June 9, 2025 • 55 mins
These days, it's common to talk about the emergence of a New Cold War that exists between the US and China. It's debatable whether or not this is a useful framing. But in order to answer the question, it requires that you have some conception of what the original Cold War actually was. Vladislav Zubok, a professor at the London School of Economics, has a new book out on exactly this question. In The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991, Zubok attempts to explain how we should understand this period, which he sees as both an ideological battle, as well as a geo-strategic one — and also a battle that the two main actors (the US and the USSR) saw very differently at the time. In addition to understanding the contours of that tension, we discuss its applicability today, as the new administration attempts to re-arrange our relationship with China and the Middle East, as well as other rivals, allies, and partners.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Tracy, you know, we did that episode with Arthur Croper recently,
and one of the questions that came up is whether
you know you could characterize the US and China as
being in a new Cold War? Right, But of course
that raises the question of what was the Cold War
in the first place? Hard to answer, are we in
a new Cold War if you actually don't know what
the original one was?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Joe, I can see through this intro already you're trying
to link it to a previous podcast. But I know
you've been reading the history books. That's what this is.
You read another history book, you want to talk about
the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
This is one hundred percent correct, But it is timely
for multiple reasons. Obviously, because there's the US China tension,
there is the ongoing war in Ukraine, and so you know,
and generally, if you want to understand the present, you
want to understand how he got here. And you know,
it's interesting to me. So I first sort of quote
(01:16):
learned about the Cold War. I think in middle school,
you know, in high school, and it was like maybe
ninety three or ninety four, and that was only a
few years after I guess it quote formally ended. Yeah,
And yet by the time I was learning about it
in high school, it was being taught it might as
well have been like Civil.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
War history, yes, capital age history.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, capital age history, just old history. And I'm trying
to learn a little bit more about it these days,
and I read some books, but there's still a lot
of questions about in my mind what it was really
all about.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Well, so I also first learned about the Cold War
in high school, and I had a realization when I
moved from high school to college. So I was doing
a sort of American curriculum in Tokyo ap history and
ap US history, and then went to London, went to
the LSE and did international relations, a big portion of
which is history, and it kind of blew my mind
(02:06):
how different the interpretations of history actually were. So, for instance,
I had learned about the American Revolution right as a
lot of Americans did, but in the UK it is,
of course the American War of Independence, and so it
was just a massive culture shock for me to go
from that sort of US oriented curriculum, Yeah, to something
more British centric or more international. So one thing I
(02:29):
am very curious about is how the Cold War sort
of played out from the non US perspective.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, and right, like we called it the Cold War,
I guess, And so the question is what was it
called elsewhere? Well, I'm really excited. We really do have
the perfect guest today. He has a new book out
on the question of what was the Cold War. We're
going to be speaking with Vladislav Zubak. He is the
Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.
(02:57):
So doubly perfect. He's the author of the new book
The World of the Cold War nineteen forty five to
nineteen ninety one. He's also written several other books sort
of in the same general history. A Lot of Soviet
History is a prior book that I also highly recommend,
came out in twenty twenty one, Collapsed the Fall of
the Soviet Union? What really happened there? So Professor Zubach,
(03:18):
thank you so much for coming on odd Laws.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Now, thank you for inviting me, And that's a great
moment to talk about great changes in history as we're
experiencing now.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We are definitely experiencing them now. So I guess if
someone had asked me, like a year ago, or you know,
a few years ago, and I wasn't really thinking about
these things, what was the Cold War? I might have said, well,
there's global battle between capitalists, vision and communism, or democracy
versus authoritarianism or something maybe something else, But what was
the Cold War? Because your book actually does sort of
(03:49):
offer a different claim, and it seems to be more
about something basic and land and territory and mostly centered
on Europe.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
No, not at all. Yeah, well let me start by.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
The other and I completely misunderstood the book. But go on,
well you can.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
You're completely misinterpreted my book normal thing, which is a
normal thing today. You know, whoever says whatever, it's misinterpretation
and fake news. So let me tell you one thing
that might amuse you. Sure, you know you started by
telling the audience when you learned about the Cold War
(04:28):
high school, And so let me tell you when I
learned it about it because I grew up in the
Soviet Union, basically wondering, well, it was in the midst
of a Cold war. It was the you know, the sixties, seventies,
and I grew up as a young believer that the
future belongs to communism. Don't laugh at me, And I
just was surprised why so many people couldn't get it
(04:49):
that communism is the way of the future. And then
very late in my sort of student years, I began
to realize, hey, it's much more complicated. You know, the
world is divided and so and so forth, And we
were told the world is divided between socialism and capitalism.
So when I learned about the Cold War, I mostly
(05:10):
learned it from American literature. So it was very much
influenced by American books because nothing was written in the
Sovigine about the Cold War. Nothing. That's a special, special
question why. But you know, I couldn't find a single
decent book on the Cold War. So I learned it
from American authors like John Lewis Gaddis. Some people may
remember there were great books by John Lewis Gaddis in
(05:31):
the eighties, and so I read them and totally absorbed them.
And so the ironic thing that many years later, thirty
years later, I'm coming back to my original kind of idea. Yes,
it was the battle between socialism and capitalism, yes, And
in a sense, the whole phenomenon of the Cold War
should not be understood like, oh, it's a game of
(05:53):
great powers. It's about, you know, Europe becoming a vacuum
after World War Two to be filled by you know,
two great powers, the Soviet Union. In the United States, yeah,
it was there. All that was there, and an ideology
was there of communism and American liberalism. But for instance,
business people hear about ideas, they kind of become a
(06:15):
little bit so horrific and they said, just ideas, tell
me something more important. So the most important thing it
was the battle for the future of capitalism in my view,
and you know, for everyone who were in Europe and
in Washington and New York, or or in Moscow, whatever,
in Tokyo, it was about that because you know, the
(06:36):
previous thirty years of capitalism were disastrous. Capitalism discredited itself.
So if you were in the late forties in Europe,
you would think, hmm, maybe I should become a young communist.
So the previous disasters use of capitalism caused the phenomenon
Cold War, and it was just geopolitical situation when Europe
(06:56):
was out for grabs. Much of Europe thanks to Hitler
was up for grabs between the two you know, coalitions
between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. They are
so called Angelis Saxons. It gained geopolitical dimensions in this way,
but essentially it was about which system would modernize the
world better. This is essentially throughout the Cold Warrior had
(07:18):
modifications of the same questions until it was answered very
much in favor of capitalism in the seventies and the
agies particularly, Yes, capitalism is much much better. In fact,
that's the only.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Way Tracy, I think I'm still half right it was.
There is a big geopolitical element about Europe. But I
do now have to reread the book to not take
away my overly simplistic takeaway from it. Anyway, Tracy go on.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Okay, Well, in all honesty, I have not read the book,
so I get to ask all the extremely basic questions here.
But I think this is relevant to the discussion.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
At least not missing.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yeah, at least I'm learning about it in real time.
But Vlad, I guess my question is how did the
US and the Soviet Union come to understand each other's
respective positions? So you know, what was the process through
which they sort of calcified each other's ideologies and came
away with this notion that you know, okay, the US
(08:16):
very capitalist. Maybe capitalism requires a lot of expansion, a
lot of domination of the world to keep going, whereas
the US came away thinking, well, you know, Soviets believe
in communism, and communism is going to take over the world.
How did that process actually happen?
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Well, let me start with what I know better about
the Soviets because I grew up there, and you know,
I said I was a young Marxist and all that
I was. You know, you may say, you know, brainwashed
at the time in high school and all that, But
by the end of the high school, by the way,
I began to have doubts. So I was already the seventies.
So it was very much unclear at the time that
(08:54):
we would ever build anything called communism already. But you know,
let me return to your question, and let's say the
same point to say, let's talk about the start of
the Cold War, because it was an immensely long contest,
immensely long confrontation, like for four decades, right, so it's
very important. I broke up my book into four major sections.
(09:15):
And if you are in the first section, when the
Cold War just started in the Soviet Union, they read Lenin,
and Lenin said, as long as capitalism exists, it would
produce imperialism, and imperialism is about competition for resources and wars,
global wars, because capitalism is global. So that's what you
learn about the other side in the Soviet Union. So
(09:39):
whenever somebody likes Stalin would say, hey, you know, the
United States now is a top capitalist power. That means
that you know, other powers should compete, like the UK should,
British Empire should compete with Americans. And this is essentially
the main source of instability and global war. This is
what you believed in as a matter faith in the
(10:01):
Soviet Union. If you are in the United States, it's
much less let's say, theoretical, and more like based on
experience of dealing with Red Russia or Communist Russia. And
during the first decade, Americans completely dismissed the existence of
Red Russia and never granted diplomatic recognition to that country
(10:22):
because there was, you know, a kind of nonsense for
Americans to think that people don't believe in private property.
They reject entrepreneurship, They reject God, atheists and so on
and so forth. This is just a nonsense. This state
cannot exist. And then you know, they began to change
their mind gradually, Oh it should stay and all that.
But what made them change their mind about the Soviet
(10:44):
Union above all was the Great Depression and a huge
crisis of capitalists. Back to my original point about the
context between capitalism and communism, the very fact that the
idea of this context entered the American mind, you know,
and later Americans even began to say, oh, communists have
taken over the world and all that stuff. It is
because of their internal insecurity, American internal insecurity, because the
(11:08):
Great Depression did take place. It was almost ten years. Yes,
America exited the war as powerful as it never had been.
But thanks to the war, nobody could say with another
Great Depression happened after the end of the war. So
that was immense internal insecurity. Coupled with that American exceptionalism,
you know, we've done so well before, we should do
(11:30):
great in the future. That produced American impulse towards the
Cold War. And I would say, you know, I'm back
and forth on this question. By the way, you know,
when you ask who started it in such a complex context,
between the two ways of light, two ways of modernization,
you know, it's very difficult sometimes to say who started it.
But I would say Americans had more sources, and therefore
(11:54):
they were much more proactive in nineteen forty five, forty six,
forty seven, when they began to see the Soviets acting
not as they had expected, strangely, because the Soviets always
acted as Soviets, they just were expansionists, they were assertive,
but after forty five they were also extremely weak. They
(12:17):
lost twenty seven million people during World War Two and
all that stuff, So Americans knew that, but they also
saw Soviets being expansionists and decided to take an initiative.
So much of the Cold War, in a way, during
its original phases Americans acting, Americans doing the Marshall Plan,
(12:37):
Americans doing dividing Germany into two parts in reaction to
the perceived Soviet expansionism and real Soviet expansionism, but also
realizing we're stronger, we can stop them. We have huge wealth,
we have atomic bomb and they don't, and we have
resources to stop communism. But the premise is in the
(12:59):
America in mind that communism is such a dangerous thing
that can spread all over the world. And why he
can spread hello, because capitalism is weak, and particularly in Europe,
because capitalisms stopped working in Europe, and you know, we
must reignite it, we must just set it straight and
you know, make it stand on both feet.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
So arguably, maybe the Cold War formally started with the
famous long telegram from the US diplomat George Kennan, and
he talked about, you know, the outlaid the foundation of
this idea of containment, in this idea that the Soviets
were a fundamental threat to everything we hold dear in
the West, in the US, our way of life, our freedom,
et cetera. And you're dismissive in the book of his
(13:58):
maybe paranoid views. But on the other hand, you know,
up until you know there was a Comintern that aimed
to foment communism around the world. And obviously the Soviets
moved a missile to Cuba and thought a war in
Afghanistan and the Gola, et cetera. Why was it so
unrealistic to think that the Soviet Union did have expansionist
(14:22):
visions for spreading a specific way of life across the globe.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Well, I never said that the Soviets didn't have expansionists
to view, because that was the essence of I continued,
I continued, I continue, No, no, no, no, you actually you
have just proved to it that you read the book
at these parts of the book that tells about the
canon fascinating character and Canon's long Telegram. My take on
Canon is, actually, you know, many people read excellent books
(14:49):
on Canon because he was such a master of words.
He essentially gave subsequent generations of American liberal historians all
the words to use, the entire kind of ideological framework
to use about what Soviet threat was about. He used
the word virus, malignant parasite, and other helpful things to
(15:10):
understand Soviet threat. But if we go beyond all this,
ask a question, okay, malignant parasite on what parasite on
healthy capitalist liberal society. That again, the thesis is, it
is liberal capitalism that collapsed in the nineteen thirties and
(15:30):
above all in Europe, above all in Germany, but also
in other countries. And maybe America can restore this capitalism
to its greatness. But maybe not, because at the end
of the Long Telegram, Canon has doubts. Canon says we
should contain communists, but not to such an extent that
(15:52):
we in America would ourselves turn into a garrison state.
So his theory that in this huge effort to contain communism,
America might itself change its nature and stop being liberal
capitalist society and would become a garrison state. So, you know,
(16:12):
that's a sort of sense of uncertainty. But later this
sense of uncertainty was dropped, particularly in the sixties with
this point you know, Kenny diesque kind of message and
then great Society and so on and so forth. So
it's very important again I repeat, when you read about
the Cold War to ask a question when exactly in
(16:33):
what phase of the Cold War are you and what
kind of questions you raise about this phase, because it's
for decades, for decades, so that uncertainty about capitalism began
to pass in Europe and you have experienced, you know,
a moment of you know, huge economic wonder at the
end of the fifties and in the sixties. But then
(16:56):
the colonization started and that uncertainty what would happen to
the global South resurfaced. That the fact that all these
countries like India and China, of course, became communists famously
in nineteen forty nine. So that always loomed large in
the imagination of Americans, is that have China turned communism
and not you know, followed that great, unique and correct
(17:19):
American way. Maybe others would take this way of misdevelopment.
It's interesting that all American diplomats and pundits and experts
use that or misdevelopment when they spoke about Soviet socialism
during the fifties and the sixties. So when you began
to pile up, well, what about Afghanistan, what about you
(17:40):
know this or that you're already kind of continuing into
extrapolating the timeline into the future. My answer to you
would be, don't do it, because we have a conflict.
It started in the late forties. It created a certain
kind of deadlock, a sense of deadlock, a long battle
(18:01):
that no one knew how to win. And one horrible
perspective of that deadlock was the possibility of a nuclear war.
Don't forget this is why you mentioned the Cuban missile crisis.
The Cuban missile crisis showed and when both sides faced
that prospect of a term a nuclear war, both sides,
No matter how more bombs and missiles and bombers the
(18:24):
United States had in nineteen sixty two, it had seventeen
times more than the Soviet Union, no matter that both
sides preferred to step back, and aside from a confrontation,
nobody knew how this conflict would end. So this conflict
continued for decade after decade and after decade, which is
the nature of any conflict that cannot end in the
(18:45):
decisive victory, and when both sides have existential reasons not
to raise up their hands sort of.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Say, you already anticipated my next question, which was what
was the role of nuclear weapons in prolonging the conflict?
So I'm going to skip to something else that you
just mentioned, but can you talk a little bit more
about the Cold War experience in a place like India,
Because again, so much of the focus tends to be
on the US versus Russia for obvious reasons, but there
(19:14):
was a lot going on in other parts of the
world as well, and some would argue that, you know,
some countries were even successful in sort of exploiting the
tension between the US and Russia for their own advantage.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Well, you mentioned India and excellent studies in India. The
fact is that Narrow and the first generation of Indian rulers,
Indian leaders had been very much under the influence of socialists,
not necessarily stalin like socialists, but they kind of had
huge apprehension of Western capitalism and they wanted to find
(19:50):
out a third way of development. That was one of
major reasons why India, among other countries, joined the non
aligned movement. They didn't want to participate in that geopolitical
conflict between the West and the East. But also they
did seriously expect to get what they wanted, a kind
of mixed model, something from socialism, something from free entrepreneurship
(20:13):
and decide for themselves what is best to them. So,
you know, in the late fifties and in the sixties,
you see the Indians kind of, you know, turning to
Moscow and asking Moscow help us with that, for instance,
to build a steel mill, and turning to America and
telling Americas, oh it, can you help with that? So
they played on both sides, and I think it was
(20:35):
a right choice. So that lasted actually into the early
eighties until the emergence of the global liberal capitalist system
that we live with today, which is I think is
crumbling before our eyes today. But anyway, that system was
emerging in the seventies and eighties. Read the fourth part
(20:56):
of my book. It's about that emergence of that system.
And at that time people of non allied movement, like Indians,
like Brazilians, like others, they began to feel the pinch
of that system. And all of a sudden they discovered
the experiments with expert substitution failed, that there was a
huge transnational force that dictated them the rules above all,
(21:21):
the rules of how get resources, how to get money,
how to get loans and credits, and that was the
system that they totally associated with American influence, with the
World Bank, with IMF. But it was broader than that.
It was a global capitalist system that began to emerge
during the seventies, something that theorists would call today's Washington consensus.
(21:46):
And it was also part of the call of the war.
Like I mentioned several things, that geopolitical context over Europe,
decolonization and now this and all those huge transnational global
developments influenced the call war and they influenced the choices
of countries like India. Of course, I want.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
To ask a question that sort of maybe falls in
the middle of the story and actually goes back to
nuclear weapons, you know, the Marxist Leninist escatology, maybe that's
the right word, is like, eventually the capitalist countries, either
because of their conflicts or other internal contradictions of the system,
eventually they'll collapse, and we don't know how long it'll take,
(22:26):
but eventually communism will win out. To what degree did
the sort of existence of the nuclear bomb or the
development of the nuclear bomb undermine that story that history
will not end. Human will not end necessarily with communist victory.
History could end with all of humanity simply being erased
(22:48):
in the nuclear war. And how much did this sort
of opening up of this other possible path through which
human history could unfold sort of shake that underlying faith
and the original story.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Well that's a great question, by the way, because Lenin
and Marx wrote the theory at the time that when
nuclear weapons didn't exist, yeah, okay, when you know, these
weapons emerged, that kind of canonical Marxist Leninist approach to
world history had to be adjusted. And it was a
fascinating process of adjustment because, above all, after Stalin, Understalin
(23:26):
and after Staalin, the Soviet Union was idiocracy and free
debate was impossible. And yet there were some elements of
debate and discussion about nuclear weapons, which I write about
in my book, from some likely corners, like nuclear physicists,
who warned, for instance, the leadership in Moscow leadership in
nineteen fifty four, that the invention of terminnuclear weapons makes
(23:51):
the end of the entire humanity possible. And the party
leaders immediately reproached them and squashed the debate because their
view was, hey, you know, our calonical explanation is that
it's not humanity, it's capitalism that will perish. But then
other unlikely candidates like it. Among them a chess champion
(24:14):
between Nick, who I cited my book, began to write
to the party leaders, wait a minute, I'm a communist
member myself, but I don't want humanity to perish. This
is my way of reconciling the two goals, keeping peace
and making communism a peaceful outcome of the competition between
the two systems. So suddenly that guy between, thinking very logically,
(24:39):
pointed to the main problem of the Marxist Leninist approach
that it always had preached a violent andent of capitalism,
some kind of a revolution, and then of course the
victory of communism as a result of another imperialist war.
But this imperialist war is no longer possible because of
the existence of certain nuclear weapons. So ultimately, Schoff, not
(25:01):
being very theoretical guy but kind of very instinctive politician,
came up with his solution to this debate and basically said,
or the forces of socialism was strong enough. He of
course meant above all the Soviet Union in China strong
enough to prevent another war that imperialists otherwise want to unleash,
and therefore we'll proceed to communism, but peacefully. So he
(25:25):
just basically squared the circle, and then the idiocratic bureaucracy
followed this lead. And then what you have is Dayton't.
Then what you have is daytont and arms control. That
was the major outcome of that ideological reconciliation that the
Soviet leadership, and particularly the guy after Cruse Schevnev said,
(25:45):
you know, but we want peace. We don't renounce how
ideological belief that capitalists would perish and communists would triumph,
But we have to do it peacefully. Our main duty
is to struggle for peace, and in the old days,
let's say, twenty years earlier, such guys like Brezhnev would
have been denounced as yeah, I don't know he read
(26:07):
its revisionists, I don't know. But in the seventies that
was all right. So in a sense, that ideological innovation
opened the way for Dayton peaceful policies by Brezhnev, and
with all kinds of good consequences for Europe, with the
American Soviet Dayton flourishing briefly but flourishing under Nixon, and
(26:29):
looking backwards, you begin to realize that without this period
of Breshnev and struggle for peace, otherwise you wouldn't have
had Garbachev. And of course, without Garbachev in the late eighties,
from eighty five to nineteen ninety one, you cannot imagine
the end of such conflict as the Cold War, because
(26:49):
Garbachev was a major part and then single handedly did
many things that made the end of this conflict possible thinkable,
and actually it happened.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Tracy, I just want to say one thing, One area
where I think the Soviet Union was objectively better is
that it's a country where a chess grandmaster is so
politically influential. I would like to live in such a
you know that was one writes a letter.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Well, well, well at that cultural small cultural note for
the audience. I mean, and not everybody played chess in
the Soviet Union, that's to begin with. So when c I,
a experts or somebody else would point out that the
Soviets are so devious because they all played chess and
all out fox us in the West, it's not true
because the po liberal leadership played domino, which was simple game.
(27:53):
They played domino, they were lot much more premiate.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
They got the domino theory from anyway, Tracy go.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Right, okay, well, vlad As you keep repeating, this is
such a sprawling period in history, and I have so
many questions, but one I want to make sure we
actually get to is just sort of bringing everything up
to date. And Joe mentioned at the beginning of this
podcast that one of the reasons we wanted to talk
to you is because one thing you hear nowadays pretenses
(28:18):
see one of the pretenses other than he read the book,
is this idea of the US and China being in
a cold war. So when you hear someone say, oh,
this is the new Cold war between the US and China.
What is your immediate reaction.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
No, I don't believe that it's a cold war between
the US and China. Well, unless you want to, you know,
let me rephrase it. You know, it may be called
the Cold War if you take very superficial or rather
abstract theoretical take on what the Cold War is. So
it's just a competition between great powers that for some reason,
(28:56):
primarily because of the existence of nuclear weapons, never turn hot. Well,
if you take this kind of abstract, generic approach, then
you may say, oh, you're not a cold war, and
probably because of the existence of nuclear weapons, if we're lucky,
we'll have a series of the Cold War into eternity. Right.
But I'm not a fan of this approach. I'm much
(29:19):
more into specific historical interpretation of the Cold War, which
I said was above all a contact between the two
ways of modernization capitalism and non capitalism called socialism and
a capitalist one that you know, all rounds of that
competition handily, and this is why essentially the Cold War
(29:39):
ended the way it ended. But where are we now
between the United States and China. It's much more narrow
in really more geopolitical context. Who would be the top
in the hierarchy of capitalist powers. Yes, somebody would say, oh,
it's about freedom versus lack freedom of authoritarianism in China.
(30:02):
But it's a much weaker argument really in my view.
A because China evolves in its own way, you know,
through hundreds and hundreds of years. But nobody said that
ultimately China would not begin to vote and have political parties.
Who knows, maybe in two hundred years China will develop
(30:23):
into some sort of democracies. I would never say no
to that. My approach is more specific that for now,
I don't believe we are facing as profound, as dangerous,
as essentialist and existential conflict as the Cold War had been,
particularly in the first two decades of the Cold War
(30:45):
between nineteen forty seven, let's say, nineteen sixty two, sixty
sixty eight, whatever. So this is my answer to the question.
There as a conflict, but I would hesitate to call
it the Cold War. However, however, we should all learn
from forty years of Cold War history to make this
(31:06):
Sino American conflict manageable or at least more manageable. And
I have a few ideas about this. By just looking
at this Soviet American interaction during the previous major conflict.
One idea is, of course diplomacy should work. And I'm
always struck how important was diplomacy even at the worst
(31:32):
moments of the Cold War, even at the time of
McCarthyism in the United States, even at the time, not
to mention, the time of the Cuban Missi crisis, when
Kennedy and Khrushov exchanged all those famous messages that ultimately
led to the peaceful outcome of the crisis. So diplomacy
is hugely important. At the second point I want to
(31:53):
make about the Sino American confrontation today that the danger
of tunnel vision. People should learn to think outside the box.
There was in the Cold War so many people who
said they cannot be any way of talking to those Communists,
to those Ruskies, And there were many hardliners in the
(32:16):
Soviet Union who never wanted to trust to talk to
the Americans. And yet there were always people thinking outside
the box and finding cultural, diplomatic and other ways of interaction.
That's really important. At third observation, some people would say tariffs,
economic sanctions, and arms race would solve this conflict today
(32:42):
between China and the United States. I would say the
entire Cold War actually shows that it was nonsense. Arms
race did not solve political sources of confrontation between the
Soviet Union and the United States. The development of capital
and the development of what global economy solved that conflict,
(33:04):
the fundamental underlining issues of that conflict. So if the
United States wants to out spend China more sophisticated weaponry
AI intelligence to manage the weaponry, that's another deadlock. That's
that's like forgetting fundamental lessons of history. And finally, you know,
(33:27):
look at the cover of my book Falling Domino. One
major problem of Cold War mentality, particularly on the American side,
but also on the Soviet side of course, was thinking,
once we make this one concession anywhere, there will be
the falling Domino effect, and that will be the end
(33:48):
of our credibility, the end of our position, That will
be the end of our whole global position in the world,
in our cap So what did the Americans get by
following this falling Domino theory? They ended up in Vietnam.
And what did the Soviets gain by going along this line?
They actually collapsed at the end of it. So it's
(34:11):
not a good way. It's not a good way to
resurrect the falling domino mentality by saying, if God forbid,
if China moves against this island somewhere, you know, and
we do not defend this island by military force, then
that's the end of the world. We know, it's a
falling domino. It's a classic falling domino theory.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
When I was growing up, terms like human rights, it
never would have occurred to me when I was younger
that these could be loaded terms, that there could be
anything bad about a human rights group or a human
you know, whatever it is, or minority rights or so forth.
I thought these were just unalloyed goods. And one of
the things, you know, I've been thinking about it recently
(34:54):
again actually in current geopolitical context, because just a week
or two ago, Trump was in the golf and he,
you know, made all these agreements and we're gonna sell
lots of semiconductors to golf countries and so forth. You know,
Saudi Arabia still does a lot of executions by beheading
and things that would horrify people in the United States.
(35:16):
All kinds of things in the human rights realm that
would horrify people in the United States, but we could
still do business with them. We could still sell them
a lot of semiconductors, by their oil and so forth.
One of the things you point out in your book
is the role of human rights groups at times throughout
this story of undermining, det haunt and sort of when
(35:37):
we were having these sort of softer moments that ultimately
the human rights groups in the West, they were not
helpful on that front. Could this be a more productive,
peaceful path in the United States to perhaps be more
willing to just accept, you know what, we can do
business with countries. We can sell arms and chips, and
(35:58):
we don't have to worry. It's just not our business
how they conduct their internal affairs.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Well, you know, this is one of those moments during
the long Cold War when Americans played very proactively in
Americans who were in a vibrant society, let me use
this loaded term free society, unlike the Soviets. But ironically,
American human rights movement was ignited by something that was
(36:25):
happening inside the Soviet Union. To begin with, there was
a group, very small groups of human rights defenders called
dissidents in the Soviet Union that evoked huge admiration in
American societies as sort of good Russians versus evil Russians.
You know, people whose names were household names at the
time and few people remember them now, like you know,
(36:47):
Alexander Soldier, Niitsen, Andre Sacharov and another, you know, great
names at the time. And then came the issue of
Jewish Emmy Grace, who wanted to leave the Sovie Union
to go to Israel or to go to other countries,
and American Jewish groups who faced discrimination at home and
wanted to sort of resert themselves. At the same time
(37:09):
at home, they found a great cause, a good cause
inside the Soviet Union to help their brethren to emigrate
from the Soviet Unions. So that was the true emergence
of the human rights movement in the United States. That
conflated without a great currents that already been there, like
civil rights movements and anti racist movements and feminist movements,
(37:31):
you know, and environment movements. That was a great moment
in American history. So what happened. I think it would
be foolish on anybody's part to blame human rights movements
for undermining the tent Because Dayton was very shaky and
very very fragile thing to begin with. But Dayton was
in a sense that Soviets were doubly unlucky during the
(37:51):
seventies because they thought that with a sheer agreement on
the equality of armaments and the agreement tongue like taming
the arms race, they would create the foundation for the
ecton And that was really really naive to think so,
because again back to one of my points, arms races
(38:11):
or taming arms races, taming arms racist is good, but
arms racists in asums, they're crucial to solving real political issues.
So these arms are agreements that the sovice were so
proud of, Well, they didn't play any role in the end.
What played the role was human rights, a movement inside
the United States that legitimized Acton in the eyes of
(38:32):
millions of Americans. Plus of course there were other issues
dealing to decolonization in Africa of all of the Portuguese Empire.
And so it's jumped in immediately, guided by their Marxist
Leninist kind of fraternity, solidarity, mentality and error and American
herdliners that you see they unchanging, they keep roiling it,
you know, they keep on the mining global stability and
(38:55):
whatever they can. And there were other things as well,
so which sadly led the Soviets to their own falling
Domino mindset and overreaction in Afghanistan that you mentioned. So
everything was a reaction to something, but I would place
the rise of human rights in context. What indubitably happened, however, then,
(39:19):
was that people like President Carter and then President Reagan
quickly realized that this is a moral cause to follow,
and it also was expedient course politically because by championing
global human rights campaigns, the United States were back as
a leader of the free world, and they were back
(39:42):
with much more credentials, like finally being not only the
leaders of the free world, but the leaders of the
just world, which was the usually the clay is something
claimed by the Soviet Union right in earlier years. You know,
the Soviet Union always was against the racism, against the
Jim Crow, you know, colonialism, And suddenly the United States
(40:03):
grabbed all of that and redirected it against the Soviet
unter set. And you Rooskies are actually you know, he
colonizes you authoritarians. You know, you don't let your people
emigrate and all that. So it was a decisive ideological
turning point in the Cold War, which the Soviets at
first didn't realize was that way, and then later they
(40:25):
became pathetically defensive and just couldn't find a good way
to deal with that until Gorbachev finally said during his presidency,
let's not be afraid of human rights. Let's basically accept
that we also can be free in just society, and
he began to liberalize the Soviet society with the outcome
that we already know.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
I want to go back to something you said very
early on in the conversation, but you mentioned that the
Cold War wasn't really written about in the Soviet Union.
I guess when you were living there, when you were
studying and in school. And I'm really curious about personal
experiences during the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of
the best books I ever read on the subject was
(41:21):
by Svetlana Alexovich. I want to say secondhand Time, which
is a sort of oral history of Russians experiencing this
transition from communism to capitalism. So I'm just very curious
what your personal experience was, and I guess what the
sort of messaging was to the Russian population about that
huge transition and transformation.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Well, that was, as you said, unexpected, a huge transition
that amounted to the complete loss of identity. And you
may say that by that time very few people seriously
took ideological promise. Is if the rival of communist and
many people far began to think that life in the
(42:04):
West was not awful, but actually much more superior. In
that particularly turning point in the eighty nine nineteen ninety one,
when the Soviet press, liberated by Gorbatrov, began to beam
to Soviet audience through television. It wasn't like, you know,
something that foreign stations did. It was the Soviet television
began to convey this information about the much better life
(42:26):
in the West. So all pillars of Soviet mindset, sort
of Soviet worldview, began to collapse simultaneously, and it led
to several faithful consequences. First was that sense of cynicism,
dejection of any certainty, any moral, any kind of ethical
(42:49):
certainties in the society, which was accompanied by huge ways
of domestic crime and you know, violence, and mostly economic violence. Second,
that was this kind of realization, well, if capitalism is
the only way for humanity to exist and evolve. Anything
to gain money, to make profit is allowed. So again
(43:12):
the combination of collapse of ethical norms with sudden spread
of capitalist practices led to that you know, wild East mentality,
much more so than the Wild West was in America,
I would say, And ultimately the void was filled by
nationalism or some kind of at least, and I wouldn't
say totally filled, but you know, some kind of expectation
(43:35):
that if everything collapses around me, it means that either
I choose my family and myself as the only sort
of bulwark in the future, or I would believe in
another super ego, which is nation nationalists. And so the
nationalist and ethnic conflicts sprung up immediately as Gorbachev began
(43:56):
to dismantle the old sort of the old mentality, see
the old system and the Soviet Union. And it was
highly dangerous and highly destructive, and of course, in part
those nationalists humilitated against the past and past grievances in
you know, all the people killed by Stalin and Lenin
and you know all that, But they also kind of
(44:18):
satisfied the new need for a renewed sense of identity.
So I used to think that the Soviet Collapse was
relatively peaceful until the current war in Ukraine. Because clearly,
you know, this new wave of Russian nationalism and is
linked to the continuing lack of idea, continuing void in
(44:40):
the heart of Russia. Why so many changes happened and
what's the meaning of those changes? So it was possible,
as it turned out, as I'm saying with deep sadness,
for the leader of Russia to fill that tremendous vacuum
with another refurbished idea of Russian imperial, imperial and national domination.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
So I just have one last question. And we could
talk for a long time and have lots of things,
including we could talk about the war in Ukraine and
how actually Kennon himself predicted that that could be a
consequence of Clinton's NATO expansion and things like that. But
you know, I want to ask one last question. The
way you depicted and also, especially in your previous book Collapse,
(45:22):
you're pretty hard on Gorbachev and you sort of castigate
him at times for his unwillingness to use force at times.
But you know, one of the things that you could
see in this book is that the collapse of the
Warsaw Pact there was a big economic element. The Soviet
Union could no longer supply cheap oil to East Germany
(45:42):
and other countries and so forth, and that the economic
dysfunction of the Soviet Union played a significant role in
the failure to keep those military allies on the other
side of the Iron Curtain. But then you sort of say,
Gorbachev unilaterally disarmed more or less the USSR. There was
an unforced collapse, that it was sort of an internal choice.
(46:05):
Why shouldn't we assume that the economic dysfunction that led
to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, which you acknowledge,
would not have eventually led to the disintegration of the
USSR itself and the emergence of all these countries pursuing
some conception of freedom and national identity.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
Oh yeah, I keep struggling with the same question, because
history is never linear and it can go different ways.
And of course, you know, those who look back at
the history of the twentieth century and in fact the
nineteenth century see the immense force of nationalism and national
cell determination. But this is one way to say that
(46:45):
the collapse of the Soil Union was inevitable and that
it was just a matter of time for all those
different nations to find their road to the statehood and
sovereignty and all that. But in other ways, to look
back at history and see the perils and danger of
sudden collapses, sudden collapses of empires, we see essentially the
(47:06):
tremendous instability in Europe paving the way too fascist and
Nazi dictatorships rooted in a sudden collapse of empires as
a result of World War One. So the suddenness of
this collapse, the fact that they create this immense vacuum
and destroy the old common identities and common links, immense
(47:26):
common links between different ethnic groups and across different ethnic groups.
This is a huge dangerous moment. And in fact I
tried to strike a balance and collapse, looking at both sides,
but sort of probably knowing what would follow after Garbachev.
Maybe I overdo the second. I'm hard on Garbachev because
(47:50):
he raised expectations tremendously, and I was among his followers,
and millions of people looked up to him full leadership.
And when particularly he tremendous changes in the late eighty
eight eighty nine, not right away, you know, the first
two years were very kind of, very frustrating. I remember that.
But then he made that huge leap forward, hugely forward,
(48:14):
and that leap forward contained elements of the future collapse
because it had many disguided premises. He believed in Leninism,
he believed in that sort of many things that he
should believed in, but he did. But then by taking
this sleep, Gorbachev kind of got frozen. In the process
of this sleep, he suddenly lost his initiative. He became
(48:38):
a famously you know, slow or infamously slow in taking
other steps. So with such tremendous changes, you have to
maintain a momentum or you lose it to others. And
he lost that momentum to the Yeltsin, to the Russian
sort of leader who essentially pulled Russia from under Gorbachev
and and destroyed the so Union, not the Balls, not Georgian,
(49:02):
it's not Ukraine. He has destroyed so Uni Elson did
in my view, So by looking at this story, I
sort of I'm harsh on the later Gorbachev because the
book is mostly about three years eighty nine nineteen ninety one,
during which Gorbachev had already done his greatest kind of
leap into the future and got scared someone you know,
(49:25):
got you know, outgunned by his arrival. So my harshness
on Gorbachev, maybe he's guided by the fact that I
would very much preferred him to succeed because other options
were very, very very clear for us. Now what other
options led to, you know, for those who admired and
Washington people admired Jelson and thought that Gorbachev was still
(49:48):
a Communist. True, Elson turned into anti communists, but look,
it was Elson who gave us the current Kremlin leader.
After all.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
A lot of loves you, bog This was fantastic. You
can talk for a long time. After I read Collapse.
I sort of thought, by the way that garbage sort
of seems like an Obama type character, Nobel Prize winner.
But then you know, in the wake of it, maybe
some lost momentum we could talk for a long time
about all this. Really appreciate you so much for coming on.
(50:19):
Everyone should read your book. I will reread it again
because I apparently missed the entire point. But really, thanks
for coming on Outlaws.
Speaker 4 (50:26):
Well, thank you very much for talking about history. It's
a rare moment.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Cherlsey, I really do have to reread the book. I
I apparently I was like, I love this book, and
then I missed the entire point.
Speaker 4 (50:49):
How did that happen?
Speaker 2 (50:50):
I am I reading comprehension. Isn't that great? Well, see, Joe,
how do you read so many books? The answer is
by now paying attention to the words on the page.
Speaker 3 (50:58):
Well, good thing, we're not basic bunch of podcast episodes
on your reading and understanding of history books. Okay, that
was fascinating. I did think, well, first of all, I
keep recommending that book secondhand time, and I really think
you should. And I think one of the important takeaways
from that conversation and from other conversations that we've had
in the past, is this idea of like, just how
(51:21):
big an existential crisis the collapse of the Soviet Union
actually was for Russia and Vlad's point that you ended
up replacing the communist ideology with nationalism. I mean, we
are still living through the consequences of all of that.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
No, we totally are. We didn't really get into it
too much. And she sort of ends the book and
talk about the US China relationship, and one of the
points that he makes, where is the US Soviet relationship
was really something that was always handled at the diplomatic level.
The US China relationship has, especially in the last you know,
thirty years, forty years whatever, has really been driven by
(51:58):
the business community, yeah, specifically, which sort of makes it
a very different story to the Cold War, and it
just has not been about that sort of ideological blog
per se.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
In fact, it was a really good article. I think
it was in the Financial Times last year. There was
like Cuba is asking China for some advice on economic growth,
and I think the Chinese leader is like, well, you
could try introducing market competition. You maybe give that a shot.
So while you know, obviously China wants to expand its influence,
it seems like, you know, it does it by building
(52:30):
factories and stuff like that and expanding its economic footprint
much more than asking its trading partners to you know,
commit to its specific model.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Well, speaking of building factories, one episode I do want
to do, because this keeps coming up, is why were
communists so obsessed with steel? And you know, Vlad mentioned
the idea of like India asking Russia for help and
building some steel factories, And it feels like, sometimes I
think the Cold War could have been you know, we
could have avoided the Cold War. If we just had
(53:02):
some sort of steel manufacturing off competition between the great
world powers, and whoever made the best steel would be
declared the winner and their economic model would be, you know,
embraced by the rest of the world. We should have
gone down that route.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Did you know that the name Stalin was a nom
de guerre that means man of steel?
Speaker 3 (53:21):
I did actually know that, so I you know, Steele,
you could tell a really good story about the Cold
War just through the medium of steel. Someone should write
that book.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Odd Lots series The History of the Cold War As
Told as that might be a little in niche.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
Yeah, just a little Okay, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
This has been another episode of the ad Thoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
And I'm Jill whysent Thal. You can follow me at
The Stalwart. Follow our guest Bluttist Loves Zubach He's at
Bloodist Love Zubac one, and definitely check out his new book.
Speaker 4 (53:56):
The World of the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (53:57):
Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash Ol
Bennett at Dashbot and Kelbrooks at Kelbrooks. For more Oddlots content,
go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we
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Speaker 3 (54:19):
And if you enjoy odd Thoughts, if you like it
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Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Tracy, you know, we did that episode with Arthur Croper recently,
and one of the questions that came up is whether
you know you could characterize the US and China as
being in a new Cold War? Right, But of course
that raises the question of what was the Cold War
in the first place? Hard to answer, are we in
a new Cold War if you actually don't know what
the original one was?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Joe, I can see through this intro already you're trying
to link it to a previous podcast. But I know
you've been reading the history books. That's what this is.
You read another history book, you want to talk about
the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
This is one hundred percent correct, But it is timely
for multiple reasons. Obviously, because there's the US China tension,
there is the ongoing war in Ukraine, and so you know,
and generally, if you want to understand the present, you
want to understand how he got here. And you know,
it's interesting to me. So I first sort of quote
(01:16):
learned about the Cold War. I think in middle school,
you know, in high school, and it was like maybe
ninety three or ninety four, and that was only a
few years after I guess it quote formally ended. Yeah,
And yet by the time I was learning about it
in high school, it was being taught it might as
well have been like Civil.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
War history, yes, capital age history.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, capital age history, just old history. And I'm trying
to learn a little bit more about it these days,
and I read some books, but there's still a lot
of questions about in my mind what it was really
all about.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Well, so I also first learned about the Cold War
in high school, and I had a realization when I
moved from high school to college. So I was doing
a sort of American curriculum in Tokyo ap history and
ap US history, and then went to London, went to
the LSE and did international relations, a big portion of
which is history, and it kind of blew my mind
(02:06):
how different the interpretations of history actually were. So, for instance,
I had learned about the American Revolution right as a
lot of Americans did, but in the UK it is,
of course the American War of Independence, and so it
was just a massive culture shock for me to go
from that sort of US oriented curriculum, Yeah, to something
more British centric or more international. So one thing I
(02:29):
am very curious about is how the Cold War sort
of played out from the non US perspective.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Yeah, and right, like we called it the Cold War,
I guess, And so the question is what was it
called elsewhere? Well, I'm really excited. We really do have
the perfect guest today. He has a new book out
on the question of what was the Cold War. We're
going to be speaking with Vladislav Zubak. He is the
Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.
(02:57):
So doubly perfect. He's the author of the new book
The World of the Cold War nineteen forty five to
nineteen ninety one. He's also written several other books sort
of in the same general history. A Lot of Soviet
History is a prior book that I also highly recommend,
came out in twenty twenty one, Collapsed the Fall of
the Soviet Union? What really happened there? So Professor Zubach,
(03:18):
thank you so much for coming on odd Laws.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Now, thank you for inviting me, And that's a great
moment to talk about great changes in history as we're
experiencing now.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We are definitely experiencing them now. So I guess if
someone had asked me, like a year ago, or you know,
a few years ago, and I wasn't really thinking about
these things, what was the Cold War? I might have said, well,
there's global battle between capitalists, vision and communism, or democracy
versus authoritarianism or something maybe something else, But what was
the Cold War? Because your book actually does sort of
(03:49):
offer a different claim, and it seems to be more
about something basic and land and territory and mostly centered
on Europe.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
No, not at all. Yeah, well let me start by.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
The other and I completely misunderstood the book. But go on,
well you can.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
You're completely misinterpreted my book normal thing, which is a
normal thing today. You know, whoever says whatever, it's misinterpretation
and fake news. So let me tell you one thing
that might amuse you. Sure, you know you started by
telling the audience when you learned about the Cold War
(04:28):
high school, And so let me tell you when I
learned it about it because I grew up in the
Soviet Union, basically wondering, well, it was in the midst
of a Cold war. It was the you know, the sixties, seventies,
and I grew up as a young believer that the
future belongs to communism. Don't laugh at me, And I
just was surprised why so many people couldn't get it
(04:49):
that communism is the way of the future. And then
very late in my sort of student years, I began
to realize, hey, it's much more complicated. You know, the
world is divided and so and so forth, And we
were told the world is divided between socialism and capitalism.
So when I learned about the Cold War, I mostly
(05:10):
learned it from American literature. So it was very much
influenced by American books because nothing was written in the
Sovigine about the Cold War. Nothing. That's a special, special
question why. But you know, I couldn't find a single
decent book on the Cold War. So I learned it
from American authors like John Lewis Gaddis. Some people may
remember there were great books by John Lewis Gaddis in
(05:31):
the eighties, and so I read them and totally absorbed them.
And so the ironic thing that many years later, thirty
years later, I'm coming back to my original kind of idea. Yes,
it was the battle between socialism and capitalism, yes, And
in a sense, the whole phenomenon of the Cold War
should not be understood like, oh, it's a game of
(05:53):
great powers. It's about, you know, Europe becoming a vacuum
after World War Two to be filled by you know,
two great powers, the Soviet Union. In the United States, yeah,
it was there. All that was there, and an ideology
was there of communism and American liberalism. But for instance,
business people hear about ideas, they kind of become a
(06:15):
little bit so horrific and they said, just ideas, tell
me something more important. So the most important thing it
was the battle for the future of capitalism in my view,
and you know, for everyone who were in Europe and
in Washington and New York, or or in Moscow, whatever,
in Tokyo, it was about that because you know, the
(06:36):
previous thirty years of capitalism were disastrous. Capitalism discredited itself.
So if you were in the late forties in Europe,
you would think, hmm, maybe I should become a young communist.
So the previous disasters use of capitalism caused the phenomenon
Cold War, and it was just geopolitical situation when Europe
(06:56):
was out for grabs. Much of Europe thanks to Hitler
was up for grabs between the two you know, coalitions
between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. They are
so called Angelis Saxons. It gained geopolitical dimensions in this way,
but essentially it was about which system would modernize the
world better. This is essentially throughout the Cold Warrior had
(07:18):
modifications of the same questions until it was answered very
much in favor of capitalism in the seventies and the
agies particularly, Yes, capitalism is much much better. In fact,
that's the only.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Way Tracy, I think I'm still half right it was.
There is a big geopolitical element about Europe. But I
do now have to reread the book to not take
away my overly simplistic takeaway from it. Anyway, Tracy go on.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Okay, Well, in all honesty, I have not read the book,
so I get to ask all the extremely basic questions here.
But I think this is relevant to the discussion.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
At least not missing.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Yeah, at least I'm learning about it in real time.
But Vlad, I guess my question is how did the
US and the Soviet Union come to understand each other's
respective positions? So you know, what was the process through
which they sort of calcified each other's ideologies and came
away with this notion that you know, okay, the US
(08:16):
very capitalist. Maybe capitalism requires a lot of expansion, a
lot of domination of the world to keep going, whereas
the US came away thinking, well, you know, Soviets believe
in communism, and communism is going to take over the world.
How did that process actually happen?
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Well, let me start with what I know better about
the Soviets because I grew up there, and you know,
I said I was a young Marxist and all that
I was. You know, you may say, you know, brainwashed
at the time in high school and all that, But
by the end of the high school, by the way,
I began to have doubts. So I was already the seventies.
So it was very much unclear at the time that
(08:54):
we would ever build anything called communism already. But you know,
let me return to your question, and let's say the
same point to say, let's talk about the start of
the Cold War, because it was an immensely long contest,
immensely long confrontation, like for four decades, right, so it's
very important. I broke up my book into four major sections.
(09:15):
And if you are in the first section, when the
Cold War just started in the Soviet Union, they read Lenin,
and Lenin said, as long as capitalism exists, it would
produce imperialism, and imperialism is about competition for resources and wars,
global wars, because capitalism is global. So that's what you
learn about the other side in the Soviet Union. So
(09:39):
whenever somebody likes Stalin would say, hey, you know, the
United States now is a top capitalist power. That means
that you know, other powers should compete, like the UK should,
British Empire should compete with Americans. And this is essentially
the main source of instability and global war. This is
what you believed in as a matter faith in the
(10:01):
Soviet Union. If you are in the United States, it's
much less let's say, theoretical, and more like based on
experience of dealing with Red Russia or Communist Russia. And
during the first decade, Americans completely dismissed the existence of
Red Russia and never granted diplomatic recognition to that country
(10:22):
because there was, you know, a kind of nonsense for
Americans to think that people don't believe in private property.
They reject entrepreneurship, They reject God, atheists and so on
and so forth. This is just a nonsense. This state
cannot exist. And then you know, they began to change
their mind gradually, Oh it should stay and all that.
But what made them change their mind about the Soviet
(10:44):
Union above all was the Great Depression and a huge
crisis of capitalists. Back to my original point about the
context between capitalism and communism, the very fact that the
idea of this context entered the American mind, you know,
and later Americans even began to say, oh, communists have
taken over the world and all that stuff. It is
because of their internal insecurity, American internal insecurity, because the
(11:08):
Great Depression did take place. It was almost ten years. Yes,
America exited the war as powerful as it never had been.
But thanks to the war, nobody could say with another
Great Depression happened after the end of the war. So
that was immense internal insecurity. Coupled with that American exceptionalism,
you know, we've done so well before, we should do
(11:30):
great in the future. That produced American impulse towards the
Cold War. And I would say, you know, I'm back
and forth on this question. By the way, you know,
when you ask who started it in such a complex context,
between the two ways of light, two ways of modernization,
you know, it's very difficult sometimes to say who started it.
But I would say Americans had more sources, and therefore
(11:54):
they were much more proactive in nineteen forty five, forty six,
forty seven, when they began to see the Soviets acting
not as they had expected, strangely, because the Soviets always
acted as Soviets, they just were expansionists, they were assertive,
but after forty five they were also extremely weak. They
(12:17):
lost twenty seven million people during World War Two and
all that stuff, So Americans knew that, but they also
saw Soviets being expansionists and decided to take an initiative.
So much of the Cold War, in a way, during
its original phases Americans acting, Americans doing the Marshall Plan,
(12:37):
Americans doing dividing Germany into two parts in reaction to
the perceived Soviet expansionism and real Soviet expansionism, but also
realizing we're stronger, we can stop them. We have huge wealth,
we have atomic bomb and they don't, and we have
resources to stop communism. But the premise is in the
(12:59):
America in mind that communism is such a dangerous thing
that can spread all over the world. And why he
can spread hello, because capitalism is weak, and particularly in Europe,
because capitalisms stopped working in Europe, and you know, we
must reignite it, we must just set it straight and
you know, make it stand on both feet.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
So arguably, maybe the Cold War formally started with the
famous long telegram from the US diplomat George Kennan, and
he talked about, you know, the outlaid the foundation of
this idea of containment, in this idea that the Soviets
were a fundamental threat to everything we hold dear in
the West, in the US, our way of life, our freedom,
et cetera. And you're dismissive in the book of his
(13:58):
maybe paranoid views. But on the other hand, you know,
up until you know there was a Comintern that aimed
to foment communism around the world. And obviously the Soviets
moved a missile to Cuba and thought a war in
Afghanistan and the Gola, et cetera. Why was it so
unrealistic to think that the Soviet Union did have expansionist
(14:22):
visions for spreading a specific way of life across the globe.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Well, I never said that the Soviets didn't have expansionists
to view, because that was the essence of I continued,
I continued, I continue, No, no, no, no, you actually you
have just proved to it that you read the book
at these parts of the book that tells about the
canon fascinating character and Canon's long Telegram. My take on
Canon is, actually, you know, many people read excellent books
(14:49):
on Canon because he was such a master of words.
He essentially gave subsequent generations of American liberal historians all
the words to use, the entire kind of ideological framework
to use about what Soviet threat was about. He used
the word virus, malignant parasite, and other helpful things to
(15:10):
understand Soviet threat. But if we go beyond all this,
ask a question, okay, malignant parasite on what parasite on
healthy capitalist liberal society. That again, the thesis is, it
is liberal capitalism that collapsed in the nineteen thirties and
(15:30):
above all in Europe, above all in Germany, but also
in other countries. And maybe America can restore this capitalism
to its greatness. But maybe not, because at the end
of the Long Telegram, Canon has doubts. Canon says we
should contain communists, but not to such an extent that
(15:52):
we in America would ourselves turn into a garrison state.
So his theory that in this huge effort to contain communism,
America might itself change its nature and stop being liberal
capitalist society and would become a garrison state. So, you know,
(16:12):
that's a sort of sense of uncertainty. But later this
sense of uncertainty was dropped, particularly in the sixties with
this point you know, Kenny diesque kind of message and
then great Society and so on and so forth. So
it's very important again I repeat, when you read about
the Cold War to ask a question when exactly in
(16:33):
what phase of the Cold War are you and what
kind of questions you raise about this phase, because it's
for decades, for decades, so that uncertainty about capitalism began
to pass in Europe and you have experienced, you know,
a moment of you know, huge economic wonder at the
end of the fifties and in the sixties. But then
(16:56):
the colonization started and that uncertainty what would happen to
the global South resurfaced. That the fact that all these
countries like India and China, of course, became communists famously
in nineteen forty nine. So that always loomed large in
the imagination of Americans, is that have China turned communism
and not you know, followed that great, unique and correct
(17:19):
American way. Maybe others would take this way of misdevelopment.
It's interesting that all American diplomats and pundits and experts
use that or misdevelopment when they spoke about Soviet socialism
during the fifties and the sixties. So when you began
to pile up, well, what about Afghanistan, what about you
(17:40):
know this or that you're already kind of continuing into
extrapolating the timeline into the future. My answer to you
would be, don't do it, because we have a conflict.
It started in the late forties. It created a certain
kind of deadlock, a sense of deadlock, a long battle
(18:01):
that no one knew how to win. And one horrible
perspective of that deadlock was the possibility of a nuclear war.
Don't forget this is why you mentioned the Cuban missile crisis.
The Cuban missile crisis showed and when both sides faced
that prospect of a term a nuclear war, both sides,
No matter how more bombs and missiles and bombers the
(18:24):
United States had in nineteen sixty two, it had seventeen
times more than the Soviet Union, no matter that both
sides preferred to step back, and aside from a confrontation,
nobody knew how this conflict would end. So this conflict
continued for decade after decade and after decade, which is
the nature of any conflict that cannot end in the
(18:45):
decisive victory, and when both sides have existential reasons not
to raise up their hands sort of.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Say, you already anticipated my next question, which was what
was the role of nuclear weapons in prolonging the conflict?
So I'm going to skip to something else that you
just mentioned, but can you talk a little bit more
about the Cold War experience in a place like India,
Because again, so much of the focus tends to be
on the US versus Russia for obvious reasons, but there
(19:14):
was a lot going on in other parts of the
world as well, and some would argue that, you know,
some countries were even successful in sort of exploiting the
tension between the US and Russia for their own advantage.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Well, you mentioned India and excellent studies in India. The
fact is that Narrow and the first generation of Indian rulers,
Indian leaders had been very much under the influence of socialists,
not necessarily stalin like socialists, but they kind of had
huge apprehension of Western capitalism and they wanted to find
(19:50):
out a third way of development. That was one of
major reasons why India, among other countries, joined the non
aligned movement. They didn't want to participate in that geopolitical
conflict between the West and the East. But also they
did seriously expect to get what they wanted, a kind
of mixed model, something from socialism, something from free entrepreneurship
(20:13):
and decide for themselves what is best to them. So,
you know, in the late fifties and in the sixties,
you see the Indians kind of, you know, turning to
Moscow and asking Moscow help us with that, for instance,
to build a steel mill, and turning to America and
telling Americas, oh it, can you help with that? So
they played on both sides, and I think it was
(20:35):
a right choice. So that lasted actually into the early
eighties until the emergence of the global liberal capitalist system
that we live with today, which is I think is
crumbling before our eyes today. But anyway, that system was
emerging in the seventies and eighties. Read the fourth part
(20:56):
of my book. It's about that emergence of that system.
And at that time people of non allied movement, like Indians,
like Brazilians, like others, they began to feel the pinch
of that system. And all of a sudden they discovered
the experiments with expert substitution failed, that there was a
huge transnational force that dictated them the rules above all,
(21:21):
the rules of how get resources, how to get money,
how to get loans and credits, and that was the
system that they totally associated with American influence, with the
World Bank, with IMF. But it was broader than that.
It was a global capitalist system that began to emerge
during the seventies, something that theorists would call today's Washington consensus.
(21:46):
And it was also part of the call of the war.
Like I mentioned several things, that geopolitical context over Europe,
decolonization and now this and all those huge transnational global
developments influenced the call war and they influenced the choices
of countries like India. Of course, I want.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
To ask a question that sort of maybe falls in
the middle of the story and actually goes back to
nuclear weapons, you know, the Marxist Leninist escatology, maybe that's
the right word, is like, eventually the capitalist countries, either
because of their conflicts or other internal contradictions of the system,
eventually they'll collapse, and we don't know how long it'll take,
(22:26):
but eventually communism will win out. To what degree did
the sort of existence of the nuclear bomb or the
development of the nuclear bomb undermine that story that history
will not end. Human will not end necessarily with communist victory.
History could end with all of humanity simply being erased
(22:48):
in the nuclear war. And how much did this sort
of opening up of this other possible path through which
human history could unfold sort of shake that underlying faith
and the original story.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Well that's a great question, by the way, because Lenin
and Marx wrote the theory at the time that when
nuclear weapons didn't exist, yeah, okay, when you know, these
weapons emerged, that kind of canonical Marxist Leninist approach to
world history had to be adjusted. And it was a
fascinating process of adjustment because, above all, after Stalin, Understalin
(23:26):
and after Staalin, the Soviet Union was idiocracy and free
debate was impossible. And yet there were some elements of
debate and discussion about nuclear weapons, which I write about
in my book, from some likely corners, like nuclear physicists,
who warned, for instance, the leadership in Moscow leadership in
nineteen fifty four, that the invention of terminnuclear weapons makes
(23:51):
the end of the entire humanity possible. And the party
leaders immediately reproached them and squashed the debate because their
view was, hey, you know, our calonical explanation is that
it's not humanity, it's capitalism that will perish. But then
other unlikely candidates like it. Among them a chess champion
(24:14):
between Nick, who I cited my book, began to write
to the party leaders, wait a minute, I'm a communist
member myself, but I don't want humanity to perish. This
is my way of reconciling the two goals, keeping peace
and making communism a peaceful outcome of the competition between
the two systems. So suddenly that guy between, thinking very logically,
(24:39):
pointed to the main problem of the Marxist Leninist approach
that it always had preached a violent andent of capitalism,
some kind of a revolution, and then of course the
victory of communism as a result of another imperialist war.
But this imperialist war is no longer possible because of
the existence of certain nuclear weapons. So ultimately, Schoff, not
(25:01):
being very theoretical guy but kind of very instinctive politician,
came up with his solution to this debate and basically said,
or the forces of socialism was strong enough. He of
course meant above all the Soviet Union in China strong
enough to prevent another war that imperialists otherwise want to unleash,
and therefore we'll proceed to communism, but peacefully. So he
(25:25):
just basically squared the circle, and then the idiocratic bureaucracy
followed this lead. And then what you have is Dayton't.
Then what you have is daytont and arms control. That
was the major outcome of that ideological reconciliation that the
Soviet leadership, and particularly the guy after Cruse Schevnev said,
(25:45):
you know, but we want peace. We don't renounce how
ideological belief that capitalists would perish and communists would triumph,
But we have to do it peacefully. Our main duty
is to struggle for peace, and in the old days,
let's say, twenty years earlier, such guys like Brezhnev would
have been denounced as yeah, I don't know he read
(26:07):
its revisionists, I don't know. But in the seventies that
was all right. So in a sense, that ideological innovation
opened the way for Dayton peaceful policies by Brezhnev, and
with all kinds of good consequences for Europe, with the
American Soviet Dayton flourishing briefly but flourishing under Nixon, and
(26:29):
looking backwards, you begin to realize that without this period
of Breshnev and struggle for peace, otherwise you wouldn't have
had Garbachev. And of course, without Garbachev in the late eighties,
from eighty five to nineteen ninety one, you cannot imagine
the end of such conflict as the Cold War, because
(26:49):
Garbachev was a major part and then single handedly did
many things that made the end of this conflict possible thinkable,
and actually it happened.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Tracy, I just want to say one thing, One area
where I think the Soviet Union was objectively better is
that it's a country where a chess grandmaster is so
politically influential. I would like to live in such a
you know that was one writes a letter.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Well, well, well at that cultural small cultural note for
the audience. I mean, and not everybody played chess in
the Soviet Union, that's to begin with. So when c I,
a experts or somebody else would point out that the
Soviets are so devious because they all played chess and
all out fox us in the West, it's not true
because the po liberal leadership played domino, which was simple game.
(27:53):
They played domino, they were lot much more premiate.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
They got the domino theory from anyway, Tracy go.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Right, okay, well, vlad As you keep repeating, this is
such a sprawling period in history, and I have so
many questions, but one I want to make sure we
actually get to is just sort of bringing everything up
to date. And Joe mentioned at the beginning of this
podcast that one of the reasons we wanted to talk
to you is because one thing you hear nowadays pretenses
(28:18):
see one of the pretenses other than he read the book,
is this idea of the US and China being in
a cold war. So when you hear someone say, oh,
this is the new Cold war between the US and China.
What is your immediate reaction.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
No, I don't believe that it's a cold war between
the US and China. Well, unless you want to, you know,
let me rephrase it. You know, it may be called
the Cold War if you take very superficial or rather
abstract theoretical take on what the Cold War is. So
it's just a competition between great powers that for some reason,
(28:56):
primarily because of the existence of nuclear weapons, never turn hot. Well,
if you take this kind of abstract, generic approach, then
you may say, oh, you're not a cold war, and
probably because of the existence of nuclear weapons, if we're lucky,
we'll have a series of the Cold War into eternity. Right.
But I'm not a fan of this approach. I'm much
(29:19):
more into specific historical interpretation of the Cold War, which
I said was above all a contact between the two
ways of modernization capitalism and non capitalism called socialism and
a capitalist one that you know, all rounds of that
competition handily, and this is why essentially the Cold War
(29:39):
ended the way it ended. But where are we now
between the United States and China. It's much more narrow
in really more geopolitical context. Who would be the top
in the hierarchy of capitalist powers. Yes, somebody would say, oh,
it's about freedom versus lack freedom of authoritarianism in China.
(30:02):
But it's a much weaker argument really in my view.
A because China evolves in its own way, you know,
through hundreds and hundreds of years. But nobody said that
ultimately China would not begin to vote and have political parties.
Who knows, maybe in two hundred years China will develop
(30:23):
into some sort of democracies. I would never say no
to that. My approach is more specific that for now,
I don't believe we are facing as profound, as dangerous,
as essentialist and existential conflict as the Cold War had been,
particularly in the first two decades of the Cold War
(30:45):
between nineteen forty seven, let's say, nineteen sixty two, sixty
sixty eight, whatever. So this is my answer to the question.
There as a conflict, but I would hesitate to call
it the Cold War. However, however, we should all learn
from forty years of Cold War history to make this
(31:06):
Sino American conflict manageable or at least more manageable. And
I have a few ideas about this. By just looking
at this Soviet American interaction during the previous major conflict.
One idea is, of course diplomacy should work. And I'm
always struck how important was diplomacy even at the worst
(31:32):
moments of the Cold War, even at the time of
McCarthyism in the United States, even at the time, not
to mention, the time of the Cuban Missi crisis, when
Kennedy and Khrushov exchanged all those famous messages that ultimately
led to the peaceful outcome of the crisis. So diplomacy
is hugely important. At the second point I want to
(31:53):
make about the Sino American confrontation today that the danger
of tunnel vision. People should learn to think outside the box.
There was in the Cold War so many people who
said they cannot be any way of talking to those Communists,
to those Ruskies, And there were many hardliners in the
(32:16):
Soviet Union who never wanted to trust to talk to
the Americans. And yet there were always people thinking outside
the box and finding cultural, diplomatic and other ways of interaction.
That's really important. At third observation, some people would say tariffs,
economic sanctions, and arms race would solve this conflict today
(32:42):
between China and the United States. I would say the
entire Cold War actually shows that it was nonsense. Arms
race did not solve political sources of confrontation between the
Soviet Union and the United States. The development of capital
and the development of what global economy solved that conflict,
(33:04):
the fundamental underlining issues of that conflict. So if the
United States wants to out spend China more sophisticated weaponry
AI intelligence to manage the weaponry, that's another deadlock. That's
that's like forgetting fundamental lessons of history. And finally, you know,
(33:27):
look at the cover of my book Falling Domino. One
major problem of Cold War mentality, particularly on the American side,
but also on the Soviet side of course, was thinking,
once we make this one concession anywhere, there will be
the falling Domino effect, and that will be the end
(33:48):
of our credibility, the end of our position, That will
be the end of our whole global position in the world,
in our cap So what did the Americans get by
following this falling Domino theory? They ended up in Vietnam.
And what did the Soviets gain by going along this line?
They actually collapsed at the end of it. So it's
(34:11):
not a good way. It's not a good way to
resurrect the falling domino mentality by saying, if God forbid,
if China moves against this island somewhere, you know, and
we do not defend this island by military force, then
that's the end of the world. We know, it's a
falling domino. It's a classic falling domino theory.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
When I was growing up, terms like human rights, it
never would have occurred to me when I was younger
that these could be loaded terms, that there could be
anything bad about a human rights group or a human
you know, whatever it is, or minority rights or so forth.
I thought these were just unalloyed goods. And one of
the things, you know, I've been thinking about it recently
(34:54):
again actually in current geopolitical context, because just a week
or two ago, Trump was in the golf and he,
you know, made all these agreements and we're gonna sell
lots of semiconductors to golf countries and so forth. You know,
Saudi Arabia still does a lot of executions by beheading
and things that would horrify people in the United States.
(35:16):
All kinds of things in the human rights realm that
would horrify people in the United States, but we could
still do business with them. We could still sell them
a lot of semiconductors, by their oil and so forth.
One of the things you point out in your book
is the role of human rights groups at times throughout
this story of undermining, det haunt and sort of when
(35:37):
we were having these sort of softer moments that ultimately
the human rights groups in the West, they were not
helpful on that front. Could this be a more productive,
peaceful path in the United States to perhaps be more
willing to just accept, you know what, we can do
business with countries. We can sell arms and chips, and
(35:58):
we don't have to worry. It's just not our business
how they conduct their internal affairs.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Well, you know, this is one of those moments during
the long Cold War when Americans played very proactively in
Americans who were in a vibrant society, let me use
this loaded term free society, unlike the Soviets. But ironically,
American human rights movement was ignited by something that was
(36:25):
happening inside the Soviet Union. To begin with, there was
a group, very small groups of human rights defenders called
dissidents in the Soviet Union that evoked huge admiration in
American societies as sort of good Russians versus evil Russians.
You know, people whose names were household names at the
time and few people remember them now, like you know,
(36:47):
Alexander Soldier, Niitsen, Andre Sacharov and another, you know, great
names at the time. And then came the issue of
Jewish Emmy Grace, who wanted to leave the Sovie Union
to go to Israel or to go to other countries,
and American Jewish groups who faced discrimination at home and
wanted to sort of resert themselves. At the same time
(37:09):
at home, they found a great cause, a good cause
inside the Soviet Union to help their brethren to emigrate
from the Soviet Unions. So that was the true emergence
of the human rights movement in the United States. That
conflated without a great currents that already been there, like
civil rights movements and anti racist movements and feminist movements,
(37:31):
you know, and environment movements. That was a great moment
in American history. So what happened. I think it would
be foolish on anybody's part to blame human rights movements
for undermining the tent Because Dayton was very shaky and
very very fragile thing to begin with. But Dayton was
in a sense that Soviets were doubly unlucky during the
(37:51):
seventies because they thought that with a sheer agreement on
the equality of armaments and the agreement tongue like taming
the arms race, they would create the foundation for the
ecton And that was really really naive to think so,
because again back to one of my points, arms races
(38:11):
or taming arms races, taming arms racist is good, but
arms racists in asums, they're crucial to solving real political issues.
So these arms are agreements that the sovice were so
proud of, Well, they didn't play any role in the end.
What played the role was human rights, a movement inside
the United States that legitimized Acton in the eyes of
(38:32):
millions of Americans. Plus of course there were other issues
dealing to decolonization in Africa of all of the Portuguese Empire.
And so it's jumped in immediately, guided by their Marxist
Leninist kind of fraternity, solidarity, mentality and error and American
herdliners that you see they unchanging, they keep roiling it,
you know, they keep on the mining global stability and
(38:55):
whatever they can. And there were other things as well,
so which sadly led the Soviets to their own falling
Domino mindset and overreaction in Afghanistan that you mentioned. So
everything was a reaction to something, but I would place
the rise of human rights in context. What indubitably happened, however, then,
(39:19):
was that people like President Carter and then President Reagan
quickly realized that this is a moral cause to follow,
and it also was expedient course politically because by championing
global human rights campaigns, the United States were back as
a leader of the free world, and they were back
(39:42):
with much more credentials, like finally being not only the
leaders of the free world, but the leaders of the
just world, which was the usually the clay is something
claimed by the Soviet Union right in earlier years. You know,
the Soviet Union always was against the racism, against the
Jim Crow, you know, colonialism, And suddenly the United States
(40:03):
grabbed all of that and redirected it against the Soviet
unter set. And you Rooskies are actually you know, he
colonizes you authoritarians. You know, you don't let your people
emigrate and all that. So it was a decisive ideological
turning point in the Cold War, which the Soviets at
first didn't realize was that way, and then later they
(40:25):
became pathetically defensive and just couldn't find a good way
to deal with that until Gorbachev finally said during his presidency,
let's not be afraid of human rights. Let's basically accept
that we also can be free in just society, and
he began to liberalize the Soviet society with the outcome
that we already know.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
I want to go back to something you said very
early on in the conversation, but you mentioned that the
Cold War wasn't really written about in the Soviet Union.
I guess when you were living there, when you were
studying and in school. And I'm really curious about personal
experiences during the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of
the best books I ever read on the subject was
(41:21):
by Svetlana Alexovich. I want to say secondhand Time, which
is a sort of oral history of Russians experiencing this
transition from communism to capitalism. So I'm just very curious
what your personal experience was, and I guess what the
sort of messaging was to the Russian population about that
huge transition and transformation.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Well, that was, as you said, unexpected, a huge transition
that amounted to the complete loss of identity. And you
may say that by that time very few people seriously
took ideological promise. Is if the rival of communist and
many people far began to think that life in the
(42:04):
West was not awful, but actually much more superior. In
that particularly turning point in the eighty nine nineteen ninety one,
when the Soviet press, liberated by Gorbatrov, began to beam
to Soviet audience through television. It wasn't like, you know,
something that foreign stations did. It was the Soviet television
began to convey this information about the much better life
(42:26):
in the West. So all pillars of Soviet mindset, sort
of Soviet worldview, began to collapse simultaneously, and it led
to several faithful consequences. First was that sense of cynicism,
dejection of any certainty, any moral, any kind of ethical
(42:49):
certainties in the society, which was accompanied by huge ways
of domestic crime and you know, violence, and mostly economic violence. Second,
that was this kind of realization, well, if capitalism is
the only way for humanity to exist and evolve. Anything
to gain money, to make profit is allowed. So again
(43:12):
the combination of collapse of ethical norms with sudden spread
of capitalist practices led to that you know, wild East mentality,
much more so than the Wild West was in America,
I would say, And ultimately the void was filled by
nationalism or some kind of at least, and I wouldn't
say totally filled, but you know, some kind of expectation
(43:35):
that if everything collapses around me, it means that either
I choose my family and myself as the only sort
of bulwark in the future, or I would believe in
another super ego, which is nation nationalists. And so the
nationalist and ethnic conflicts sprung up immediately as Gorbachev began
(43:56):
to dismantle the old sort of the old mentality, see
the old system and the Soviet Union. And it was
highly dangerous and highly destructive, and of course, in part
those nationalists humilitated against the past and past grievances in
you know, all the people killed by Stalin and Lenin
and you know all that, But they also kind of
(44:18):
satisfied the new need for a renewed sense of identity.
So I used to think that the Soviet Collapse was
relatively peaceful until the current war in Ukraine. Because clearly,
you know, this new wave of Russian nationalism and is
linked to the continuing lack of idea, continuing void in
(44:40):
the heart of Russia. Why so many changes happened and
what's the meaning of those changes? So it was possible,
as it turned out, as I'm saying with deep sadness,
for the leader of Russia to fill that tremendous vacuum
with another refurbished idea of Russian imperial, imperial and national domination.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
So I just have one last question. And we could
talk for a long time and have lots of things,
including we could talk about the war in Ukraine and
how actually Kennon himself predicted that that could be a
consequence of Clinton's NATO expansion and things like that. But
you know, I want to ask one last question. The
way you depicted and also, especially in your previous book Collapse,
(45:22):
you're pretty hard on Gorbachev and you sort of castigate
him at times for his unwillingness to use force at times.
But you know, one of the things that you could
see in this book is that the collapse of the
Warsaw Pact there was a big economic element. The Soviet
Union could no longer supply cheap oil to East Germany
(45:42):
and other countries and so forth, and that the economic
dysfunction of the Soviet Union played a significant role in
the failure to keep those military allies on the other
side of the Iron Curtain. But then you sort of say,
Gorbachev unilaterally disarmed more or less the USSR. There was
an unforced collapse, that it was sort of an internal choice.
(46:05):
Why shouldn't we assume that the economic dysfunction that led
to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, which you acknowledge,
would not have eventually led to the disintegration of the
USSR itself and the emergence of all these countries pursuing
some conception of freedom and national identity.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
Oh yeah, I keep struggling with the same question, because
history is never linear and it can go different ways.
And of course, you know, those who look back at
the history of the twentieth century and in fact the
nineteenth century see the immense force of nationalism and national
cell determination. But this is one way to say that
(46:45):
the collapse of the Soil Union was inevitable and that
it was just a matter of time for all those
different nations to find their road to the statehood and
sovereignty and all that. But in other ways, to look
back at history and see the perils and danger of
sudden collapses, sudden collapses of empires, we see essentially the
(47:06):
tremendous instability in Europe paving the way too fascist and
Nazi dictatorships rooted in a sudden collapse of empires as
a result of World War One. So the suddenness of
this collapse, the fact that they create this immense vacuum
and destroy the old common identities and common links, immense
(47:26):
common links between different ethnic groups and across different ethnic groups.
This is a huge dangerous moment. And in fact I
tried to strike a balance and collapse, looking at both sides,
but sort of probably knowing what would follow after Garbachev.
Maybe I overdo the second. I'm hard on Garbachev because
(47:50):
he raised expectations tremendously, and I was among his followers,
and millions of people looked up to him full leadership.
And when particularly he tremendous changes in the late eighty
eight eighty nine, not right away, you know, the first
two years were very kind of, very frustrating. I remember that.
But then he made that huge leap forward, hugely forward,
(48:14):
and that leap forward contained elements of the future collapse
because it had many disguided premises. He believed in Leninism,
he believed in that sort of many things that he
should believed in, but he did. But then by taking
this sleep, Gorbachev kind of got frozen. In the process
of this sleep, he suddenly lost his initiative. He became
(48:38):
a famously you know, slow or infamously slow in taking
other steps. So with such tremendous changes, you have to
maintain a momentum or you lose it to others. And
he lost that momentum to the Yeltsin, to the Russian
sort of leader who essentially pulled Russia from under Gorbachev
and and destroyed the so Union, not the Balls, not Georgian,
(49:02):
it's not Ukraine. He has destroyed so Uni Elson did
in my view, So by looking at this story, I
sort of I'm harsh on the later Gorbachev because the
book is mostly about three years eighty nine nineteen ninety one,
during which Gorbachev had already done his greatest kind of
leap into the future and got scared someone you know,
(49:25):
got you know, outgunned by his arrival. So my harshness
on Gorbachev, maybe he's guided by the fact that I
would very much preferred him to succeed because other options
were very, very very clear for us. Now what other
options led to, you know, for those who admired and
Washington people admired Jelson and thought that Gorbachev was still
(49:48):
a Communist. True, Elson turned into anti communists, but look,
it was Elson who gave us the current Kremlin leader.
After all.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
A lot of loves you, bog This was fantastic. You
can talk for a long time. After I read Collapse.
I sort of thought, by the way that garbage sort
of seems like an Obama type character, Nobel Prize winner.
But then you know, in the wake of it, maybe
some lost momentum we could talk for a long time
about all this. Really appreciate you so much for coming on.
(50:19):
Everyone should read your book. I will reread it again
because I apparently missed the entire point. But really, thanks
for coming on Outlaws.
Speaker 4 (50:26):
Well, thank you very much for talking about history. It's
a rare moment.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Cherlsey, I really do have to reread the book. I
I apparently I was like, I love this book, and
then I missed the entire point.
Speaker 4 (50:49):
How did that happen?
Speaker 2 (50:50):
I am I reading comprehension. Isn't that great? Well, see, Joe,
how do you read so many books? The answer is
by now paying attention to the words on the page.
Speaker 3 (50:58):
Well, good thing, we're not basic bunch of podcast episodes
on your reading and understanding of history books. Okay, that
was fascinating. I did think, well, first of all, I
keep recommending that book secondhand time, and I really think
you should. And I think one of the important takeaways
from that conversation and from other conversations that we've had
in the past, is this idea of like, just how
(51:21):
big an existential crisis the collapse of the Soviet Union
actually was for Russia and Vlad's point that you ended
up replacing the communist ideology with nationalism. I mean, we
are still living through the consequences of all of that.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
No, we totally are. We didn't really get into it
too much. And she sort of ends the book and
talk about the US China relationship, and one of the
points that he makes, where is the US Soviet relationship
was really something that was always handled at the diplomatic level.
The US China relationship has, especially in the last you know,
thirty years, forty years whatever, has really been driven by
(51:58):
the business community, yeah, specifically, which sort of makes it
a very different story to the Cold War, and it
just has not been about that sort of ideological blog
per se.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
In fact, it was a really good article. I think
it was in the Financial Times last year. There was
like Cuba is asking China for some advice on economic growth,
and I think the Chinese leader is like, well, you
could try introducing market competition. You maybe give that a shot.
So while you know, obviously China wants to expand its influence,
it seems like, you know, it does it by building
(52:30):
factories and stuff like that and expanding its economic footprint
much more than asking its trading partners to you know,
commit to its specific model.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Well, speaking of building factories, one episode I do want
to do, because this keeps coming up, is why were
communists so obsessed with steel? And you know, Vlad mentioned
the idea of like India asking Russia for help and
building some steel factories, And it feels like, sometimes I
think the Cold War could have been you know, we
could have avoided the Cold War. If we just had
(53:02):
some sort of steel manufacturing off competition between the great
world powers, and whoever made the best steel would be
declared the winner and their economic model would be, you know,
embraced by the rest of the world. We should have
gone down that route.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Did you know that the name Stalin was a nom
de guerre that means man of steel?
Speaker 3 (53:21):
I did actually know that, so I you know, Steele,
you could tell a really good story about the Cold
War just through the medium of steel. Someone should write
that book.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
Odd Lots series The History of the Cold War As
Told as that might be a little in niche.
Speaker 3 (53:38):
Yeah, just a little Okay, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
This has been another episode of the ad Thoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
And I'm Jill whysent Thal. You can follow me at
The Stalwart. Follow our guest Bluttist Loves Zubach He's at
Bloodist Love Zubac one, and definitely check out his new book.
Speaker 4 (53:56):
The World of the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (53:57):
Follow our producers Carman Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash Ol
Bennett at Dashbot and Kelbrooks at Kelbrooks. For more Oddlots content,
go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we
have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and
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Speaker 3 (54:19):
And if you enjoy odd Thoughts, if you like it
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Joe Weisenthal
Tracy Alloway
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