Everyone interested in discovering what the Cold War really was deserves to have a copy of The World Was Going Our Way on his or her bookshelves. Based on one of the U.S.’ most impressive espionage troves, the Soviet Union’s Mitrokhin Archive, the book recounts the way the KGB created a secret foreign policy in the Third World from 1950 to 1990. It was a paranoid shadow policy of destabilization, based on the delusional premise that the marauding Americans would shape the world in their image unless the Soviets acted. Like all paranoid policies, it was characterized by repeated miscalculation.
One of the book’s most captivating disclosures is the way that KGB aggression did not change with detente; when the Foreign Ministry, the military and even the Kremlin ran against the KGB’s prerogatives for global Soviet power, the KGB routed around. The result was a death toll in the millions; and the decades-long fear that erratic Soviet behavior would lead to a nuclear apocalypse.
So it’s with horror and frustration that I see The Nation is running a series of essays asking if the world is really, really safer without the U.S.S.R. I’m embarrassed as a liberal by this shit. The liberals I know — those of my generation, certainly — have no nostalgia for an empire whose chief characteristics were slaughter and mass immiseration. The Nation would rather be Soviet Union Truthers.
Because that’s what you get from this bullshit package. It’s not an affirmative argument that the world was safer with the Soviet Union around. That would actually be more intellectually bracing than this dreck from Mikhail Gorbachev, who really is a titan of history:
In short, the world without the Soviet Union has not become safer, more just or more stable. Instead of a new world order—that is, enough global governance to prevent international affairs from becoming dangerously unpredictable—we have had global turmoil, a world drifting in uncharted waters. The global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 made that abundantly clear.
Wait, a lifelong Soviet apparatchik is going to decry the irrelevance of the United Nations? The man who opened his eyes to the chronic poverty endured by Soviet subjects is going to sit in judgment on a superior system’s economic faults? This isn’t an essay. It’s historical-counterfactual equivalent of performative skepticism. Do we know for suuuuure that the Towers weren’t knocked down by a controlled demolition? Reaaaaally? What, you believe that was really bin Laden on those tapes…
These aren’t good-faith arguments. They’re not even forthright defenses of the Soviet Union. They’re juvenile attempts at satisfaction through reminding everyone that the world didn’t magically attain perfection after the fall of the USSR. The right response to that is to improve the world, not to cultivate nostalgia for one of the central reasons the 20th century was a slaughterhouse.
Stephen P. Cohen swipes at straw men “commentators” here, caring more about historiography than the thing-itself. He’s upset at the “triumphalist narrative” in the U.S. — because you’re being a dick by not shedding a tear for what truly was an Evil Empire, even if the hated Ronald Reagan said it:
Because its seventy-four-year role in the twentieth century is still bitterly disputed, because the way it ended remains so controversial and because the full ramifications of its disappearance are still unclear, its fate can only confirm the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s axiom, “History is indeed an argument without end.”
Suffice it to say there are many Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Finns, Ukrainians, Afghans and others who don’t really have much patience for Geyl in this context. If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed, ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.
Photo: Flickr/Earls37a
2011.12.29
Well said, Mr. Ackerman. Communism was a historical aberration that should be considered thoroughly discredited by all involved parties. Anyone who feels nostalgia for the Soviet Union feels nostalgia for repression, murder and militarism.
2011.12.29
Ask the Dalai Lama in the hills of Tibet / how many monks did the Chinese get.
One of the great deconstructive moments in rock history!
2011.12.29
What a whitewash and outright revision of history. The USSR was born in violence, sustained by repression, and in a moment of serendipity, ended in a relatively peaceful manner. Yet, The Nation chooses not to focus on how Russia moves forward and avoid a back-slide, but instead mourn a party-dictatorship replaced by an imperfect, but more liberalized, constitutional state.
2011.12.29
You ought to be embarrassed as a liberal. That is precisely why I am NOT one.
2011.12.29
Well crafted article, made less so by the use of profanity/swearing words that have no pale in essays of this type. By resorting to that type of polemic, you have in my eyes ruined your own argument, and come across somewhat petulant and aggressive, rather than as a careful analyst. Shame on you for that. it takes away from the message, and the message is what is important, not your words.
The Soviet Union as a positive force is an evil representation. Gorbachev is trying to resurrect nostalgia of the type found in East Germany. he should be discredited as a statesman at this point.
2011.12.29
It specifically says ‘real talk’ in the blog description. Deal with it. Fucker.
2011.12.29
“you … come across somewhat petulant and aggressive”
Dude, the name of the site is ATTACKerman. What did you expect?
2011.12.29
Okay, let’s separate two points here. One, yes, of course, the world is a better place without the USSR, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a dumb-ass (sorry, Tom, but I use profanity… wait, come to think of it, I’m not fucking sorry). But I seriously fail to see how the world has gotten safer since the Soviet Union crumbled.
I mean, even by the time Gorbie took over, the Soviets were out of money, making dissolution pretty much inevitable no matter what. But we’ve had equally dangerous foes since then, and ones that are a lot harder to pin down. We have internally suffered events like the Enron scandal — stuff that’s, let’s just say it, economic terrorism — that had nothing to do whatsoever with the USSR. We’ve had uprisings in the Arab world, terror attacks on our own soil, two wars with Iraq, and the near-collapse of the European Union. Chinese political prisoners, GTMO — hell, political prisoners in Gorbie’s own country still exist!
All these put together tell me that the world isn’t really safer just because the Soviets are gone. Better? Absolutely. But safer? Considering the dire straights in which the USSR was for most of Gorbie’s tenure, I can’t say they could have done much, so I have to say, no, it’s not really safer.
2011.12.29
I agree the Soviet Union was an abomination if viewed in its historical entirety. To give Gorbachev the benefit of the doubt, however, I believe his argument is that the Soviet Union of Perestroika was a markedly different entity than the Stalin era Soviet Union. It is not entirely clear to me that the world is better off with Russian nationalism and autocracy than it would have been with continued Soviet movement towards democracy. There are certainly wide swathes of Eastern Ukraine and Belarus that still pine for a union with Russia.
2011.12.29
Totally disagree. This is a question that should be considered, given the triumphalist/progressive narrative that dominates the mainstream conversation on the end of the cold War. In general, there is an overemphasis in the west on the Stalin-era USSR, which was indeed a repressive totalitarian regime. Bear in mind that internally, the situation was quite different for 95% of the population from the 1950s onward. For a great many people who now live in ex USSR countries (perhaps even a majority), the USSR represented a safer, less corrupt, and more predictable life – free healthcare, education, work, and even vacation provided for. All of these countries saw a massive decline in their standards of living, higher crime etc following the USSR’s collapse, for a great many people life now is worse than it was then. This is not to say that it was a perfect or even good system, but statements like “Anyone who feels nostalgia for the Soviet Union feels nostalgia for repression, murder and militarism” are borne of ignorance of the actual realities of life in the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, to place the blame on the USSR for destabilizing countries around the world is to overlook the actions of the other side of the cold war…
2011.12.29
I don’t understand this. That corner of the US where you live, which is probably doing well today is not the world. Get some perspective, for pete’s sake. And, the reality is ongoing economic uncertainties, and widening income disparities between the haves and have nots, have raised doubts about the supposed victorious economic arrangement. This, mind you, is not to say communism, or socialism – let alone statism – is superior.
2011.12.29
And now you’re getting strokes from all the important people.
2011.12.30
Ugh…really? I would agree: as a liberal defense of the Soviet Union is embarrassing. What exactly about the USSR was liberal? In my mind nothing…in many aspects they resemble a hard right movement expending all of their energy preserving the status quo.
This is not to say that Communism was a “right” ideology…obviously it was not. But I think everyone can agree that it was repressive BULLSHIT.
2011.12.30
Gorbachev’s well-written and reasoned essay seems far more convincing than the myopia and ad hominem attacks contained in this post.
I’m not necessarily saying Gorbachev is correct. Rather, it would be nice to see you actually back up the idea that the world is more stable and safer than it was before the collapse of the USSR, or, failing that, to point out how the USSR may have even become irrelevant in determining today’s levels of global security and safety.
You do neither. You simply attack Gorbachev personally, while focusing exclusively on KGB malfeasance, without ever addressing the current state of affairs, both pro and con.
You’re right, Gorbachev is a titan of history. And if you’re going to refute him, you’d best do better than this.
2011.12.30
Maybe this will clarify things.
It is perfectly fine to observe that the world is a dangerous place without a counterbalance to American hegemony. Good point, salient point, etc. But it doesn’t follow that we ought to accordingly lament the demise of the Soviet Union, a rapacious and destabilizing empire. We might say, “Let’s build a world of collective security and decision-making in order to maximize human freedom and security.” I wish The Nation hadn’t muddied the waters.
Clear enough?
2011.12.30
Almost all of the territories of the USSR belonged to the pre-revolutionary Russia. The break-up of the USSR as a geopolitical entity had in itself nothing to do with the end of Communism, it was a demise a country that was several hundred years old. There’s nothing obviously great about that.
For one, if the “Big Russia” were to survive, it would have to be much more democratic than “New Russia” and most of the former Soviet republics: the emergence of a Putin-like or Lukashenko-like strongman in such a big country with so many distinctly different identities and cultures would be almost impossible.
2012.01.02
What is it about the Soviet Union, that they miss, really,
the gulags, the Holomodor, now Russia seems to be in a bad czar moment, more Nicholas 1 then Alexander 11, but this too shall pass., the siloviki is the nomenklatura in a nicer suit. The Chechen preoccupation is unsurprising, there is no Narodniki at this time.
2012.01.02
Poland was a Russian colony, for the better part of a two hundred years, so Stalin’s takeover was a continuation of the trend, the Poles appreciate their liberty, however,
the Ukraine was originally a Ottoman dependency, Azerbaijan, a Persian one,
2012.02.01
See what the US ruling military-industrial conglomerate has been doing since 1991! Father Bush unleashed the Gulf war in 1991 that Clinton continued but under a different guise. Then came Bush the Son who started the criminal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan as there was no international restraining power as before. If the Soviet power were still intact, the American rulers would have thought twice before hurling millions of people in the hell of war and destruction. But the Soviet Union was gone and now the field for predatory wars was open for the American ruling elites and their imperial agenda.