Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the ‘valiant Russians’ who had fought alongside Britain and America had ‘transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation’. So begins Vladislav Zubok’s thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides’s formulation – are now very contemporary questions. ‘The world has become perilous again,’ writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West:
Diplomacy ceases to work; treaties are broken. International institutions, courts and norms cannot prevent conflicts. Technology and internet communication do not automatically promote reason and compromise, but often breed hatred, nationalism and violence.
Historians tend to be wary of drawing direct parallels between the present and the past, and Zubok is too wise to arrive at any glib conclusions. The bulk of this concise, pacy book is a narrative history of the postwar world and the great superpower rivalry that defined it. Yet, as we face a new period of strategic realignments, it’s inevitably to the dynamics of the Cold War we must look for a mirror of our times.
There are many surprises – one being that Joseph Stalin and his entourage had been expecting their wartime alliance with London and Washington to be followed by a period of cooperation. ‘It is necessary to stay within certain limits,’ recalled the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. ‘[If you swallow too much] you could choke… We knew our limits.’
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