Johnson's Russia List #6075 13 February 2002 davidjohnson@erols.com A CDI Project www.cdi.org ******** JRL RESEARCH AND ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT Issue No. 5 February 2002 Editor: Stephen D. Shenfield shenfield@neaccess.net THEMATIC ISSUE THE SOVIET SIDE OF THE COLD WAR -------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS ======== Introducing the Issue 1. Mark Kramer. The half-open record: How much do we now know about the Soviet side of the Cold War? 2. Book review by Stephen D. Shenfield Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev 3. Isabella Ginor. The Russians were coming: The Soviet military threat in the 1967 Six-Day War 4. The Soviet nuclear war scare of the early 1980s 5. The Cold War: Not so stable after all 6. Price of the Cold War: Nuclear disasters in the Urals 7. Book review by Andrew Savchenko Vladimir Shlapentokh. A normal totalitarian society: How the Soviet Union functioned and how it collapsed 8. Did cultural exchange win the Cold War for the West? Review of a paper by Yale Richmond Note of correction -------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCING THE ISSUE The perceptions of the Cold War that continue by force of inertia to dominate Western thinking were formed at a time when little was reliably known about the motives and policies underlying Soviet conduct during the Cold War. The advent of glasnost has opened up a wealth of new information about the Soviet side of the Cold War. The main purpose of this issue of the RAS is to encourage a reassessment of our customary perceptions of the Cold War in the light of this new knowledge. The issue is opened by Mark Kramer, who directs the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies. (To learn more about this project, go to http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/index_f.htm.) Mark discusses how much we now know -- and how much remains hidden -- about the Soviet side of the Cold War. To illustrate the current state of knowledge, he describes recent work by Russian historians on the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948. Next I review a book by two Russian historians, Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, who on the basis of newly available sources offer an analysis of the first phase of the Cold War, up to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, from the perspective of the Soviet leaders. The next two pieces (nos. 3 and 4) look at episodes from later in the Cold War. Israeli researcher Isabelle Ginor summarizes her work on the plans for Soviet military intervention in the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967. I comment on revelations about the fears of nuclear attack that arose in Soviet ruling circles in the early 1980s. Drawing on these two studies, I proceed to question the Western conventional wisdom according to which the Cold War, at least after 1962, was a relatively stable system of superpower rivalry constrained by mutually well understood "rules of the game" (no. 5). Ordinary people on both sides of the divide paid a high price for the Cold War. The full price paid by Soviet people is only becoming known in retrospect. The development of the nuclear weapons complex in the Southern Urals involved a number of nuclear disasters the scale of which is not widely realized even today. These disasters are the subject of piece no. 6. The last two pieces are contributions to the debate about how the Cold War came to an end. Andrew Savchenko reviews a recent book by Vladimir Shlapentokh that proposes a controversial interpretation of how the Soviet system functioned and why it collapsed. And I summarize a paper by Yale Richmond, formerly a cultural officer in the US Foreign Service, in which he argues that cultural exchanges played an important role in "winning the Cold War for the West." -- SDS -------------------------------------------------------- 1. THE HALF-OPEN RECORD: HOW MUCH DO WE NOW KNOW ABOUT THE SOVIET SIDE OF THE COLD WAR? By Mark Kramer (Director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies) The collapse of communism in East-Central Europe in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later created valuable opportunities for archival research on events of the Cold War. The initial inclination of some scholars -- and especially of some journalists -- was to look for sensational revelations that would drastically alter existing accounts of post-1945 history. But this impulse soon faded as researchers became more aware of the limits as well as the utility of the newly available archival holdings. Most scholars, while mindful of the genuine opportunities that exist, now approach the former East-bloc archives with due circumspection. Access to documents One reason that great care is needed when working with East European and Russian materials is that many collections of documents are still not available, especially in Russia. A few privileged Russian institute administrators and academicians have been permitted to work in the Presidential Archive, which is the repository of the archive of the Soviet Politburo, but this crucial archive has never been open to ordinary researchers. The archive of the former KGB in the Lubyanka, which is now controlled by the Federal Security Service (FSB), is closed for all postwar topics. The archive of the foreign intelligence service (SVR) at Yasenevo and the archive of Soviet military intelligence (GRU) at Podolsk are hermetically sealed. Even the best-connected Russians, such as the late military historian Dmitry Volkogonov and Gorbachev's former ideologist, Aleksandr Yakovlev, have not been permitted to work with GRU materials. The main postwar military archive, known as the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO), is also inaccessible. Although a handful of documents from the SVR archive and TsAMO have occasionally been released, there is no access at all to the wider holdings of these repositories. Nor do scholars have more than a very rough idea of what is actually contained in the Presidential Archive, TsAMO, the KGB archive, the SVR and GRU archives, or even the archive of the Soviet foreign ministry. Detailed guides to these archives with lists of holdings at various levels of categorization are not publicly available. Although the foreign ministry archive has been partly open for research since the early 1990s, the lists of the archive's holdings are still secret, even though in the early 1990s the ministry promised to declassify them. Scholars have to depend on the foreign ministry archivists to bring them materials on a particular topic -- an arrangement that often causes frustration. In short, vast collections of high-level Soviet documents from the post-1945 era are unavailable and will likely remain so for many years or even decades to come. Entire categories of Soviet documents -- for example, foreign intelligence reports, documents on covert operations, military intelligence reports, military planning documents, military operational materials -- are inaccessible in Russia. True, a considerable number of KGB and foreign intelligence documents that are still classified in Moscow can be found in the archives of the Baltic states, where all materials from the Soviet period are declassified and freely accessible. But the scattered items there are no substitute for the incomparably larger collections in Russia. Using the documents The enormous gaps in the documentary evidence should make one very skeptical about pronouncements regarding "what we now know" -- especially when made by people who rely exclusively on the minuscule number of items that get translated into English. To be sure, even if all the archives in Russia were open to everyone, consensus on the historical record would remain elusive. Scholars are bound to interpret key documents in different ways. They are also bound to make different choices regarding the archival materials and other evidence that they select for study and citation. Even those few who know all the requisite languages cannot possibly take account of all sources from the former communist world as well as from the major Western archives. Selectivity is unavoidable. Thus, debates and disagreements will continue even if all the documentation from the Soviet era is someday made available. Moreover, the documents themselves have to be used with great caution. The problem is not so much that materials can be forged -- this would be relatively easy to detect in most instances, given the nature of the Russian and East European archival filing systems -- but that items can be read out of context and misinterpreted. Whether deliberately or not, some reports and memoranda convey an inaccurate sense of what actually took place. Scholars must bear in mind the circumstances in which a document was written, why it was prepared, the identities of the author and the recipient, and the effect of the document. Was it read? Did it influence policymakers? Unless archival materials are evaluated carefully, they can sometimes be very misleading. It is much to our benefit that Soviet and East European officials never expected that their documents would someday be made available to the public, but we should never assume that we can simply take a document at face value. Notwithstanding these caveats, there is no doubt that the partial release of documents in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, together with the publication of memoirs and other first-hand accounts, is helping to winnow some of the areas of disagreement and refocus certain debates. An individual document may sometimes reveal a great deal, but the more common pattern is one of cumulative inference from thousands of pages of documents and memoirs. Scholars who methodically pore over archival materials and other sources are likely to emerge with a much better understanding of specific events and recurrent themes. They can also gain many insights into decision-making procedures and organizational behavior. Case Study: The Soviet-Yugoslav Split of 1948 The extent to which the newly released evidence can improve and alter our understanding of key Cold War events can be seen in some of the research done in recent years. A good example is provided by new work on the split that occurred between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1948. The rift first emerged in public at the June 1948 summit of the Cominform [the Communist Information Bureau, the organization created by Stalin after the war to enhance his control over European communist parties]. At this meeting Yugoslavia, which had earlier been one of the staunchest allies of the Soviet Union and one of the most orthodox communist regimes, was expelled and publicly denounced. Several articles by the Russian scholar Leonid Gibiansky have confirmed that the rupture with Yugoslavia, which developed behind the scenes over several months and reached the breaking point in March 1948, stemmed both from substantive disagreements and from political maneuvering. Documents collected by Gibiansky and others from the Russian and East European archives (including archives in Belgrade) indicate that the level of animosity between the two sides by mid-1948 was even greater than Western analysts had previously thought. The most serious differences between Moscow and Belgrade had arisen over policy in the Balkans. Stalin was increasingly wary of Tito's efforts to seek unification with Albania and set up a Yugoslav-dominated federation with Bulgaria. (1) This issue figured prominently in the last face-to-face meetings between Stalin and Tito in May-June 1946, but at that point the divergent positions of the two sides had not yet generated any serious recriminations or acrimony. Only in August 1947, when Yugoslavia neglected to obtain Soviet approval before concluding a treaty with Bulgaria, did the matter come to a head. In a secret cable to Tito, Stalin denounced the treaty as "mistaken" and "premature." Tensions increased further over the next several months as Yugoslavia continued to pursue unification with Albania in defiance of Moscow's objections. Under pressure from Stalin, Tito promised in January 1948 not to send a Yugoslav army division to Albania. (Yugoslavia had tentatively arranged to do this after deploying an air force regiment and military advisers in Albania the previous summer to prepare the country to "rebuff Greek monarcho-fascists.") Nevertheless, Tito's failure to maintain adequate consultations with Moscow had deeply irritated Stalin. In February 1948, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov warned Tito that "serious differences of opinion about relations between our countries" would persist unless Yugoslavia adhered to the "normal procedures" of clearing all actions with Moscow beforehand. These procedural concerns were at least as salient as any policy disputes in the exchanges over the Balkans. A few other points of contention had also emerged between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early postwar years. In particular, Tito was far more willing than Stalin to provide military and financial aid to communist guerrillas in "gray area" countries, notably in Greece. On other issues too Tito had occasionally objected to what he regarded as the Soviet Union's excessively conciliatory policies toward the West. (Ironically, he himself subsequently turned toward the West.) Quite apart from the specific disagreements between the two sides, Stalin had clearly decided to seek an abject capitulation from Belgrade in order to demonstrate to the other East European countries the unwavering obedience that he expected. But this move proved highly counterproductive. Far from demonstrating Soviet strength, the split with Yugoslavia revealed the limits of Soviet military, political, and economic power. Although it is still not fully clear why Stalin did not launch an invasion of Yugoslavia to rein Tito in, the latest evidence points to several factors: -- the likelihood of determined Yugoslav resistance -- the burden of deploying large numbers of troops from an army that was already overstretched -- the transport and logistical problems of crossing Bulgaria's mountainous terrain into Yugoslavia -- the possibility of provoking war with the West, a concern that became particularly acute after the US responded vigorously to North Korea's attack on South Korea in June 1950 Stalin also believed that Tito could be ousted by non-military means. But economic sanctions proved futile when Yugoslavia turned elsewhere for trade and economic assistance. Political measures were pre-empted when Tito imprisoned Yugoslav communists loyal to Moscow before they could move against him. Documents released in the 1990s showed that Stalin's aides devised a multitude of covert plots to assassinate Tito. Several of these involved a notorious special agent, Josif Grigulevich, who had been posing as a senior Costa Rican diplomat in Rome and Belgrade. The idea was for Grigulevich (code-named "Max") either to release deadly bacteria during a private meeting with Tito or to fire a concealed silent gun at him during an embassy reception. All these plans fell through, leaving Stalin with the unattractive option of resorting to all-out military force, an option he declined to pursue. Were it not for Yugoslavia's location on the periphery of Eastern Europe, it is unlikely that Stalin would have shown such restraint. Khrushchev later said that he was "absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had had a common border with Yugoslavia Stalin would have intervened militarily." (2) Plans for a full-scale military operation were indeed prepared (though the full plans have not yet been released from TsAMO or the Presidential Archive), but in the end the Soviet Union was forced to accept a breach in its East European sphere and the loss of its strategic position in the western Balkans and on the Adriatic Sea. This brief discussion of new evidence from the East European and former Soviet archives about the Soviet-Yugoslav split suggests the richness of the work done by Gibiansky and others on this topic. Research on countless other issues and events has been equally worthwhile and illuminating. The former East-bloc archives are not a panacea for our study of the Cold War, but they are clearly helping us to get a better sense of what happened and why. NOTES (1) This is a topic that Gibiansky has explored at some length, most recently in "Ideia balkanskogo ob"edineniia i plany ee osushchestvleniia v 40-e gody XX veka," Voprosy istorii, No. 11-12 (November-December 2001), pp. 38-56. (2) N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniia [typescript], "Vzaimootnosheniia s sotsialisticheskimi stranami," p. 20e. --------------------------------------------------------- 2. BOOK REVIEW BY STEPHEN D. SHENFIELD VLADISLAV ZUBOK AND CONSTANTINE PLESHAKOV. INSIDE THE KREMLIN'S COLD WAR: FROM STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV (Harvard University Press, 1996) This book is an impressively coherent account and analysis of what is now known about the genesis and early period of the Cold War as viewed through the eyes of Soviet leaders from Stalin to Khrushchev. (1) The authors are long-time associates of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences in Moscow, although Zubok did much of the research for the book while at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. The authors' most valuable contribution is at last to bring clarity to the issue that for so long confused Western observers -- the respective roles of ideology and realpolitik in Soviet foreign policy. They do so by shifting focus from the abstract entity of the Soviet party-state to the personalities, experience, and worldviews of specific leaders -- Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev. (2) The persisting center of gravity of Soviet thinking about world affairs was "the revolutionary-imperial paradigm, a peculiar blend of ideological and geopolitical motivations." Each of the two components served the other, with neither enjoying clear dominance. Around this center of gravity there were at various times significant fluctuations, but the paradigm was always reconfirmed (until Gorbachev). Although it was Stalin who first established the revolutionary-imperial paradigm in the 1930s, Zubok and Pleshakov argue that for a brief period near the end of the war and just after it Stalin was prepared to give priority to realpolitik and reach a long-term modus vivendi with the Western powers based on a stable division of the world into spheres of influence and joint management of the international system through the United Nations. The death of Roosevelt and his replacement by Truman, the deepening division of Germany and the economic challenge represented by the Marshall Plan led Stalin to shift course in 1947 to consolidation of the Soviet bloc through the newly created Cominform and renewed ideological confrontation with the West. The idea of Stalin as a disillusioned advocate of détente is hard to reconcile with our image of him as the epitome of all evil. But any realistic leader of a country devastated by war might have sought a long period of international stability in order to concentrate on reconstruction. There is no need to impute to Stalin a love for peace as such. Nor does realpolitik necessarily imply moderation. The terms of settlement with the West that Stalin had in mind could hardly have seemed acceptably moderate to most Western politicians. The Soviet security zone was to include not only Eastern Europe but also a "friendly" and "neutral" Germany and Western Europe (at least on the continent) on what would later become the Finnish model. And Britain and the US were to deal with the USSR as an equal. The West was not ready for a deal on Stalin's terms, especially as few yet realized how short-lived the Western monopoly on nuclear weapons was to be. Immediately after Stalin's death, two members of the new collective leadership -- prime minister Georgy Malenkov and secret police chief Lavrenty Beria -- again tried to reach an understanding with the West. Like Stalin in 1945-46, they were prepared to sacrifice the East German regime in exchange for a neutral united Germany. It was no coincidence that Malenkov and Beria were the two members of the leadership most closely involved in the nuclear weapons program, and so the first to grasp how the new weapons were changing the world. Malenkov was the first Soviet leader to state that a nuclear war would destroy world civilization. He was soon removed from power. (Beria was executed by Khrushchev.) It is true that Khrushchev, once he had concentrated power in his hands, also sought to improve relations with the West. But Khrushchev's concept of "peaceful coexistence" remained firmly anchored in the revolutionary-imperial paradigm. In fact, the "revolutionary" component of Khrushchev's foreign policy received new impetus from several factors -- the opportunities apparently presented by decolonization in the Third World, the beginning of Sino-Soviet competition for legitimacy within the international communist movement, and the Cuban revolution. Cuba was especially important to Khrushchev. As the authors point out, Khrushchev was not only the first Soviet reformer: he was also the last Soviet leader with a heartfelt personal belief in the communist dream. He was deeply affected by the romantic appeal of the Cuban revolution. When he deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962, his main motive was not to change the strategic balance between the superpowers but to deter American invasion in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. The effect of the Chinese factor changed over time. So long as Khrushchev was trying to preserve unity with China, the need to placate Mao was one more factor working against détente. And indeed Mao staged deliberate provocations -- notably, the shelling of the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Straits in 1958 -- solely with a view to heightening the US-Soviet confrontation. However, once the Sino-Soviet split was accepted as irrevocable, the Maoist line of "not fearing war" served as a foil for sharpening the Soviet stance on peaceful coexistence. Thus the Sino-Soviet split, together with the shock of getting so close to nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis, paved the way for the shift toward détente at the end of Khrushchev's term of office. The study makes us more aware of the existence and importance of multipolarity within the communist camp. The incipient Sino-Soviet split was not the only case in point. Thus East German leader Walter Ulbricht played an autonomous part in the chain of events leading up to the crises over West Berlin, while the initiative for the attack on South Korea in 1950 came from North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung (though he did seek and eventually obtain Stalin's approval). The course of the war in Korea was shaped by the intricate politics of the triangular relations between the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. One might wish to argue with the authors' interpretation of certain events, but on the whole this book raises the analysis of Soviet policy in the Cold War to a higher and more fruitful level. Similar studies are badly needed of later phases of the Cold War. Only then will we be in a position to consider the Cold War in its totality. NOTES (1) One can see what difference the new sources have made by comparing the book with the best earlier account of the genesis of the Cold War from the Soviet point of view, Vojtech Mastny's "Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945" (Columbia University Press, 1979). (2) For the sake of balance, it is useful to read the book in conjunction with the pen-portraits of Molotov, Malenkov, and others in Roy Medvedev's "All Stalin's Men" (Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1983). Medvedev's focus is on the roles played by these leaders in domestic affairs. -------------------------------------------------------- 3. Isabella Ginor. THE RUSSIANS WERE COMING: THE SOVIET MILITARY THREAT IN THE SIX-DAY WAR OF 1967 On June 10, 1967, with Egypt and Syria facing defeat in the Six-Day War, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin transmitted to US President Lyndon Johnson a demand that the Israeli advance be halted, backed up by the threat that otherwise the USSR would take "all necessary action, including military action." Western historians have hitherto attributed little but bluster and an attempt at deterrence to this threat, assuming that the Soviet Union had neither the operational capability to undertake direct military intervention in the Arab- Israeli conflict nor the political will to risk a clash with the United States. These assumptions are now challenged by new evidence, including official and unofficial Russian publications and interview testimony from persons directly involved. These sources reveal that during the Six-Day War the Soviet Union did set in motion large-scale military operations to assist Egypt and especially Syria, first in making their plans to overcome Israel and then in stemming Israel's pre-emptive attack. The planned operations included a naval landing on the Israeli coast, for which purpose a 30-ship fleet was assembled in the Mediterranean Sea, and airborne troop reinforcements and air support by fighter and bomber squadrons that were pre-positioned in the southern USSR well before the outbreak of hostilities. These plans were initiated by a military-KGB elite who aimed to consolidate the USSR's strategic position in the Arab world by overwhelming Israel. Had their true purpose been deterrence, the operations would not have been so carefully -- and successfully -- concealed from American and Israeli intelligence (although the latter did have vague suspicions that something of the kind was afoot). Despite the rout of Egypt by Israel, full implementation of the Soviet plans was blocked by the opposition of civilian leaders in the Politburo, who feared that it might lead to a superpower confrontation and possibly to nuclear war. The likelihood of direct Soviet military intervention was greatest on June 10, when Syria, whose alliance with the USSR was closer than Egypt's, also faced defeat. The operations were finally aborted, with the landing force only about 100 kilometers from the Israeli coast, as the result of a firm though poorly informed US response and Israel's decision to agree to a cease-fire. The USSR's failure to intervene caused it severe problems with its Arab (and other) clients. In order to secure their continued allegiance, Moscow re-armed Egypt and Syria following their defeat, and effectively deployed a large military force in Egypt during the War of Attrition of 1969-70. Thereby it made a vital contribution to the preparation of Egypt's successful attack across the Suez Canal in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. NOTE Isabella Ginor is an Israeli journalist specializing in former Soviet affairs and a fellow of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This is an edited version of a synopsis she provided of her article in the December 2000 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, published by Bar-Ilan University. The full version is available at: http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2000/issue4/jv4n4a5.html -------------------------------------------------------- 4. THE SOVIET NUCLEAR WAR SCARE OF THE EARLY 1980s SOURCE: Stephen J. Cimbala. Russia and Armed Persuasion. New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers [www.rowmanlittlefield.com], 2001, Chapter 3. The main theme of Professor Cimbala (Pennsylvania State University) in this book is the difficulty that Russian political and military leaders have experienced throughout the 20th century, and still experience as the 21st century begins, in using military power for any purpose other than the preparation and conduct of total war. These other purposes include small wars, peacekeeping operations, information war, arms control, crisis management, and above all "armed persuasion" -- that is, nuclear and non-nuclear deterrence and compellence. From this perspective the author examines a series of case studies, ranging in time from the failure of Tsarist Russia to keep out of the First World War in 1914 to the current war in Chechnya. But the case study that casts most light on the Cold War is that of the Soviet war scare of the early 1980s that reached its height in 1983 when Yuri Andropov was Soviet leader. Inside information about this episode was first revealed by Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, who had been KGB resident in London. (1) Cimbala provides a succinct analysis of the facts that are now known, concluding that the most dangerous year of the Cold War may not have been -- as the conventional account has it -- 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, but rather 1983. The beginning of the war scare may be dated to May 1981, when Andropov -- at that time still chairman of the KGB -- told a KGB conference in Moscow that the new US Administration of President Ronald Reagan was actively preparing for nuclear war, and that an American first nuclear strike had become a real possibility. In order to obtain the earliest possible advance warning of such an attack and thus the best chance of retaliation or pre-emption, a global intelligence-gathering operation was to be launched, code-named RYaN -- the Russian acronym for "nuclear missile attack." The KGB and its rival the GRU (the military intelligence department of the General Staff) were for once to work together in monitoring a wide range of political, military, and economic indicators suggestive of NATO preparations for a nuclear attack -- for example, mobilization and civil defense measures, the disappearance of prominent individuals and their families from their homes, or the sabotage of strategic facilities in the USSR. RYaN continued for about three years. Activity peaked in the fall of 1983 and fell off during 1984. East German intelligence under the leadership of Markus Wolf made a big contribution to the effort. Cimbala traces the origins of the Soviet war scare to NATO's "dual track" decision of December 1979, under which up to 572 new intermediate-range nuclear missiles (Cruise and Pershing) were to be deployed in Western Europe at the same time as negotiations were pursued with a view to reducing or eliminating the intermediate- range missiles (SS20s) that the USSR had been deploying since 1977. The Pershings were viewed by Soviet leaders with particular alarm. A Soviet intelligence assessment of February 1983 estimated that they could reach their targets in the USSR within 4-6 minutes. This very short flight time, taken in conjunction with the range and accuracy imputed to the Pershings, raised the specter of successful "decapitation" of the nuclear command and control centers near Moscow. Soviet perceptions of vulnerability were exacerbated in March 1983 when Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars"). The anti-missile space systems envisaged by SDI were regarded as offensive and not as defensive weapons because they could provide little protection against a full-fledged first strike, but might minimize the damage inflicted by a weak and ragged retaliatory second strike. The US might calculate that through combined use of Pershing and SDI it could escape "assured destruction" and "win" a nuclear war. Nevertheless, SDI was a long-term threat. What brought the scare to its peak in the fall of 1983 was a series of three incidents. The first and best-known was the shooting down by Soviet air defense fighters on September 1 of Korean Air Lines flight 007, further raising US-Soviet tensions. The other two incidents received much less publicity, but were far more serious. On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early warning satellite over the US mistook the reflection of sunlight off the top of clouds for the launch of 5 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. An alarm was generated at the satellite-monitoring facility south of Moscow, and General Staff HQ was authorized to respond as they saw fit. (The top Soviet leader still had no device like the nuclear "briefcase" or "football" that would give him direct control over nuclear forces.) However, no confirming evidence came in from the other component of the early warning network, the ground-based radar stations, and it was strange that the number of missiles launched should be so small. The conclusion that the alarm must be false was drawn by an officer named Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov. We are all in his debt. Then between November 2 and 11, 1983 NATO conducted a command post exercise called Able Archer to practice procedures for nuclear release and alert. The Soviet military command suspected that the exercise might camouflage real war preparations. Their suspicions were aroused by the fact that message formats and procedures differed from those used in previous NATO exercises, and also by the greater realism of Able Archer, which simulated all phases of alert from normal day-to-day readiness to general alert. On November 6 the KGB residency in London received from Moscow a new checklist of indicators to monitor, followed some days later by an urgent telegram reporting a non-existent alert at US bases. On November 8-9, some nuclear-capable Soviet aircraft in East Germany, Poland, and the USSR were put on higher levels of alert. Even in the post-Cold War period, it appears, responsible officials in NATO countries have not learned to take care not to trigger false Russian alarms of nuclear attack. On January 25, 1995, a team of American and Norwegian scientists launched an experimental rocket from Andoya Island off Norway's north-western coast. For some reason it was sent neither north toward the Pole nor west into the Atlantic, but east over the Barents Sea, where US nuclear-missile submarines patrol. The rocket was picked up by the Russian early warning system, which identified it as a possible sea-launched ballistic missile on its way to a target in Russia. President Boris Yeltsin opened the "nuclear briefcase" containing authorization codes for a counterstrike. Fortunately the alarm was cancelled when it was determined that the trajectory of the "missile" was not going to cross Russian territory. Cimbala's account relies on secret Soviet sources that were not available to researchers at the time the events occurred. However, there was ample evidence of the nuclear war scare in the open Soviet sources of the early 1980s. (2) There seems to be a high degree of consistency between the open and the closed sources, although the latter reveal much more about how Moscow was dealing with the perceived threat. And yet those of us who -- as it now turns out -- correctly understood Soviet threat perceptions and protested against the NATO INF deployments (and later SDI) that fed such dangerous paranoia in the minds of Soviet leaders were castigated as naïve dupes of Soviet propaganda, if not as conscious agents of Moscow. (3) REFERENCES (1) Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, eds. Comrade Kryuchkov's Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985 (Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 68-90. (2) For analyses of the nuclear war scare based solely on open Soviet sources, see my book: The Nuclear Predicament: Explorations in Soviet Ideology (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), Chapter 5, and also my chapter "The Militarisation of Space Through Soviet Eyes," pp. 129-50 in Stephen Kirby and Gordon Robson, eds. The Militarisation of Space (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987) (3) Professor Cimbala repeats the old Establishment view of the role played by the West European peace movement: "Moscow mounted an aggressive active measures campaign through a variety of European peace movements … in order to stop the scheduled NATO deployments" (p. 59). I can assure my esteemed colleague, on the basis of direct experience, that "aggressive" and "active" as Soviet attempts to influence and penetrate the peace movement may have been, they were also extremely inept and without significant impact -- if not, indeed, counterproductive from the Soviet point of view. The peace movement tried to stop the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles, but it did so purely on its own initiative as an independent civic actor responsive not to Soviet interests but to the interests of all humanity. -------------------------------------------------------- 5. THE COLD WAR: NOT SO STABLE AFTER ALL I suspect that the revelations in the two preceding pieces may come as something of a shock to many people, muffled only by the comforting thought that all this is now safely in the past (or so we all hope). That the world should have been so close to the brink of nuclear war in 1967 and in 1983 (and when else?) runs directly counter to the conventional Western wisdom about the Cold War that we were fed for so long. The conventional wisdom granted that there had been some dangerous moments during the first 15 years of the Cold War -- in particular, the confrontations over Berlin and above all the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. (In the USSR it was called the Caribbean crisis.) But thereafter, largely in reaction to that crisis, the superpowers had learned to take more care and conduct their rivalry in accordance with "rules of the game" that though implicit were well understood and accepted by both sides. As a result, the Cold War settled down into a basically stable and predictable standoff. There are many who -- perceiving the Cold War in this light and faced with the uncertainties and instabilities of the post-Cold War world -- even look back on those times with a definite feeling of nostalgia. The supposed stability of the Cold War system rested on the following main pillars: -- Both superpowers respected the rigid division of Europe into American and Soviet spheres of influence. -- The superpowers conducted their rivalry in the Third World by indirect means, using client states as proxies and renouncing direct military interventions as these might lead to clashes between American and Soviet military forces. -- Each superpower was confident that the other was reliably deterred from launching a nuclear attack "out of the blue" by mutually assured destruction (MAD), and was not therefore tempted itself to launch such an attack by way of prevention or pre-emption. MAD was perceived as a highly robust "existential" condition, invulnerable to the twists and turns of the arms race. -- Escalation to nuclear war in the context of a severe crisis or conventional clash between the superpowers was not excluded as a hypothetical possibility. However, the chance of this happening was negligibly small precisely because the risk of nuclear war would always impel the superpowers to act with due caution, forestalling or defusing any crises that might arise and avoiding direct conventional clashes. Thus the hypothetical risk of nuclear war was not so dangerous, and could indeed serve a useful purpose in "extended deterrence." There were, however, ambiguities in this system that created ample scope for misunderstanding. For one thing, was the WHOLE of the Third World to be open to rivalry without direct military intervention? Or were the superpowers allowed fixed spheres of influence in those parts of the Third World close to their borders -- the US in Latin America, in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan? The conduct and attitudes of the superpowers with regard to these regions leads one to conclude that each claimed such a sphere for itself but refused to recognize the corresponding claim of the other. And in Vietnam, of course, the US intervened directly in a country that was very far from its borders. We see a similar ambiguity in the sphere of nuclear deterrence theory. There was always a significant difference between the version of the conventional wisdom found in academic international relations texts, built around the symmetrical concept of mutual deterrence, and the version that held sway in strategic studies, with its close links to the politico-military establishment. In the latter it was always the "Soviets" who had to be deterred, while "we" preferred to be deterred as little as possible. This duality, which existed also on the Soviet side (with signs reversed), pointed to the fragility of the entire construct. Even during the Cold War, the conventional wisdom was contested by those who questioned whether the Soviet leaders really did understand and sincerely subscribe to all the rules and ideas that were supposed to guide their conduct. After all, even in the open Soviet literature there were plenty of indications that they might not do so -- for instance, the resistance of military authors to the idea that nuclear war would mean the end of civilization, and statements that it was the duty of the USSR to "intercept the export of counter-revolution." The critics fell into two separate groups. On the one hand, there were those who doubted whether Soviet leaders were reliably deterred from risky adventures, as according to the conventional wisdom they should be. On the other hand, there was those who thought that the Soviet leaders might have fears of unprovoked American nuclear attack -- fears that according to the conventional wisdom they should not have. As the first group of critics were regarded as "right-wing" and the second group as "left-wing," people tended to overlook the possibility that BOTH might be right. Actually there is neither a logical nor a psychological inconsistency between adventurism and paranoia. Perhaps they even naturally complement one another. In any case, we now know that both WERE right. Soviet leaders were both more adventuristic and more paranoid than most of us realized at the time. I find it hard to detect any trend over time toward greater caution in Soviet behavior. Stalin was actually quite cautious in the early years. Although he finally gave his consent to the attack on South Korea in 1950, he resisted repeated pleas from Pyongyang to commit ground troops, insisting that the Chinese do the job instead. Soviet and American pilots did admittedly clash in the air. (1) In the late 1950s and early 1960s Khrushchev behaved much more recklessly. It took the traumatic experience of the Cuban missile crisis to teach him the full dangers of nuclear brinkmanship. (2) But Khrushchev was to remain in power for only another couple of years. The crucial issue was the extent to which the lessons that he had learned were also learned at the institutional level. Isabella Ginor's research highlights just how limited Soviet learning at the institutional level had been. That Soviet leaders should have planned, and been well on the way to carrying out, a large-scale attack on such a close US ally as Israel, as Ginor shows they did in 1967, demonstrates that they had not as a body deeply internalized the supposed rules of the Cold War game. At most, the fact that the operation was aborted at the last minute suggests that SOME of the Soviet civilian leaders had internalized those rules. (3) An attack on another US ally, Pakistan, was under serious consideration in the early 1980s. Frustrated by the way in which the Afghan mojjahedin were able to use the refugee camps in Pakistan as a base and sanctuary, the Soviet military command requested permission to carry out a cross-border attack on the camps. After weighing up all the pros and cons, the leadership eventually decided to veto the operation. (4) Again, caution had won the day, but a direct attack on a US ally was not automatically ruled out of court, as the conventional wisdom would have led one to expect. NOTES (1) See Zubok and Pleshakov (reviewed at no. 2 above), pp. 54-72. (2) See Chapter 8, "Khrushchev and Kennedy: The Taming of the Cold War," in Zubok and Pleshakov. The authors' contention that the Cold War was "tamed" after 1962 seems to be an assumption taken uncritically from the conventional wisdom rather than a finding derived from their own research, which pertains only to the early phases of the Cold War. (3) It might be illuminating to undertake a systematic comparison of Soviet behavior in the Six-Day War and in the Yom Kippur / Ramadan War of 1973. The key text for the latter is Victor Israelyan, "Inside the Kremlin During the Yom Kippur War" (Penn State Press, 1995). (4) Even now I prefer not to reveal my sources for this information. That an attack into Pakistan was under consideration was hinted at in thinly veiled threats against Pakistan that appeared at this time in open Soviet sources. -------------------------------------------------------- 6. PRICE OF THE COLD WAR: NUCLEAR DISASTERS IN THE URALS On June 8, 1948 the first Soviet military reactor for the production of plutonium-239 for the atomic bomb went into operation at the new "Mayak" [meaning beacon or lighthouse] Production Association just east of the town of Kyshtym in the Southern Urals (Chelyabinsk Province). The reactor was finally shut down on June 16, 1987. Radioactive waste from "Mayak" has been released into the environment in three ways: [1] For over six years, from 1949 to 1956, radioactive waste was deliberately dumped into the River Techa. The four largest villages on the river's banks were never evacuated. The river was cordoned off with barbed wire, and people were forbidden to fish in it or to pick mushrooms and berries or cut hay nearby. In 1951 radioactivity from the river was found in the Arctic Ocean. [2] Radioactive waste from the reactor was stored in underground water tanks. In the summer of 1957, undetected by the defective monitoring system, the cooling water in one of these tanks must have begun to dry out. Finally, on September 29, the resulting rise in temperature set off a powerful explosion, throwing a kilometer-high radioactive cloud up into the atmosphere. The cloud was carried by the wind through Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen Provinces. An elongated strip about 1,000 square kilometers in area was contaminated with strontium-90 at levels considered too dangerous for habitation. More than 16,000 people from 40 villages and settlements were evacuated. The zone was christened the East Urals Radioactive Trace. Agriculture and permanent residence are still forbidden in a zone of about 350 square kilometers. Some 200,000 people exposed to smaller doses were never evacuated. [3] More radioactivity was released a decade later in another accident, also caused by the drying out of water used to store radioactive waste. The nearby Lake Karachay had been used since 1951 as a repository for waste from the reactor. The winter of 1966-67 and the early spring of 1967 were unusually dry, with little rain or snow. The water level fell, exposing the silt sediments below the lake shore, which dried into a fine dust. Between April 10 and May 15, 1967 there were gale-force winds that blew this radioactive dust over an area of some 20,000 square kilometers, further irradiating about half a million people. A person standing on the lake shore near the area where wastes are discharged from the plant would receive about 600 roentgens of radiation, a lethal dose, in an hour. The lake is now being filled with hollow concrete blocks, rock, and soil to reduce the dispersion of radioactivity. A report on the health of the people living along the banks of the Techa River was published in 1991. It showed that the incidence of leukemia had increased by 41 per cent since 1950. Between 1980 and 1990, cancers had risen by 21 per cent, and diseases of the circulatory system by 31 per cent. These figures are probably underestimates, because local physicians were instructed to limit the number of death certificates they issued containing diagnoses of cancer and other radiation-related illnesses. According to Gulfarida Galimova, a local doctor who has been keeping her own records, the average life span for women in the village of Muslyumovo was 47 in 1993, compared to a national average of 72, while the average life span of Muslyumovo men was 45 compared to a national average of 69. A NOTE ON SOURCES The only book on the subject still appears to be Zhores A. Medvedev, "Nuclear Disaster in the Urals" (London: Angus & Robertson, 1979). In 1976, Zhores Medvedev -- a Soviet biologist and dissident then in exile in England and twin brother of historian Roy Medvedev -- happened to mention, in an article for the popular-science journal "New Scientist," a nuclear accident that had contaminated a large area of the Southern Urals in 1957 or 1958. To his surprise -- for he had not realized that the disaster was generally unknown in the West -- the passing reference sparked a media sensation. Sir John Hill, chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, worried that the revelation would fuel public opposition to nuclear power, dismissed Medvedev's claim as "pure science fiction." Medvedev's response was to bring together all available evidence and write a book on the disaster. The book is a masterpiece of scientific detective work. Apart from vague CIA leaks and the testimony of another Soviet scientist who had passed through the contaminated zone and was now in Israel, he relied on published Soviet scientific studies of the effect of radioactivity on water and field plants, trees, fish, mammals, birds, and soil animals. Although direct indication of where these studies had been conducted was lacking, there were many clues pointing to the Southern Urals. Medvedev's book nonetheless inevitably contained some inaccuracies. While he correctly estimated the area of the contaminated zone, he got its shape wrong. He was unable to infer the exact mechanism of the accident at Kyshtym, and was not aware of the other sources of contamination. The most accessible recent source is the website maintained by the New York-based film producer Slawomir Grunberg at http://www.logtv.com/chelya/. Grunberg has also made a film entitled "Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet." The best account in English, including a detailed survey of types and levels of radioactive contamination in the Southern Urals, is a report produced in 1997 by the Joint Norwegian-Russian Expert Group for Investigation of Radioactive Contamination in the Northern Areas, entitled "Sources contributing to radioactive contamination of the Techa River and areas surrounding the 'Mayak' production association, Urals, Russia" and available from the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority. Another informative technical account of the history of nuclear disasters in the Southern Urals is given in: I. I. Kryshev and Ye. P. Riazantsev. Ekologicheskaia bezopasnost' iaderno-energeticheskogo kompleksa Rossii [Ecological Security of Russia's Nuclear Energy Complex]. Moscow: Izdat, 2000, Chapter 7. Relevant articles have also appeared in the technical journals "Health Physics" (1993, 1996, 1998), "Science of the Total Environment" (1994), and "Journal of Environmental Radioactivity" (1997). -------------------------------------------------------- 7. BOOK REVIEW by Andrew Savchenko (Independent Scholar, Providence RI, USA) VLADIMIR SHLAPENTOKH. A NORMAL TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY: HOW THE SOVIET UNION FUNCTIONED AND HOW IT COLLAPSED (M. E. Sharpe, 2001) The name of Vladimir Shlapentokh was became familiar to Soviet social scientists in the 1960s, when he pioneered empirical sociological research, non-existent in the USSR since the late 1920s. Now a professor at Michigan State University, Shlapentokh is known to the American reader as the author of several books on Soviet society. In his latest book he attempts to answer the question that is still on the minds of many Sovietologists of various disciplinary affiliations. Why did the Soviet Union collapse so rapidly and unexpectedly? Caveat lector [Latin for "let the reader beware]: you will not find a satisfactory answer to this question in Shlapentokh's book, although it makes for interesting reading. Most of the book consists of a narrative of Soviet history, presented through the prism of the author's first-hand familiarity with life in the Soviet Union. The narrative is lucid so long as it relies on simple commonsense reasoning. Unfortunately, the author's forays into sociological theory only add unnecessary complication. He spends -- and invites the reader to do likewise -- a considerable amount of time and effort defining what is a normal society. The reader would be well advised to decline the invitation, because at the end Shlapentokh comes up with a less than useful contention that a society that managed to reproduce itself for some 60 years must be normal. Shlapentokh's treatment of totalitarianism is marginally better. He firmly adheres to the concept of totalitarianism introduced by Brzezinski and Friedrich over 40 years ago, which relies on actually existing totalitarian institutions, such as the single ruling party, the omnipotent supreme leader, and the centralized economy. While useful in its day, this approach has long since been supplemented, and to some extent superseded, by the more subtle concept of totalitarianism as an idea or aspiration. Although partly embodied in tangible state structures, this aspiration, which exists in the minds not only of the ruling elite but also of a significant part of the population, can never be fully realized. Had the author chosen to use this concept of totalitarianism, the analysis would have been more consistent. As it is, his dependence on the structural concept of totalitarianism forces him to contend that Soviet society maintained recognizable totalitarian institutions throughout its history. He thereby puts himself in the untenable position of claiming that the main Soviet institutions remained basically unchanged from 1918 until they began to fall apart in the late 1980s. Immediately he has to qualify this premise and then proceeds throughout the book implicitly to refute it by describing profound changes in major Soviet institutions that occurred in the course of Soviet history. Attempts to build a conceptual framework are mostly confined to the first chapter. The rest of the book makes for informative reading, especially for those new to the field of Soviet studies. Professor Shlapentokh makes some very intriguing statements. Unfortunately, he fails to develop them even to the level of reasonably well-presented hypotheses. For example, he casually mentions that the NSDAP [German Nazi party] was created as an imitation of the Bolshevik party. This statement deserves to be further developed and supported with relevant references. Its elaboration is especially important in the context of the author's perception of totalitarianism as a set of institutions that includes a party of the Bolshevik or Nazi type. However, the author chooses not to develop this statement, missing an opportunity to bolster his conceptual apparatus. To his credit, throughout the book the author recognizes the affinity between the Soviet and the Nazi political systems, thereby consistently keeping the Soviet Union within the category of totalitarian societies. Shlapentokh's casual treatment of facts is especially frustrating in his analysis of the Soviet economy. Thus he asserts that the Soviet economy in the 1960s and early 1970s grew faster than Western economies, but fails to supply figures to support this view. Even if official statistics created the impression of rapid economic growth, the author is familiar with the work of Soviet economists such as Khanin who presented much lower and more realistic figures. It would be interesting to know what information he was using. He also fails to mention the different nature of growth in the USSR (mostly due to the expansion of extractive industry) and in Western economies (almost exclusively due to increased productivity based on new technologies). The statement about "the falling value of the ruble" in the 1960s and 1970s is not only irrelevant in the context of the Soviet economy, but impossible to support with data, as the Soviet national currency at the time was never legally traded. Black market data would also have given a highly distorted picture. The author praises the independence of the leading enterprise managers under Stalin. The reader should realize that in practice this "independence" meant reporting personally to Comrade Stalin instead of to the branch ministry. Indeed, given the lack of an effective central coordinating mechanism in the Soviet economy of the 1930s and 1940s, those enterprise managers who reported directly to Stalin were less independent in their decision-making than those who did not have privileged access to the supreme leader. The author writes that the Soviet economic system used prices to regulate economic activity, but does not mention that throughout the post-war period Soviet planners tried to neutralize incentives inherent in price differences, thereby ensuring the predominance of direct vertical controls. As for the assertion that taxes played a regulatory role in the Soviet economy, a fiscal system based on an almost flat income tax and a sales tax on some consumer goods has very limited regulatory capacity. The author's experience as a Soviet pollster makes his analysis of Soviet public opinion the most valuable part of the book. His treatment of the "two-level mentality," a frame of mind that allowed Soviet people to go about their everyday business while simultaneously supporting the evident absurdities of communist ideology, sheds much light on this truly Orwellian aspect of Soviet society. Equally insightful is the analysis of the "open" and the "closed" ideology. The open ideology was presented by the party leadership for consumption by the non-party public and rank and file party members, while the closed ideology was used within the upper echelons of the party. The author's exposition of these dichotomies serves to clarify the contradictions between pragmatic policies and ideological statements that have frequently been observed throughout Soviet history. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the account of the last decade of the Soviet Union. Refuting several commonly advanced hypotheses regarding the causes of the Soviet collapse, the author presents his vision of events, stressing the crucial disruptive role played by Gorbachev. Shlapentokh views the early Gorbachev reforms as an attempt to maintain military parity with the US after Ronald Reagan's announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The reformers believed that the new level of technology required to counter the emerging threat to the Soviet arsenal of ICBMs could be attained only through economic restructuring. As the author correctly notes, whether the SDI did indeed amount to a credible threat is beside the point, as there is enough evidence to prove that the Soviet leaders believed that it did. The absence of official statements mentioning the need to counter SDI as a motive for reforms does not weaken the argument, as this is consistent with the dichotomy between the open and the closed ideology. The thesis that the desire to maintain military parity was the main reason for reform is supported by many researchers whose studies are quoted by the author. Indeed, Gorbachev's early reforms did not include transition to the market or even tangible decentralization. Instead they promoted "acceleration" of economic growth within the existing economic structure. However, the author's reference to these reforms as "neo-Stalinist" is confusing, as they did not envision a degree of centralized control commensurate with the goals of Stalin's economic policies. It would be interesting to have a more detailed account of how the "acceleration" stage of the reforms failed and came to be supplanted by "perestroika." It is disappointing that Shlapentokh only mentions this failure in passing. While the initial reforms are presented in detail and with abundant references to supporting sources, the crucial shift to "perestroika" is registered but not plausibly explained. The book contains many references to original Soviet and Russian sources not readily available in the US. This, together with the author's personal familiarity with Soviet society, make for quite an informative and insightful account of important aspects of Soviet history. ADDITIONAL COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR I too found it frustrating that the exact meaning of Shlapentokh's definition of the Soviet system as "normal totalitarianism" was never clarified. I agree with the reviewer that totalitarianism is best understood as an unrealizable utopian aspiration. Indeed, the word was used in this sense by the man who coined it, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Moreover, Shlapentokh acknowledges that at least at certain times -- during leadership transitions, when the key institution of the supreme leader was missing -- the USSR did not function in accordance with the totalitarian model. The question then arises: To the extent that those who aspired to make the Soviet Union a totalitarian society fell short of realizing their aspiration, what other principles made Soviet society tick? Within this constrained framework, the alternative theories are a little more plausible than the author allows. Unfortunately, Shapentokh seems to be aware of only one theory apart from totalitarianism -- pluralism. This theory, based as it is on the free play of group interests in Western society, is the least appropriate for understanding Soviet reality. But there are stronger candidates more compatible with the totalitarian impetus -- above all, the theory of corporatism (another concept with origins in Italian fascism). One crucial issue closely connected to this theoretical debate is the viability of elite conspiracies to depose the supreme leader. In a properly functioning totalitarian state, such a conspiracy is very unlikely to take shape and extremely unlikely to succeed. Shlapentokh dwells at length on the pitiful failure of the Soviet elite to depose Gorbachev, whom by the end of the 1980s they had come to hate, and attributes their apparent helplessness to the totalitarian nature of the society. All well and good, except for one glaring fact that the author glosses over. After all, one supreme leader, Nikita Khrushchev, WAS deposed by an elite conspiracy! How is that to be explained? Clearly one relevant factor is the much greater self-confidence of the elite of the mid-1960s compared to the demoralized elite of the late 1980s. But one cannot argue that elite conspiracies were doomed to fail by virtue of the totalitarian character of the political system. As for Soviet society being "normal," this might be understood as "compatible with human nature." Those who once argued that a society without private property flew in the face of human nature and would for that reason soon collapse were indeed proven wrong. Shlapentokh's data on the public support that the Soviet system eventually acquired -- the full support of an active minority and the partial support of most of the population -- point in the same direction. The view that Soviet society was normal in this sense has been most vigorously expressed by the Soviet (later émigré) philosopher Alexander Zinoviev. It is a pity that the author does not engage with his ideas. Just how capable was the Soviet system of reproducing itself in the conditions of the modern world? It is one thing to say -- as Shlapentokh does at some places -- that the system had not exhausted its reserves and if not for Gorbachev's meddling could have staggered on for another 20 years or so. Many analysts would accept that. But it is quite another thing to claim, as the word "normality" seems to imply, that the system could have gone on indefinitely. Again, it is unclear which thesis the author wishes to defend. -- SDS -------------------------------------------------------- 8. DID CULTURAL EXCHANGE WIN THE COLD WAR FOR THE WEST? SOURCE: Unpublished paper by Yale Richmond entitled "Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: How the West Won." Yale Richmond is author of "U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986: Who Wins?" (Westview Press, 1987) and of "From Nyet to Da: Understanding the Russians" (Intercultural Press, 1992 and 1996 revised). It is most unlikely that anyone knows more about U.S.- Soviet cultural exchanges than Yale Richmond. As a cultural officer in the US Foreign Service, he negotiated and administered such exchanges for many years, and he has also interviewed many of the Russian and American participants. Western strategists during the Cold War tended to look upon cultural exchange as a marginal and rather airy-fairy issue, not expecting it to have any major impact on the Soviet system. Indeed, this was an assumption shared by the Soviet leaders, who would not otherwise have been willing to allow cultural exchanges. Mr. Richmond demonstrates that exchanges were in fact conducted on quite a large scale and had a significant social impact. Between 1958 and 1988 some 50,000 Soviet citizens visited the US through exchange programs. To take another example, between 1959 and 1991 the US Information Agency brought to the USSR 20 exhibitions of American life. These were displayed not only in Moscow and Leningrad but also in major provincial centers, and were seen by millions of people. It is true that the Soviet authorities did not allow ordinary people to participate in certain kinds of exchange. Only a few trusted loyalists were sent to study at American universities, while politically sensitive American films were screened only at clubs for the intellectual and political elite. But these restrictions had a boomerang effect: they introduced the Trojan Horse of dissent into the Establishment itself. Thus Alexander Yakovlev, who studied American history and politics at Columbia University in 1958-59, later as a senior party official under Gorbachev became the "godfather of glasnost." His KGB classmate Oleg Kalugin also became a democratic activist in the late 1980s. And the films "On the Beach" and "Dr. Strangelove" helped bring home to the Soviet elite the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. (1) A particularly important role in the emergence of "new thinking" was played by the Moscow foreign-relations think-tanks, such as Academician Georgy Arbatov's Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada. Scholarly exchange with the West gave the institutchiks access to Western data on Soviet military forces (they were denied access to Soviet data), as well as to concepts that they could apply to criticize Soviet military programs. These concepts -- e.g., minimum nuclear deterrence and non-provocative or non-offensive defense -- came mainly from researchers connected to the West European peace movement. (2) Another incubator of reform-minded journalists, scholars, and party officials was the Prague editorial office of "Problems of Peace and Socialism," a journal of the international communist movement established in 1959. One "Praguer," Yegor Yakovlev (no relation of Alexander Yakovlev) was to be one of the main pioneers of glasnost after his appointment in 1985 as editor of the weekly "Moscow News." At a more popular level, the biggest ever cultural exchange was the 6th World Youth Festival, held in Moscow in the summer of 1957. It is estimated that 60,000 Soviet young people and 34,000 foreign guests took part -- although there were only 160 Americans among them, who ignored the "misguided advice" of the State Department not to go. Among other things, the youth festival facilitated the spread of Western popular musical styles -- at that time mainly rock and roll and boogie woogie -- to the USSR. In the 1960s and 1970s, the songs of the Beatles gave many Soviet people a way of "quietly rejecting the System." One point strikes me as bearing further reflection. Many of the cultural and intellectual influences that undermined official Soviet ideology and prepared the ground for change came from the Western left, understood in a broad sense to include the counterculture and the anti-nuclear and green movements as well as West European social democracy and Eurocommunism. The "Praguers" developed their ideas in interaction with West European (as well as Czech and other East European) communists. Italian communists played a part in Gorbachev's ideological evolution. The conceptual impact of the Western peace movement has been noted. And has anybody ever evoked the communist ideal more movingly than the Beatles' John Lennon in "Imagine"? REFERENCES (1) For a discussion of the ideological implications of this issue see Stephen D. Shenfield, The Nuclear Predicament: Explorations in Soviet Ideology (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). (2) See Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999). Another useful account of the genesis of the "new thinking" is that of Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). -------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------- NOTE OF CORRECTION In the last issue I included a piece about Viktoria Tokareva in which I expressed regret that her work has not appeared in English. I have since learned that this is not the case. Picador published a volume of her work, translated by Rosamund Bartlett, in 1993 entitled "The Talisman and Other Tales." Two stories were included in the anthology edited by Helena Goscilo under the title "Balancing Acts" (Indiana UP, 1989), and another in the collection "Lives in Transit" (Ardis, 1995), also edited by Helena Goscilo. -------