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There is a good reason why the book 6WDOLQ·V Russia opens with the statement that the past cannot be known. ‘History is a different way of looking at things, a way of thinking about their vanished meanings. (...) we can never know what it felt like to live in the past. The association of words, places and ideas, or the context of body language and speech, as they appeared to denizens of another world are lost to us forever. (...) It follows that whilst there can be definitive descriptions of things, there can be no definitive history, only meditations on things - artefacts seen from a variety of angles, a never-ending debate on the significance which can be ascribed to the ‘evidence’ or the ‘sources’, the trial of debris left behind by the dead.’2 This is certainly true for the historiography of the Cold War,
characterized by a debate between a great many schools of thought each with its own interpretation of the conflict between East and West. The source material that has become available after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991 has facilitated new debate. This new material has led to the so-called QHZ &ROG :DU KLVWRU\, founded by professor J.L. Gaddis, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and Robert A. Lovett Professor at Yale University. His interview with us offers a general framework for the specific topics dealt with in this issue of Leidschrift. Most attention is given to Stalin’s period in office, as Professor Gaddis identifies Stalin as the main culprit in causing the Cold War.
There are many interpretations of the events, processes and people involved. The title of Gaddis’s latest book :HQRZNQRZ5HWKLQNLQJ&ROG:DU KLVWRU\3 speaks for itself. Assigning responsibility is a strong current in the
historical debate both during and since the Cold War. Who is to ‘blame’ for the Cold War? Who started it? This debate can be broadly divided in three
1 This interview took place on april 25, 2001 in Leiden. We like to thank dr. H.W. van den
Doel for making the interview possible and dr. J. Augustein for translating the ‘preface’.
2 C. Ward, 6WDOLQ·V5XVVLD (second edition London 1999) 1.
schools of thought. Until the sixties the main view was the orthodox interpretation, which saw the Soviet Union as the aggressor. Its main opponent was the United States, which unselfishly dedicated itself to the establishment and support of democracies and freedom. They wanted a world without spheres of influence unlike the totalitarian regime in the USSR. Their policy was primarily reactive. The hostile attitude of the USSR, forced the USA to act in line with their policy of containment.
At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies a revisionist school developed influenced by the actions of the Americans during the Vietnam War. The revisionists criticized the traditionalists for their one-sided approach. They claimed that the United States also shared a responsibility for the Cold War conflict. They saw economic self-interest as the motivating force behind American foreign policy. In their search for economic growth the United States themselves created spheres of influence and built an empire just like the Soviet Union had done. This forced the Soviets, economically weakened by their huge sacrifices during the Second World War, into a search for security. In this view the Soviets and not the Americans were the reactive party.
In the period between the 1970s and 1990s post-revisionism developed, a kind of synthesis of the other two schools. The traditionalist view that Soviet expansion had caused the conflict was maintained, but it was now also accepted that the United States had become an imperialist power itself. Gaddis was part of this school. He emphasized the importance of geopolitics and balance of power. He did not accept that the main motivating force of the foreign policy of the United States was economical. The ‘empire’ created by the US was one based on freedom. The USSR was responsible, but little attention was given to this fact. The leaders of the United States were less able to act rationally than a dictator like Stalin because they had to take account of internal pressures caused by the democratic system.
by invitation’. One of the main characteristics of the QHZ&ROG:DUKLVWRU\ is its emphasis on ideology. In his book Gaddis describes the importance of revolutionary romanticism as a motivating force for Stalin and his successors. The question of good and evil, which historians in the past have frequently tried to avoid, also resurfaces.4
Not just historians, but political scientists and economists are also getting involved in the debate. Where the historian focused on the nation state or the person they take a more theoretical approach.5 Two main views can be
discerned within this, the realist and realist or pluralist (with a neo-liberal institutional character). An exceptional feature of the historiography of the ‘Fifty years war’ was for a long time that the conflict was still raging. Gaddis points out that most experts never knew any other international system, and that its ‘history’ was written without knowing the outcome of the conflict. The innovation brought by the QHZ&ROG:DUKLVWRU\ is that apart from the above, it can treat the fifty years as a rounded off period. It also has the benefit that it can use sources from all participants, and thus obtain a broader international character. The QHZ&ROG:DUKLVWRU\ also assigns an important role to ideas. Although a military conflict was avoided the system collapsed. According to the QHZ &ROG :DU KLVWRULDQV this was cause by a collapse of legitimacy.6 Professor Gaddis, the founder of this school,
however, dislikes the labels used.
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Well, first of all I have never been comfortable with these labels. Because it seems to me that they oversimplify. I did not invent the label post-revisionism. Somebody else invented that. I got stuck with it, yes, it is not one that I chosed. I am not happy with these labels because it seems to me that people use it as a substitute for actually reading books. Books tend to get plugged into these pigeonholes and historians tend to get plugged into them too and that makes the debate too stiff and artificial. It loses subtlety and nuance as a result of this.
4 This overview is primarily based on: R.J. McMahon, T.G. Paterson, 3UREOHPVLQ$PHULFDQ
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‘The Cold War: What do “We now know”?’ in $PHULFDQKLVWRULFDOUHYLHZ (1999) 501-524.
5 Fifty years war, 7.
So it seems to me that if the new Cold War history can do anything at all, the one thing I hope it will do is to get rid of these old labels. Perhaps the old labels made some sense when one was thinking about Cold War history primarily as US diplomatic history. So, I am sure new labels will emerge in time, but I would like to resist that process as long as possible and we will all be better off if we stop worrying about who is a revisionist and who is a post-revisionist and just try to look at the evidence and try to sort it out, making it as clear as we can. I think we are worrying too much about our previous positions as historians. We are no theorists. The structure of our thought does not depend on consistency, on setting up a system that is going to work in all times and all places. And that’s precisely why I resist doing theory in the first place. It seems to me that we are in a perfectly valid position to say ‘well the book that I wrote in 1992 is based on what I knew at that point, but the one I wrote in 1997 is based on what I knew at that point and so they are two different books.’
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Well, I got interested in this subject for a different set of reasons. It started when I was in graduate school in the 1960’s. At that point there were new documents coming out although it were almost exclusively American documents on the early Cold War-period. I decided that I preferred to work in a period where there would always be fresh and new documents and therefore a period one would not necessarily be having to cope with what other historians had done and argue about the same pieces of evidence. It was a field where it was pretty clear that there would always be a steady flow of new documents and new evidence. That is what interested me in the field from the beginning. Of course that has held up. There have always been new documents.
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evidence changed what we knew about our old interpretations of the Cold War. As it happened, a lot more material started coming out from ‘the other side’, not just in Moscow, but also in Eastern Europe and Beijing. So what started out as a set of lectures became a whole book that took much longer to write than I thought. It would take about five years to produce it. So the intention of the book was just to look at the first period of the Cold War up to 1962, to try to pull together the work that other people had done in the archives, some of them my own students, and to try to ask the question ‘What difference does this new information actually make in terms of our understanding of the Cold War?’ I was trying to do it from, as we would say, ‘scratch’. That is with an open mind, not necessarily with a view of trying to defend positions or arguments that I have taken in the past.
In some cases I ended up revising and changing my mind about certain things I said in the past. But it seems to me that this is quite a normal historical process. This is what one should do when one is confronted with new evidence. What was particularly striking about this period was how much new evidence we got all at once. It was rare to have so much new evidence about an old conflict, surfacing at one time.
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I tried to be very careful in the preface to the book by deconstructing every one of those three words. By saying ‘we’ I mean ‘we the scholars’ drawing on the new material. By saying ‘now’, I mean the time that I was writing the book. Not that we have conclusive findings that are going to stand up for all time And ‘now’ being 1997, the period when I was actually writing the book. I even tried to explain what the word ‘know’ means for a historian, because the word ‘know’ never has a definitive final connotation in it. The word ‘know’ for a historian is always a provisional word. Subject to knowing more subject, to having new sources which may cause you to change what you think you know.
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Yes, I would admit that some of this was deliberate, trying to generate a debate, because &ROG :DU KLVWRU\ is and always has been a controversial field. The new documents added to the controversy, because so much of the previous work had been done just on the basis of Western sources and particularly American sources. Getting the new Soviet sources really has pushed the debate back into the direction of assigning greater responsibility to the Soviet Union and many of my own colleagues in the American historical profession were comfortable with doing that. When you have a set of documents providing a detailed view of policy making, one tends to see the bad with the good and one often tends to wither away to the side where you can have that clear window in the policy making. We have had that for a long time with the Americans. We did not have it for the Russians. So it is not surprising that beginning to get it for the Russians has pushed the debate back toward the argument that the Russians were considerably responsible.
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I am not sure. Let’s put it this way. I can say what the intention of the book was. It was to lay out a set of issues which I hoped would be further investigated and I certainly tried to make the point how I saw those issues, but I never wrote the book with the idea that this was going to dominate or shape somehow all the research that was to come. If the effect of the book has been to stimulate historians to pursue more deeply these issues, that’s fine, that’s what I hoped it would do. The last thing I want the book to do is to create what they call a ‘master narrative’. A narrative that has to be imposed on everybody who follows. That was not at all my intention with this and I am happy to say that my own students show very little signs in going that direction. They are quite comfortable in going the opposite direction on some issues. So, at least with my own students, it does not seem a great danger. That’s all to the good.
Well, I think this is something that simply surfaces as you begin to go through new evidence. Sometimes it happens very dramatically. For example, one of the things that we had all presumed was that the relationship between Mao Zedong and Stalin had always been a difficult and awkward relationship even in the 1930’s and 40’s. When Chinese historians began to work with the Chinese material, it became immediately clear that that was not true at all. Mao was much more deferential to Stalin than Mao himself later let people to believe or than the later history of that relationship would suggest. So it did not take long, reading these findings from the Chinese sources, to say ‘Ok, here is something I said in the past that was just wrong on the basis of not having the material’. And so it was quite easy on that one to reassess and to correct what I once said. That was a very clear cut case.
I think we are all influenced in writing history by what is happening at the time we are writing. One of the things I have written and suggested in earlier books was that being a democratic state was in some way a source of weakness for the United States in competing with the Soviet Union. The latter could make decisions faster and more efficiently. We Americans quite often had got the Congress and the press debating decisions and the domestic political pressures, driving many of these decisions. The conclusion in much of my earlier work was that this was a source of weakness. But then you look at how the Cold War came out and look at how successfully the democracies sustained a very consistent, firm policy. And look how unsuccessful the Russians were in this regard and on the basis of new documents and knowing the end of the story you realize that your earlier conclusion wasn’t right.
For most history you do know the end of the story. If we are sitting here today writing a history of the French Revolution or the Dutch rebellion or whatever issue we know the outcome of the story and we know that from the very beginning. But those of us who are working with Cold War history for many years did not know the outcome of the story. And so it is hardly surprising that now that we GR know the outcome, some want to go back and reconsider things
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where I tried to bring in some theoretical insights of one kind or another, but this is not primarily a theoretical book. That is not the point of the book. The one on which I am working now, is, if not a theoretical book, certainly a methodological book. I am quite interested in methodology, but :HQRZNQRZ, was not primarily intended to introduce new theories. It was an effort simply to sort out what the new evidence seemed to show and to put that together in a very clear narrative. Let others construct theories from it that may and may not work.
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First of all, I don’t think you can separate people from ideas. People have ideas. So to say ideas exist outside there, independent of people, doesn’t really make much sense. What I meant to say in the book is that ideology turned out to be more important than we thought in determining Soviet and Chinese behavior. The reason for this is simply that a set of ideas, which we thought only came up in the speeches of the leaders, in fact also showed up in the private discourse and their internal documentation. That was surprising. Many of us had assumed, partly based on theories of nuclear deterrence, that whatever the rhetoric was, whatever the public statement, there was a common way of thinking, a common rationality that both sides shared. And perhaps both sides did to some extend on nuclear deterrence, but it is becoming increasingly clear that they did not in all other areas. Stalin, Khrushchev and Mao really believed that the forces of history where moving towards the socialist world revolution. That was not just rhetoric and realizing this is very important to understanding their actions.
the forebode and foothold to the socialist revolution in Latin-America. That is why I am saying that ideology was important.
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I don’t think so, because it was Stalin who, to a considerable extend, determined what the ideology was and how it was understood. Stalin inherited the ideology of course from Lenin and from Marx, but Stalin was without opposition from 1929 on, after he had defeated Trotsky. From that point on he could determine ideology. So he could have said if he had chosen to, ‘forget about the world revolution’ and his subordinates would have gone along with that. He did not say that. He continued to maintain visions of world revolution, he continued to believe right up to the time of his death that the capitalists would fall out with one another and that there would be another world war: a war between Great Britain and the United States. He was saying these things out of ideological reasons, because Lenin had said them. But we know that Stalin was capable of modifying ideology. We know that he shifted back and forth toward the popular front and away from the popular front, toward industrialization and away from it, tolerating the NEP at some points and than junking it at some other point, and so on. So we know that Stalin was capable of making shifts in ideology and certainly Mao was capable of it. It is just that neither of them ever abandoned the ultimate goal of world revolution.
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Germans fled all in one direction: to the West. It is a good example of ideas at work in people’s minds. In this case it is about seeing one side as by far the lesser of two evils. None of this can be explained in terms of truly numerical considerations. Much of it is difficult to explain in terms of common rationality. But if one just looks at what people themselves actually said and why they acted, one quite often finds that ideas are in the center of it.
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It depends on the kind of history that you are writing. If you are writing a biography of a particular individual, you can go quite deeply into the psychology. But you must be very careful if you are writing about an entire nation. Collective psychology is a dangerous thing to do. American officials used to make very ill-formed judgments about WKHRussian mind or WKH Chinese mind during the Cold War. Many of those judgments were wrong. So I think it is fine at the individual level, but I would be suspicious of it at the collective level.
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running something like 350 spies in the United States. The United States and Great Britain were doing nothing like this in the Soviet Union. It would not have occurred to them to do it and they didn’t have the capability to do it.
The very fact that Stalin was mounting espionage as much against his allies as he was against his adversaries during war, tells you something about what his intentions for the post-war period were. We now have from the KGB-archives and the American intercepts of Soviet communication quite some evidence about the number of spies in the United States. And the number is actually far greater than senator McCarthy ever imagined. Senator McCarthy never found any of them. He was a misguided missile. But the problem was a major problem and it says something about Stalins intentions.
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I think it did not end in part because Stalin had built a system that perpetuated the Cold War-mentality. One can see that with Khrushchev, going back and forth all the time, sometimes talking about reconciliation, but at the same time undertaking aggressive moves such as the Poland crisis and the Cuban missile crisis. Part of it was the fault of the Americans. The Americans did not take the opportunity to explore the possibility of relaxing tensions. Particularly in the period immediately after Stalin’s death when there were some Soviet leaders like Beria and Malenkov who might have been interested in this. So, it was largely a matter of both sides being out of sink with one another. When one of them was interested in exploring the opportunities of relaxation, the other often was not. It was not until roughly the 1970’s that interest in relaxation began to exist to about the same extend on both sides.
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I think the differences are less than you suggest. A lot has to do with terminology here. What I meant when I said that Stalin was comfortable with the Cold War in the same way as a fish is comfortable with water, is that Stalin had a fundamental distrustful view of human nature. Another way to say this would be that Stalin was comfortable with distrusting everyone and this was pretty fundamental of how the Cold War came about. Did Stalin actually want a Cold War at the time it actually developed? Well no, I think obviously not. He lost it ultimately. And to some extend it is clear he lost it in his lifetime. Clearly Stalin did not want the revival of the capitalists, he did not want the rearmament of West-Germany, he did not want the permanent stationing of American troops in Europe or the formation of them in American-European military alignments in one or another sense. He got them and they were part of the Cold War. So a lot depends on what you mean here. But I think where Zubok, Pleshakov and I would agree, would be on the fundamental proposition that Stalin’s initial position toward the West is one of far greater distrust than is that of the West toward Stalin.
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Well, because that is what I think. In the end ideology, as it played itself out in the minds of the Soviet, Chinese and East-European leadership, was ultimately a romantic concept. Not in the sense of how we think of romantic love or something like that, but in the sense of a detachment from the realities of the situation, in the sense that the preoccupation with ideology and believe in the world revolution blinded Stalin to what was actually happening. A good example is Stalin’s continuing believe that there was going to be a war between the British and the Americans. He
considered the capitalists to be so greedy that they would argue among themselves. Any reasonable observer of the world situation in the 1940’s would have said: ‘That is absurd.’ It was ideology what kept Stalin from seeing this. So, that was what I meant when I wrote about romantic illusions. We could similarly take chairman Mao and his believe that China could become an industrial power, overtaking not only Britain, but also the United States, if people stopped producing grain and started producing steel by throwing all their agricultural instruments, tables, chairs, silverware and plates and so on in furnaces in the backyard and in this way start producing steel. That surely is a romantic illusion that is far away from reality. And again, it came from ideology. I think there was nothing like it on the Western side. We had people who were occasionally unrealistic but never on scales like this.
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Because in the final analysis it wasn’t a critical factor in the outcome of the Cold War.
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Why I ended it there? Nobody is ever satisfied. I ended there for two reasons. One of them is practical and the other one is historical. The practical reason was that at the time I was writing the sources of the post 1962-period began to play out. I wanted :HQRZNQRZ to be a book to reflect the new sources and there were fewer new sources that would change our views dramatically for the period after the Cuban missile crisis.
The other reason is that looking back on it now, with the information we QRZhave, one could see by 1962 who had won the Cold War. It was quite clear who was going to win. It was not quite clear at the time, but we can look back now and say: ‘By 1962 the outcome had be determined’. There of course remains the question why the Cold War from that point did go on for another thirty years. I wrote to some extent about that in the conclusion of my book.
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No, not necessarily. Brezhnev is kept out of my book, but interesting in himself. And there is new material coming out on Brezhnev that is quite interesting. It is certainly worth working on that period.
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Sure, there are a couple of differences. Brezhnev was a far less brutal person than Stalin. He dominated those around him much less successfully than Stalin did. Brezhnev was actually not going out and killing people in his own country to the same extend as Stalin did. I think that is a very important difference. Further, Brezhnev was bound by ideology, but not to the same extend that Stalin was. On the other hand, there is a considerable similarity in the way both leaders became senile while they were in power, although Brezhnev was senile for a longer period of time than Stalin was.
Yes, Brezhnev inherited Stalin’s system, as modified by Khrushchev. I think the modifications Khrushchev has made were such that Brezhnev could have continued those reforms. Perhaps Brezhnev even wanted to continue those reforms, because at first he was sympathetic of what was happening in Czechoslovakia (1968). At first Brezhnev was sympathetic to the revolutionaries in Praha, but this was over when he began to fear the reforms began to spill over and undercut authority. In this sense he looked like Khrushchev who also at first approved of the reforms that were taking place in Hungary in 1956, but later pulled back. So there is a similarity in both cases in which there exists a sympathy for reforms in principle, but not knowing how to control the process once it got going.
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