BOOK REVIEW: ‘To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power’

OPINION:

The Cold War, as we are taught, was an existential struggle between two irreconcilable systems: Communism vs. democratic capitalism.

A worldwide conflict emerged from the clash over Eastern Europe’s future that was underway before the final Allied victory in 1945, its tentacles reaching most of the globe until one of its combatants collapsed under its own decay. One ideology survived. The other, to borrow a phrase, was swept into the dustbin of history.

In this common interpretation, foreign policy was the means to achieve an ideological end, to expand freedom and capitalism for the West (led by Washington) or spread Marxism-Leninism for the East (led by the USSR and China). This framing obscures as much as it clarifies, as Communist ideology itself “does not get us very far in understanding Soviet behavior. It was an ill-fitting cloth that never adequately draped the incongruent lines of Moscow’s ambition,” writes the historian Sergey Radchenko in his provocative reinterpretation of the motivations behind Soviet foreign policy. Mr. Radchenko is a Russian and Chinese security policy expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“To Run The World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid For Global Power” is a monumental achievement of archival research and original analysis made possible by the declassification of documents in the Russian archives, including the personal papers of the most important decision-makers. The author also had “access to a remarkable treasure-trove of top-level Chinese materials, most of which were never in the public domain,” he reveals.

These sources let Mr. Radchenko probe where few Western historians have been able (or willing) to go: Inside the psychology of men like Stalin and Mao, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. This very long book deals with the metaphysical and concrete, for such abstract concerns as legitimacy, recognition, credibility, and prestige – these words appear countless times in the 602 pages of text – drove Soviet (and Chinese) leaders to pursue “realist aims.”

In this rendering, ideology is de-emphasized. As Mr. Radchenko contends, ideology is never a fixed thing. It could be dropped when convenient. Marxism-Leninism, for example, dictated that violent conflict with the capitalist powers was inevitable. Yet, time and again, in the fluid early years of the Cold War, Stalin and then the bombastic Khrushchev stepped back from the brink in Germany, Egypt, and elsewhere “when ideological tenets got in the way of common sense.” 

“There was nothing immutable about the Soviet doctrine that made the conflict inevitable. It was not that the doctrine was unimportant. But rather than serving as the foundation for policies, it was used to rationalize policies… aimed at securing the [Soviet] leadership what they most desired for themselves and their troubled country: security and legitimacy,” Mr. Radchenko says. 

The author grapples with big questions as he delves into an enormous diplomatic record: What were the Kremlin’s leaders after and why? How did their adversaries interpret their motivations and aims? Readers will apply these questions to today’s crisis in Ukraine, as Western politicians and policy-makers have, for the better part of a quarter century, misread and underestimated the autocrat in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin – “the bored kid in the back of the classroom” in the words of President Barack Obama in 2013. 

American Cold Warriors held as an article of faith that the atheistic Communist Soviet Union had an insatiable appetite for world conquest. Mr. Radchenko argues that rather than attempting to defeat the West, Stalin and his successors sought recognition for the legitimacy of Soviet interests with the aim of achieving equality – even a partnership – with U.S. power and prestige. Why not run the world together?

This was Brezhnev’s idea during the headiest days of detente. At odds with this lofty aim, however, was the Kremlin’s need for clients, Communist or not, in the decolonized world. Reputation mattered there, too. Any respectable superpower must have clients – even when they served no discernible material or strategic national interest worth the cost, to say nothing of the death and destruction that Cold War competition (or carpet bombing) brought to peripheral countries. Did it really matter to Washington or Moscow who controlled Angola? The answer is yes, if maintaining credibility – or the illusion of it – matters.

The picture that emerges from Mr. Radchenko’s exhaustive yet lively, witty narrative is not of one Cold War but overlapping Cold Wars in which Moscow alternated between conflict and cooperation with Beijing as intensely as with Washington. Perceived interests and the timeless quest for recognition and prestige, rather than ideological rigidity, shaped the Sino-Soviet relationship. Even the fanatical Mao could be a pragmatist as he vied for leadership of the revolutionary vanguard.

Over the half-century of statecraft illuminated by Sergey Radchenko, the simplest answer was often the correct answer to a big question: Why did they do it? Because they could. Still, ideas mattered. As the last act of the Cold War proved, the ideas the USSR sold had few buyers.

• Martin Di Caro is the host of the “History as it Happens” podcast at The Washington Times.