistent thread throughout, it is Zubok’s insistence upon the contingent, often accidental nature of history itself. This is in keeping with the contributions that he has already made to our understanding of the conflict. He restates a claim from his 2007 book, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, that the Soviet victory in the Second World War was a pyrrhic one, gifting a weakened Soviet state outsized power and influence. In that book he also argued, as he does here, that the post-Cold War order was largely a result of realpolitik as opposed to ideology, with Stalin depicted as interested more in security than global revolution.

Although broader social developments punctuate the narrative, the book focuses primarily on the actions of Cold War leaders. Zubok is critical of those on the Soviet side. Stalin was ‘prudent and cautious’ but capable of ‘phenomenal miscalculations’. Both Khrushchev and Brezhnev – the products of Stalin’s purges, which Zubok sees as empowering scheming and spineless self-promoters – emerge in a particularly negative light. While Khrushchev was ‘strange’, impulsive, and intellectually lacking, Brezhnev is judged to have been a cynical and vain careerist. In contrast, Zubok reserves praise for Yuri Andropov, who he describes as ‘formidable and sharp’. His period as general secretary was plagued by ill health, however, and he died 15 months after taking charge.

As with his most recent academic work, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, Zubok peppers this account with his own personal remembrances. A strength of that book was the image that it presented of Gorbachev, a figure imbued with a messianic zeal and revolutionary vision whose idealism led him to set in motion a series of world-historical developments that spun out of his control. Here, Zubok repeats the argument that it was not Reaganite posturing or economics that brought down the Soviet Union, nor state-socialism’s inherent flaws: rather, it was Gorbachev himself, a committed Leninist without Lenin’s capacity for brutality and decisiveness, who was archly responsible.

It is tempting to conclude that in his focus on personality and contingency, the whims and oddities of leaders, and the unintended consequences of their policies, this is a history of the Cold War written for our mercurial present. In his reading of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Zubok concludes that disaster was averted largely as the result of luck. This, he notes, avoiding the temptation to praise Kennedy or others, was a ‘story without heroes’. We might expand this judgement to Zubok’s retelling of the narrative of the Cold War itself, which is largely devoid of moral judgement and emphasises ambiguity and chance over any grand political narrative. It will serve as a helpful primer for those seeking to understand the past that made our present.

• The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991
  Vladislav Zubok
  Pelican, 544pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

George Bodie is Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University of London.