Geoffrey Roberts' Review of Jonathan Haslam's Book

Review article

The Cold War as history

GEOFFREY ROBERTS

International Affairs 87:6 (2011) 1475–1484© 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Russia’s Cold War: from the October Revolution to the fall of the Wall. By Jonathan Haslam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2011. 523pp. £25.00. isbn 978 0 30015 997 4.

The contested history of the Cold War was, from the beginning, one of its most important ideological battlegrounds. As Jonathan Haslam notes, the origins and causes of the conflict were—and still remain—a prime battlefield of Cold War historiography. Did the Grand Alliance disintegrate after the war because of Soviet expansionism or because of western aggression? Did Stalin seek postwar security or domination of Europe? Was the Cold War the cause or the conse-quence of the division of Europe? Was it a clash of ideas and values, or a contest for power and material interests? In the given historical circumstances, was the Cold War inevitable or was it avoidable?

When the Russian archives were opened up after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 expectations were high that these debates could be resolved by historians having access to Soviet and eastern bloc archives as well as to western ones. The new archives have indeed revealed a wealth of detailed information about Soviet foreign policy and provided many new insights into the internal workings of the Soviet regime, not least its foreign policy bureaucracy. But there have been no paradigm-shifting revelations. As Vojtech Mastny famously first said, the biggest secret to come out of the Soviet archives was there was no secret.1 Moscow had no hidden foreign policy agenda. What the Soviets said among themselves was by and large what they said in public, and in the same language. The archives mostly confirmed what could have been—and had been—gleaned and inferred by scholars from the public record.

The absence of startling revelations did not obviate the need for new syntheses of the Soviet role in the Cold War so as to summarize and evaluate the breadth and importance of new evidence from the Russian archives. Haslam’s Russia’s Cold War is the latest in a long line of such texts.

One early, and influential, contribution was Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War by two young Russian historians, Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, who used the new evidence to put forward what they called the ‘revolutionary-imperial 1 See further V. Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet insecurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Geoffrey Roberts

1476International Affairs 87: 6, 2011Copyright © 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

paradigm’—the idea that Soviet expansionism was motivated by a combination of revolutionary ambition and imperial design. But they cautioned against blaming Stalin for the Cold War, arguing that the Soviet dictator wanted to avoid confron-tation with the West after the Second World War and preferred cooperation and compromise, even at the price of downgrading, if not eliminating, his ideological aspirations.2

In 1999 I proposed a more benign version of the revolutionary-imperial paradigm, based on understanding postwar Soviet foreign policy within the frame-work of the official doctrine of peaceful coexistence. The Soviet commitment to long-term peaceful coexistence with western capitalism was genuine, I argued, but the revolutionary-political dimension of Moscow’s policy and practice constantly undermined its strivings for stability and security. The Soviets’ ideological view meant they thought they could transform world politics through peaceful coexis-tence, but, as Gorbachev discovered, only by giving up their ideology could they end the Cold War.3

In 1997 John Lewis Gaddis, the doyen of American diplomatic historians, published a book with the striking title We now know: rethinking Cold War history. Gaddis had made his reputation with a detailed study of the American role in the Cold War’s origins, published in 1972.4 Then in 1983 he published an article on the historiography of the early Cold War, suggesting that a new ‘post-revisionist synthesis’ was emerging. In his version of the synthesis Gaddis utilized specific insights offered by the so-called ‘revisionist’ critics of US foreign policy. But he did not concede their general case that American imperialism and power were the primary cause of the Cold War rather than Soviet postwar ambitions. Gaddis characterized Stalin as ‘a cagey but insecure opportunist, taking advantage of such tactical openings that arose to expand Soviet influence, but without any long-term strategy for or even very much interest in promoting the spread of com munism beyond the Soviet sphere’.5 But by the time he wrote We now know, Gaddis’s position on Stalin had hardened into the view that the Soviet dictator was indeed the principal cause of the Cold War. Without Stalin, it is possible that the Cold War could have been avoided, he said. With him in power in the USSR, argued Gaddis, that was impossible, as Stalin’s dictatorship and the very survival of his authoritarian communist system were at stake in the inception and continuation of the Cold War.6

Somewhat different was Melvyn P. Leffler’s portrayal of Stalin in For the soul of mankind. According to Leffler, neither Stalin nor Truman wanted the Cold War but both leaders faced a complex, uncertain and dangerous international situation

2 V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

3 G. Roberts, The Soviet Union in world politics: co-existence, revolution and Cold War, 1945–1991 (London: Routledge, 1999).

4 J. L. Gaddis, The United States and the origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).

5 J. L. Gaddis, ‘The emerging post-revisionist synthesis on the origins of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History 7: 3, 1983, p. 181.

6 J. L. Gaddis, We now know: rethinking Cold War history (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), especially chapter ten.



after the Second World War. This situation presented risks they were not prepared to accept and opportunities they could not resist. The dangers and disorders of the postwar world provoked fears and threat perceptions that were reinforced and entrenched by ideology—in Stalin’s case the Marxist-Leninist doctrines he had adopted and adapted since his early youth. Leffler’s message was that with the capacity and courage to make different choices Soviet and western leaders could have avoided the Cold War or brought the conflict to an end much sooner.7

In 2007, the same year as Leffler’s book, Vladislav Zubok published a second synthesis of Cold War history, this time as sole author. By now an emigrant to the United States, Zubok’s view of Stalin had become closer to the western and traditionalist stance, portraying Stalin as a dictator who preferred unilateral action to multilateral negotiation; who curtailed his expansionism only in response to western resistance; who strove from the outset for a ‘socialist empire’ in Eastern Europe; and whose main concern was, as Gaddis argued, the maintenance of his own power. Zubok’s book was notable for its extensive, if patchy, use of citations from the Russian archives.8

A different take on what Russian archives revealed about the history of the Cold War—again based on much first-hand research in the archives—was Odd Arne Westad’s The global Cold War. Westad contested the Eurocentric bias of much Cold War historiography, arguing that ‘the most important aspects of the Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centred, but connected to political and social developments in the Third World’.9 Ideology drove both American and Soviet interventionism in the Third World, Westad argued, and thereby patterned their mutually interlocking global struggle for power and influence.

Westad’s emphasis on the role of ideology in the Cold War is now quite common among historians. If the new Cold War historiography has a consensus it is that ideology mattered. The Soviet Union was a self-proclaimed ideological state with an explicit ambition to transform the world in its own image. And the archives have indeed revealed that Soviet ideology was inherent in the Soviet Union’s lived relationships with the world, not simply a convenient mask to disguise its pursuit of power.10

One recurring debate about Soviet foreign policy is whether it was driven more by realpolitik or by ideology, with the most influential proponent of the real politik perspective being E. H. Carr. In his monumental work, A history of Soviet Russia (Macmillan, published from 1950 onwards), Carr traced how in the 1920s the Bolsheviks gradually abandoned their revolutionary and ideologically expan-sionist foreign policy and embraced the priorities of national security. Carr’s views on Soviet foreign policy were consonant with his Realist perspective that states

7 M. P. Leffler, For the soul of mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

8 V. Zubok, A failed empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). I pointed out the contradiction between Zubok’s earlier and later views in a May 2008 H-Diplo roundtable review of A failed empire.

9 O. A. Westad, The global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 396.10 But see further M. Kramer, ‘Ideology and the Cold War’, Review of International Studies, vol. 25, October 1999,

pp. 539–76.

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behave in broadly similar ways in an international political system dominated by the politics of power rather than by values and ideas. The alternative to Carr’s view was that the Soviets did not abandon their revolutionary ambitions, but reformulated them in a synthesis of Realism and ideology that projected the gradual growth of Soviet power alongside communist advances in the states of the capitalist and developing worlds. There are still advocates of the realpolitik perspective (Michael Carley, Gabriel Gorodetsky and, more recently, Sergey Radchenko), though the current debate tends to focus on the content of Soviet ideology and the nature of its synthesis with Realism.11

Jonathan Haslam, the British doyen of Soviet diplomatic history, was a pupil and later a biographer of E. H. Carr.12 Haslam established his reputation with a series of books on 1930s Soviet foreign policy, thus continuing the story of the USSR’s foreign relations that Carr had started in A history of Soviet Russia. The first volume in a projected quartet was published in 1983 and the third in 1992. The fourth volume, covering the Nazi–Soviet pact, has yet to appear, although a now-substantial body of Russian archival material on the 1939–41 period has been published or made accessible.13

Haslam’s work on the 1930s can still be read with profit today. In that early work he adhered as closely as possible to the Soviet documentary record, only relying on western sources, memoirs and secondary studies when necessary. That documentary record was substantial and included thousands of published Russian archive documents—a body of material that remains indispensable to scholars of prewar Soviet foreign policy. Haslam’s work on the 1930s was in the Realist and empiricist mould pioneered by Carr, though he was more sensitive than his mentor as to how important the Soviet world view was in shaping Moscow’s foreign policy.14

A key figure in Haslam’s 1930s trilogy was Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, the architect of the Soviet policy of collective security, portrayed as a realistic and pragmatic diplomat pursuing an anti-Nazi and pro-western foreign policy, only to be thwarted by Stalin’s ultimate decision to do a deal with Hitler in 1939. Litvinov reappears here in Haslam’s Cold War volume though now as a somewhat pathetic figure, stripped of power, making indiscreet remarks to western diplomats and journalists, and lamenting the increasingly anti-western course of postwar Soviet foreign policy.15

Russia’s Cold War, claims the book’s cover blurb, is ‘the first history of the Cold War in its entirety, from 1917–1989, based on previously inaccessible archives’. In

11 See S. Pons, ‘Conceptualising Stalin’s foreign policy: on the legacy of the ideology/Realism duality’, in G. Roberts, ed., Stalin: his times and ours (Dublin: IAREES, 2005).

12 J. Haslam, E. H. Carr: the vices of integrity (London: Verso, 2000). 13 See G. Gorodetsky, Grand delusion: Stalin and the German invasion of Russia (Newhaven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1999); and G. Roberts, Stalin’s wars: from World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (Newhaven, CT: Yale Univer -sity Press, 2006).

14 J. Haslam, Soviet foreign policy, 1930–1933 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983); The Soviet Union and the struggle for collective security in Europe, 1933–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). pp. 23–54; The Soviet Union and the threat from the East, 1933–1941 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).

15 For my own view of Litvinov, which is not unsympathetic, see G. Roberts, ‘Litvinov’s lost peace, 1941–1946’, Journal of Cold War Studies 4: 2, 2002, pp. 23–54.



actuality, only a handful of pages are devoted to the period before 1943, a disap-pointment, since Haslam is one of the few specialists whose expertise on Soviet foreign policy spans both the pre- and postwar periods. In his preface Haslam presents the book as a ‘consecutive narrative’ that ‘uses Russian-language archives throughout from 1945–1989’ and relies ‘as far as possible on declassified documents and interviews’ (p. xi). The book’s endnotes, however, reveal little evidence of sustained research in Russian archives, but show that the text is based overwhelm-ingly on already published documents from those archives supplemented by research in various other archives.

An enormous amount of published Russian archival material is now avail-able—much of it translated on the website of the Cold War International History Project—and it is perfectly feasible to write a general history of the Soviet role in the Cold War based on this documentation. But some immersion in the Russian archives themselves might have enriched Haslam’s perspectives. Gaining direct access to Russian archival material on high-level political decision-making is extremely difficult but not impossible, as the work of numerous Russian and western scholars shows, although this work is largely ignored by Haslam, who chooses to fill the gaps in his research by frequent resort to memoirs—at best a dubious source—or to decoded or declassified intelligence reports. Yet he provides little or no evidence to show when or how these reports were either read or acted upon by Soviet leaders.

Haslam’s claim for the book being a consecutive narrative is also problematic, for he omits or glosses over key episodes and significant periods of transition in postwar Soviet foreign policy. Russia’s Cold War is far from being a complete narra-tive of the Soviet role in the conflict.

Haslam’s simple answer to the complex question of what caused the Cold War is that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 is to blame because it brought to power a revolutionary movement with a messianic ideology. When Russia expanded after the Second World War so, too, did the communist system built by the Bolsheviks. It was this threat to the West’s existence that provoked its hostile response—a dénoue-ment seen soonest by astute analysts such as George Kennan and Frank Roberts, the American and British diplomats in Moscow, as well as by Litvinov. According to Haslam, communist expansionism was both inevitable and a conscious choice made by Soviet leaders, especially Stalin. The Soviet dictator identified the United States as the main obstacle to communist domination of Europe and sought its ejection from the continent:

Stalin and his closest supporters had every intention of seeking dominance over Europe by positioning Russia as the pivotal Power in the region with Germany under foot, France counted out, and Britain confined to the periphery … Quite apart from the Marxist-Leninist impulse, the belief was firmly fixed that Russians had a right to dominate the Continent in its entirety after the enormous blood sacrifice of the war … Predominance could in principle have been secured at the expense of Eastern Europe as it had in previous centuries without necessarily threatening Western Europe, but only if the expansion of Russian power did not necessarily also mean the expansion of the communist system …

Geoffrey Roberts


It was this that made all the difference to being merely a struggle between empires, as some would have it. In this sense ideology was important not just to the Russians in their assessment of the postwar world—as has rightly been emphasized—but it was also critical to the assessment by the West of the threat they posed … Even after Stalin, Soviet leaders rejected the option of settling the peace of Europe on the basis of compromise … and persisted in the aim of ejecting US power from the region (pp. 395–6).

Stalin and his successors as Soviet leader also believed, says Haslam, in the inevi-tability of war under capitalism: ‘as soon as one war was over, the next had to be anticipated’ (p. 395).

Haslam is not uncritical of the United States, but his interpretation is, in essence, yet another version of the traditionalist western Cold War view of the Soviet Union. Does he provide new evidence or arguments in support of this view? The short answer is no. In this book you will find plenty of evidence of Stalin’s concerns about his partners in the Grand Alliance, of his determination to defend Soviet interests, even of his fear that the Americans wanted to dislodge the USSR from its position in Eastern Europe, but nothing to suggest Stalin wanted or intended to dominate Europe after the war and expel the Americans or expunge their influence. What Stalin wanted—as he said time and again in public and in private—was a continuation of the Grand Alliance with Britain and the United States, and a Soviet sphere of influence in an Eastern Europe ruled by friendly governments, in which his communist allies would play a significant but not necessarily a decisive role.

The closest Haslam comes to proving his point that Soviet expansionism neces-sarily meant the expansion of the communist system is to deploy the claim in Milovan Djilas’s memoir that Stalin had told him and Tito in April 1945 that ‘this war is not as in the past. Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach’.16 Maybe Stalin did say something like that—we may never know—but the remark was more than likely aimed at warning the Yugoslav communists that they had to recognize the realities of western allied military power in Trieste and Greece. As many historians have pointed out, there were many areas the Red Army withdrew from after the war—Finland, Iran, Manchuria and so on—leaving the capitalist system intact. In any event, we have more direct evidence of Stalin’s thinking at this time in the form of contemporary reports of his conversations with commu-nist leaders immediately after the war, in which he expounded his view that the transition to socialism in Europe would be a long-term process taking many and varied forms, and not necessarily the Soviet model. Stalin expected prolonged coexistence with various forms of capitalism in Europe, including the liberal democratic variety of the United States.17

Stalin’s experiment with the politics of New or People’s Democracy, as it was called, turned out to be quite short-lived; in the late 1940s Soviet-style communist 16 Quoted in Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 114.17 Details may be found in Roberts, Stalin’s wars, pp. 245–53. See also the late Eduard Mark’s important study

Revolution by degrees: Stalin’s national-front strategy for Europe, 1941–1947, Cold War International History Project Working Paper 31, 2001.



systems were imposed throughout Eastern Europe, and the West European Communist parties were directed to end their participation in postwar recon-struction along social market lines. But was the creation of a communist bloc in Eastern Europe the cause or a consequence of the Cold War? Haslam thinks it was the former, because he sees communist expansionism as an ineluctable effect of the Soviet system and its ideology.

Haslam is scathing of western politicians and diplomats such as Averell Harriman and President Roosevelt who thought otherwise, who believed Soviet postwar aims were limited and that long-term cooperation with Stalin was possible. Haslam highlights the problems in Soviet–western relations in the prelude to the Cold War but not the successes. Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam were successful summits, as was the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in October 1943, which Haslam ignores completely. Agreement on the thorny issue of Poland’s postwar government and frontiers was reached, although admittedly not to the satisfac-tion of the Poles. The United Nations was created in 1945, the Nuremberg Trials were held in 1945–6, and peace treaties with Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy and Romania were successfully concluded in 1947, albeit after prolonged wrangling. The foreign ministers’ conference in London in September 1945 was a failure, though the next in Moscow in December 1945 was quite successful. Substantial agreement was reached on the future of Germany; there was every prospect of achieving a common solution to contentious issues until those negotiations, too, were wrecked finally by the outbreak of the Cold War in 1947–8.

Those early postwar years were a contradictory period in which Soviet–western collaboration coexisted with signs of the coming Cold War. What finally broke the Grand Alliance were the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as the Soviet counter-response at the Cominform conference of September 1947, when Zhdanov proclaimed the ‘two camps’ doctrine. Thereafter both sides of the Cold War saw the other as a dire threat. Neither view was accurate. The Cold War was the result of neither communist expansionism nor western imperialist aggression, but of the failure of political and ideological imagination—aided and abetted by historians on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Haslam misunderstands the Soviet position on the inevitability of war. Bolshevik doctrine was that inter-capitalist wars were inevitable (although not war between socialism and capitalism). But that doctrine was de facto abandoned in the late 1940s, when the Soviets launched the communist peace movement. The movement was based on their explicit belief that political struggle could avert war, including the Cold War.18 Stalin himself endorsed this doctrinal shift, albeit in a somewhat arcane manner, in his Economic problems of socialism in the USSR (1952), in which he stated that while in principle inter-capitalist wars were inevitable, in practice each and every such war could be prevented.

The communist peace movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a significant political force in Europe and internationally, and was a major element

18 The only full-length study of the communist peace movement and Soviet foreign policy remains M. D. Shulman, Stalin’s foreign policy reappraised (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

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of Moscow’s foreign strategy as it responded to the formation of the western Cold War bloc. Haslam ignores the peace movement although it was one of the most important phases in the postwar development of Soviet foreign policy. It was in the context of the peace movement that the Soviet state underwent a fundamental reidentification of itself as more peace-loving than revolutionary. Through the struggle for peace—no longer through war and revolution as in the original Bolshevik conception—the Soviets envisaged achieving political and ideological goals.19 Crucial to this new project was curtailing the Cold War and halting the polarization of Europe. But Soviet efforts in this respect were not helped by Stalin’s involvement in the Korean War, or by his scepticism that an agreed solution of the German question was possible. They were complicated, too, by Soviet rearmament in the face of the perceived threat from NATO and the remilitarization of Germany.

Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign commissar/minister from 1939 to 1949, and again from 1953 to 1956, was the key figure in the anti-Cold War policy of the Soviets. As Soviet premier in the 1930s he had been a great rival of Litvinov’s although the conflicts between the two men were more personal than political, and Molotov did not advocate a pro-German orientation as depicted by Haslam. When he succeeded Litvinov as foreign commissar in 1939 he worked harder than his predecessor for an anti-Hitler triple alliance with Britain and France. Molotov later acquired a reputation as an inveterate cold warrior, partly because he was the public face of Soviet intransigence in postwar peace settlement negotiations with the West, and partly because Khrushchev labelled him as such when he ousted Molotov from the party leadership in 1957.

When Molotov initially refused to support the expulsion of his Jewish wife from the Party in 1948 (she was subsequently arrested and imprisoned for Zionist sympathies and connections), he was dismissed as Soviet foreign minister by Stalin. Molotov fell out even further with the Soviet dictator following the failure of the so-called ‘Stalin Note’ in 1952—a proposal to reunite Germany as a disarmed state neutral in the Cold War. Actually, this was not Stalin’s note but Molotov’s. When it failed to make any headway, Stalin called Molotov an appeaser in the Cold War struggle with the West and cut him out of his social circle.20

To his credit Haslam does not buy entirely the Cold War stereotype of Molotov, noting his disagreements with Stalin and his greater inclination to negotiate with the West. But Haslam is mistaken when he claims that Molotov proved ‘incapable of innovation’ (p. 140) when returning as Soviet foreign minister after Stalin’s death in March 1953. The great innovation of post-Stalin Soviet foreign policy was the proposal for a pan-European system of collective security in return for the reuni-fication of a neutralized Germany. This was wholly Molotov’s innovation, which he pursued despite strong opposition from both Khrushchev and western cold warriors. As late as November 1955 Molotov was urging an end to the Cold War

19 See T. Johnston, ‘Peace or pacifism? The Soviet “Struggle for peace in all the world”, 1948–1954’, Slavic and East European Review 86: 2, April 2008.

20 See further G. Roberts, Molotov: Stalin’s cold warrior (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2011).



on the basis of a deal on collective security and the German question. But he was overruled by Khrushchev at a crucial meeting of the Presidium. Haslam notes this episode, but dismisses it as a ‘radical gesture’ by Molotov in face of his declining authority relative to Khrushchev (p. 159). However, the campaign for European collective security—omitted in Haslam’s account21—had been ongoing for nearly two years and represented a prolonged effort by Molotov to end the Cold War.22

Haslam’s treatment of Khrushchev’s conduct of Soviet foreign policy is on firmer ground. Because of his denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 Khrushchev has generally been given a good press by western historians. But, as Haslam shows, in the sphere of foreign policy, Khrushchev was an impulsive and dangerous adventurer. During his stewardship of Soviet foreign policy, the world once again plunged into an era of international tension and acute Cold War confrontation, which culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. I am not convinced, however, by Haslam’s assertion that new evidence shows that a major motive for placing missiles in Cuba was to offset the strategic nuclear imbal-ance with the United States. This new evidence seems to consist of post hoc memoir claims and suppositions based on intelligence reports that Khrushchev may or may not have read. The one piece of direct evidence offered by Haslam is a note of a Presidium meeting in May 1962. ‘On 21 May’, Haslam writes, ‘Khrushchev presented the Presidium with his scheme [for nuclear missile bases in Cuba], plans for which came to another meeting on 24 May. It would be an “offensive policy”. Only along the subheading and not in the record of what was decided appear the words “aid to Cuba”’ (p. 202). Not too much should be made of this note, which was an informal record rather than a formal minute of the Presidium meeting. But the full note reads:

Concerning aid to Cuba. How to aid Cuba, in order to hold on to it. Come to an agreement with F. Castro. Conclude a military agreement on joint defence.Deploy nuclear rockets.Install in secret. Then announce.Rockets under our command.This will be an offensive policy.23

If anything, this suggests the main motive for the missile bases was to deter an American invasion and defend Cuba—as Khrushchev said at the time and in his memoirs. It seems to be the case that so intent is Haslam on pursuing his argument that, here and elsewhere in the text, there are many such not-quite-accurate presentations of the evidence.

Haslam’s depiction of the Brezhnev era is more balanced and finely drawn than his treatment of Stalin, Molotov and Khrushchev. A particular strength is his

21 Haslam refers to Moscow’s 1960s campaign for European collective security (pp. 240–41), which culminated with the Helsinki agreements of 1975, but not to the 1950s campaign initiated and led by Molotov.

22 See G. Roberts, A chance for peace? The Soviet campaign to end the Cold War, 1953–1955, Cold War International History Project Working Paper 57, December 2008.

23 Prezidium TsK KPSS, 1954–1964 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), p. 556.

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narrative and analysis of Soviet policy and action in relation to the Third World, which constitutes a useful supplement to the work of Westad and others. There are some solid sources available on this subject and Haslam makes good use of them, although I am not convinced by his speculation that President Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski tricked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan at the end of 1979, as they mistakenly thought the country was about to defect to the West. Haslam is spot on, however, when he argues that it was Soviet optimism about the 1970s detente that was its undoing. Moscow believed detente was the result of a fundamental shift in the global balance of forces in its favour, and fully expected further political advance for communism and its allies, even in Western Europe. Ronald Reagan and other western cold warriors had other ideas when they halted detente and unleashed a new Cold War in the early 1980s.

Gorbachev remains a bit of a mystery for Haslam. He notes the reform commu-nist precedents for Gorbachev from Dubcek’s Prague Spring and western Eurocom-munism, but his account of Soviet ideology and the communist system makes it difficult to explain the intellectual revolution that so suddenly and radically transformed the USSR in the late 1980s. Haslam has to resort to personality-based explanations of change, combined with the external pressures of the Cold War—a favourite theme of western Cold War lore, which always claimed modifications in Soviet behaviour were a result of the West standing up to the Russians.

In truth, Gorbachev’s revolution was the result of an ongoing process of change and transformation in Soviet ideology. Gorbachev’s moves to end the Cold War were the culmination of a campaign that the Soviets had launched 40 years before. The unexpected consequence was the collapse of Soviet communism and of the USSR itself. But, just as with the outbreak of the Cold War, this was a contin-gent, not an inevitable process. Had the Cold War not begun, or had it ended much earlier as a result of negotiation or a prolonged detente, we might still be living in a world of mixed socialist and capitalist systems. Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a matter of political judgement and historical perspec-tive. From our present-day experience of deep, and perhaps catastrophic, financial crises, the global triumph of liberal capitalism in the 1990s may yet be judged a mixed blessing.

Haslam’s book provides interesting glimpses of the thinking and calculations of the Soviet side of the Cold War, although its overarching interpretation is neither new nor convincing. The Cold War was a war of choice, not necessity, and on balance of the evidence, a choice made more by the West than by the Soviets.

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Geoffrey Roberts' Review of Jonathan Haslam's Book