Book Reviews

Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. $35.00.

Reviewed by Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

Vladislav Zubok’s new book is an impressive account of Soviet cultural politics from the death of Iosif Stalin in 1953 to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Zubok, who was born in Moscow in the mid-1950s, grew up witnessing most of the events he describes here. His book helps the reader sense how small the psychic space was between the Soviet rulers and the intellectuals they sought to control. At the same time, his reverence for the Russian intelligentsia and the tradition these intellectuals embodied leads him both to romanticize them and to judge them too harshly. The “Zhivago’s Children” of his title were born in the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II, they entered universities, where they encountered war veterans born in the 1920s and formed what Zubok calls an “extended historical generation” (p. 21). They were fervent believers in the Bolshevik Revolution, proud of their country’s victory in World War II, and ªlled with hope for the future. They shared in Boris Pasternak’s struggle for intellectual and artistic emancipation, a struggle embodied by the hero of his novel, Doctor Zhivago, and they viewed themselves as descendants of the cultural and moral tradition Pasternak represented. Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 shattered the faith of this generation (a generation known as the shestidesyatniki) by revealing some of Stalin’s crimes and his betrayal of the supposed ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. All over Moscow, all over the country, students, intellectuals, and others engaged in painful discussions of the revelations and demanded greater freedom to examine how these crimes had come about. Like the poet Evgenii Evtushenko, and like Khrushchev himself, most of the Zhivago generation dealt with their vexation by remaining loyal to the revolution and hoping to restore Soviet Communism to what they saw as its early ideals. Faced with a torrent of public questioning, the regime at ªrst seemed in doubt about what to do. Then, in October 1956, protests in Budapest by students and intellectuals helped to spark an uprising. The Soviet government fell back on its old reºexes and sent in troops to put down the Hungarian revolution. In Moscow, too, intellectuals quickly felt the effects. Confronted by evidence that intellectual ferment could “spark a conºagration,” Khrushchev and the Committee on State Security (KGB) cracked down (p. 80). Students were expelled from universities and arrested, Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 118–151 © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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the literary almanac Literaturnaya Moskva was closed, and the editors of other journals were ªred or forced to recant. After a while the crackdown abated, and for a few years the latitude afforded to Soviet writers and visual artists expanded or shrank according to Khrushchev’s for- tunes and those of his de-Stalinization campaign. The high point came in 1962, just after Khrushchev approved publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. On 20 October of that year, Zubok tells us, Khrushchev received Aleksandr Tvardovskii, editor of Novyi mir, the journal that published the no- vella, and during their discussion agreed to a request by Tvardovskii that he abolish literary censorship altogether. Once again, however, disaster struck the cause of liberalization. Halfway around the world, Khrushchev was caught secretly deploying missiles in Cuba and suffered a defeat that later contributed to his downfall. In anger and humiliation, Khrushchev again turned on the Moscow intellectuals who had been allied with him during his bouts of de-Stalinization. He scolded them on three terrifying occasions. At the Manezh on 1 December he singled out the abstract artists, Zubok tells us, “like an aged, ill-tempered peasant father trying to discipline his sophisticated, urbanite children” (p. 210). The artists lost their jobs, and their paintings disappeared. The second occasion was at a meeting of 400 people on Lenin Hills on 17 De- cember, when Ernst Neizvestnyi was the target. Khrushchev ordered the KGB to ªnd out where the sculptor had “found copper for this trash” (p. 212). If the metal turned out to have been stolen, Neizvestnyi might be indicted as a criminal. Evtushenko rose to defend his colleagues. They were loyal to Communist ideals, he said, and were op- posed only to Stalinism. The third and ªnal meeting took place in the Kremlin in March 1963. Some artists, not knowing whether they would be arrested, had their wives accompany them to the Kremlin gate. This time Khrushchev told poet Andrei Voznesenskii that he was “a nothing, a zero. Do not think you are another Pasternak. We offered Pasternak the right to leave. If you want, you will get your passport tomorrow. Join your friends abroad.” The packed audience of apparatchiks was yelling like a lynch mob as Khrushchev continued: “They think that Stalin is dead and anything is allowed. No, you are slaves! Slaves!” (p. 215). The Thaw was over. Stalinists returned as editors of the literary journals and as heads of all the branches of the Writers’ Union. Innovative artists went underground or ceased to paint altogether. Western jazz disappeared from the radio. The poetry readings at Luzhniki ended. Voznesenskii had a nervous breakdown, Neizvestnyi wrote a letter of recantation, and even Evtushenko kept his distance from writers who had been arrested. Informing on friends and colleagues became pandemic, and witch- hunting ºourished as if de-Stalinization had never begun. As Zubok sees it, Khrush- chev bungled his great opportunity. With members of the 1960s generation he shared a moral commitment to Communism and the revolution. Yet instead of co-opting them, he chose to crush them. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost would such a moment come again, and by then it was too late. After that, the dissidents’ focus shifted to human rights. With the coming of the

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Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet intellectuals hoped that Alexander Dubcek’s dream of “socialism with a human face” would spill over to Moscow as well. But when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Zhivago’s children protested less than they had after the crackdown in Hungary twelve years earlier. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, only a handful of dissidents, led by the physicist Andrei Sakharov, protested. The regime responded by exiling Sakharov to the city of Gorky, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences obediently de- nounced him, the country’s most celebrated scientist. Many established intellectuals sent cables to the Communist Party praising the academy’s action. The Moscow intelligentsia, Zubok remarks, had “failed the test of history” (p. 331). When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he and his wife, Raisa, were like Zhivago’s children all over again. They had been students in Moscow during the heady days of the Twentieth Party Congress but had spent most of the intervening years in Stavropol, far from the prisons, asylums, and exile the KGB had used in its campaigns to break the will of dissidents in Moscow and Leningrad. The Gorbachevs still believed in the Communist Party and the revolution but respected the intellectuals. The shestidesyatniki who had not emigrated and the activists in the human rights movement who had supplanted them had despaired of reforming the Communist Party and had become alienated from the regime. Accustomed as the best of them were to resisting moral compromise, they had no experience with political compromise and refused to engage in it. In the late 1980s they pushed Gorbachev further and faster in the direction of radical democratization than he might have gone had he re- lied solely on his own political instincts. They condemned the use of force in putting down unrest in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic states. The radical intelligentsia’s unqualiªed support of national separatist movements, Zubok says, “helped destabilize and undermine the Soviet Union” (p. 349). Zubok even goes so far as to criticize reform-minded economists for failing to provide solutions for the Soviet economy. “They diagnosed a terminal illness,” he says, “but could not prescribe a cure” (p. 348). But after 50 years of Five-Year Plans, with the accompanying bureaucratization and corruption, those problems ironically had become insoluble. Throughout that time, moreover, Soviet economists had been cut off from major trends of economic thought in the West, including the mathematical revolution that had started in Leningrad in the 1920s (input-output theory, invented by Wassily Leontief, and linear programming, invented by Lev Kantorovich). Zubok regrets the death of the dream of “socialism with a human face” and blames the Zhivago generation and its successors in the human rights movement, even Sakharov and Elena Bonner, for helping, as he sees it, to bring down the Soviet Union. What he regrets most of all is that the end of Communism in Russia has led to the death of the traditional Russian intelligentsia, with its mission of enlightenment, commitment to high culture, and alienation from state power. Although Zhivago’s children, in Zubok’s words, “rarely lived up to the ethos and ideals of the Old Russian intelligentsia,” they did, he concedes at the end of his book, help to lead Soviet society away from the myths of the revolution and its legacy of totalitarian rule (pp. 360– 361).

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David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. 272 pp. $28.95.

Reviewed by Mark Atwood Lawrence, University of Texas at Austin

David Hunt promises a great deal at the outset of Vietnam’s Southern Revolution. To date, he suggests, historians of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement during the Second Indochina War have focused almost entirely on the role of political organiza- tions such as the Communist party and the National Liberation Front (NLF). By contrast, Hunt proposes to examine the war at “ground level” by analyzing the “vicissi- tudes of everyday life” (p. 2) experienced by South Vietnamese peasants. This “different kind of history” (p. 1), Hunt insists, makes it possible to appreciate the crucial role played by ordinary villagers in inspiring, shaping, and waging the struggle against the Saigon government and ultimately the United States. The challenge of writing this kind of social history, however, is the paucity of sources documenting peasant life. “Political parties leave a paper trail and are therefore easy to research,” Hunt asserts, “while peasants generate few documents and are difªcult to research” (p. 2). Hunt overcomes this problem by drawing on a remarkable collection of interview transcripts compiled by the RAND Corporation, the national security think-tank hired by the U.S. Department of Defense during the war to study motivation and morale among NLF loyalists. From 1965 to 1968, RAND employees interviewed 285 South Vietnamese from the province of My Tho in the Mekong Delta—243 defectors from the revolutionary movement and 42 prisoners regarded as criminals by the South Vietnamese government—to obtain information potentially useful to Saigon and Washington as they prosecuted the war. For the latter-day re- searcher, writes Hunt, the transcripts provide a treasure-trove of information that would otherwise be unrecoverable. The transcripts have been exploited before, most notably by David Elliott, an original RAND interviewer who later became a political scientist and in 2003 published an exhaustive two-volume study of the war in My Tho. Yet Hunt, who has criticized Elliott for exaggerating the Communist party’s control over revolutionary activity in the South, insists that reading the RAND material with fresh eyes yields important new insights. Above all, Hunt argues that villagers constituted a more or less autonomous “popular movement” (p. 6) distinct from the party and responsible for some of the most creative and visionary revolutionary activity. Revolutionary villagers depended on the party for “strategic perspectives not readily attained at hamlet level,” but the party depended at least as much on the mobilized peasantry, Hunt asserts. Without that popular movement, he adds, the party “would have ºailed in a void” (p. 6). The book’s central chapters describe the rise and disintegration of the revolutionary aspirations that, according to Hunt, spurred the My Tho peasantry to rise up against the South Vietnamese government in 1959 and 1960. This “concerted upris-

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ing” ºowed from the everyday grievances and desires of ordinary peasants fed up with the Saigon regime and anxious for meaningful land reform, Hunt argues. Yet he goes beyond these relatively familiar explanations for peasant unrest by suggesting that the revolutionaries were also motivated by a vision of the future that overlapped only partly with the goals of the Communist party. The peasants, Hunt writes, embraced the rural ideals of material abundance, social equality, and communal solidarity and projected them across Vietnamese and even international society in an all-encompass- ing ideology that he labels “peasant modernism” (p. 152). In the “golden period” of the early 1960s, villagers believed that “the usual constraints ªxing limits on action and imagination had been overcome and that felicity was within reach” (p. 116). The dramatic escalation of the war in 1965 put an end to this “revolutionary dream,” Hunt asserts (p. 116). Intensive bombing and shelling disrupted revolutionary activity in a literal sense by forcing many peasants to ºee their villages and demol- ishing the economic system that had sustained them. Hunt is at least as interested, however, in teasing out the psychic costs that full-scale war exacted. Ubiquitous death and destruction caused peasants to despair about the future and to shelve the vision of social harmony that had inspired them just a few years earlier. Just enough of the old enthusiasm survived by 1968 to motivate peasants to participate with “millenarian fervor” in the Tet Offensive, Hunt insists (p. 221). But he speculates that the survivors must have been “heartbroken” when their efforts failed to bring victory (p. 221). Hunt tells his story with appealing energy and a keen eye for revealing detail. Moreover, he deserves credit for his sensitivity to the pitfalls of relying on testimony from informants who had good reason to skew their comments to please questioners who held considerable power over their fates. One can never know for sure the full extent of the distortion produced by these circumstances, but Hunt makes a persuasive case that the transcripts can yield valuable insights if treated with care. Still, Hunt falls short of his ambition to expose a wholly new dimension of the Vietnam War. For one thing, he exaggerates the extent to which historians have seen the Communist party and the NLF as the sole agents of political activism in the Viet- namese countryside. In fact, scholars such as William J. Duiker, James Trullinger, and Jeffrey Race have repeatedly observed that the party sometimes lagged behind the revolutionary enthusiasms of the rural populace and struggled to impose control. More- over, the very informants whom Hunt quotes at length rarely appear to have seen a sharp line between themselves and the party. On the contrary, many of them seem to have been comfortable identifying closely with the NLF or its goals. Another problem is Hunt’s failure to situate his case study within the political, social, and ideological landscape of South Vietnam as a whole. To what extent was My Tho like or unlike other South Vietnamese provinces? To what extent do Hunt’s con- clusions apply elsewhere? Hunt clearly wants to extrapolate from My Tho to general- ize about “the Vietnamese,” “peasants,” or “revolutionaries.” But, without more discussion of the representativeness of the province, it is not at all clear that this is a reasonable step to take. Indeed, Hunt might be guilty of allowing the experience of particular Vietnamese to stand in for the experience of the society as a whole—more

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or less the same ºaw he sees in those scholars who have emphasized the party at the ex- pense of ordinary peasants.

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Matthew Jones, After Hiroshima: The United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 502 pp. $110.00.

Reviewed by Robert J. McMahon, Ohio State University

The great strength of this empirically rich study lies in the important connections it traces between two topics that scholars typically treat in isolation: race and nuclear strategy. Matthew Jones reveals here in painstaking detail that U.S. policy toward Asia during the ªrst two decades of the Cold War was plagued by heightened Asian suspicions about the racial biases of Americans and especially about a presumed American disregard for the value of Asian lives. The growing reliance of the U.S. military on nuclear weapons to maintain predominance in the Asia-Paciªc region compounded the problem, feeding those suspicions and thereby creating an insuperable policy dilemma for Washington. In the aftermath of the Korean War, U.S. policymakers had con- cluded that only a willingness to employ nuclear weapons could ensure the containment of China. Yet to the extent that the United States based its defense plans on the use of weapons that would inevitably kill millions of Asian civilians, it risked further estrangement from the very peoples whose hearts and minds it was seeking to win. The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained visceral across Asia, Jones contends, along with the conviction—unfair though it might have been—that the United States would not have used nuclear bombs against Nazi Germany. President Harry S. Truman’s casual reference in a 1950 press conference to the possible use of nuclear bombs in Korea triggered a highly negative reaction across the region. His remarks reinforced the suspicions of many Asians that nuclear weapons were reserved for use against non-whites. The powerful nuclear test in the Paciªc in March 1954, code-named Bravo, played into the popular narrative of U.S. callousness and racism. The fact that a boatload of unfortunate Japanese ªshermen became infected with radi- ation sickness as a result of the test exacerbated the problem. “For Western policymakers concerned over winning the favour and allegiance of an attentive Asian public,” Jones notes, “Bravo was a public relations disaster, heightening the impression that nuclear weapons and the deadly fallout they generated were reserved for areas in- habited by non-white peoples” (p. 235). The fusion, in popular Asian opinion, of U.S. racism with an aggressive U.S. nuclear stance in the Far East became especially pronounced during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The former general’s “New Look” defense posture required the blurring of distinctions between nuclear and conventional weapons; it also fea- tured regular public declarations about the administration’s readiness to break the nuclear taboo in order to prevent or turn back Communist aggression. That approach,

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however, turned out to be politically counterproductive because it aroused deep- seated resentment in Japan, India, and other countries. Jones expertly details the bu- reaucratic battles that had erupted within the administration by the late 1950s, pitting a State Department worried about the negative political ramiªcations of the U.S. military’s ªrst-use strategy against a Pentagon committed to nuclear weapons as the most cost-effective means for checking potential Chinese aggression. With the advent of John F. Kennedy’s administration, Jones makes clear, the massive retaliation strategy largely gave way to ºexible response and a deliberate widening of U.S. conventional military options, marking a victory for the State Department’s viewpoint. Unlike most previous historians, Jones sees the racial conundrum facing U.S. decision-makers as a key causal factor in the transition to a new military strategy. After Hiroshima focuses principally on the years bracketed by the Korean War and the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The book sheds a surprising amount of fresh light on numerous topics covered in earlier scholarly accounts, including the ending of the Korean War, allied clashes over nuclear strategy, the impact of Bravo, the emergence of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Bandung Conference, the two crises in the Taiwan Strait, and Western reactions to the success- ful Chinese nuclear test of October 1964. The book also explores two other topics that have suffered from relative neglect. Far more than previous scholars, Jones captures the critical salience of the still-fragile U.S.-Japanese alliance to U.S. deliberations about nuclear strategy in the Asia-Paciªc region. The Japanese people, Under Secre- tary of State Robert Murphy complained, remained “pathologically sensitive about nuclear weapons” (p. 221). Given the centrality of a pro-Western Japan to core U.S. policy objectives in Asia, U.S. leaders could dismiss those sensitivities only at their own peril. As Jones emphasizes, they did not dismiss them, and therein lies an important, and underappreciated, dimension of Asian-American relations in the early Cold War. In one of the book’s more provocative, albeit not entirely persuasive, sections, Jones also draws links between Beijing’s emergence as a nuclear power and Washing- ton’s deepening commitments to the survival of the South Vietnamese regime. “The United States embarked on war on the Asian mainland,” he asserts, “in part to demonstrate that even with China’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, Washington was ready and able to employ military force in the region” (p. 463). The diplomatic and strategic implications of China’s entry into the nuclear club deserve systematic scholarly examination. This book, at a minimum, should provide a solid starting point. Although Jones offers a useful sampling of Asian (and especially Indian) attitudes throughout, his is not a thorough or systematic examination of Asian opinion toward the policies and issues at the heart of this study. The focus, instead, is on “Western perceptions, attitudes and evaluations, and how they came to inºuence the formation and conduct of policy” (p. 5). That limitation may disappoint some readers as too one-sided. That said, the many strengths of this strikingly original study far outweigh its shortcoming. Jones has provided us with one of the most important books in recent years on U.S. policy toward early Cold War Asia.

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Nicholas Khoo, Collateral Damage: Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino- Vietnamese Alliance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. x ϩ 267 pp.

Reviewed by Qiang Zhai, Auburn University at Montgomery

A political scientist by training, Nicholas Khoo approaches his topic with typical political science methods. He begins by laying out competing theoretical interpretations and then proceeds to assess the relative weight of competing explanations according to explicit methodological standards. Although he is effective in demonstrating the importance of the Soviet factor in the meltdown of the Sino-Vietnamese alliance, he tends to inºate and over-rehearse his argument. In striving for theoretical parsimony and monocausality, he loses sight of complexity, contingency, nuance, and multicaus- ality in historical processes. Khoo calls his explanation of Chinese foreign policy “principal enemy theory.” He contends that 1964 marked the de facto termination of the Sino-Soviet alliance and that after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the declaration of the Brezh- nev Doctrine in 1968 the Soviet Union became China’s principal foe. Beijing’s desig- nation of the Soviet Union as its principal opponent determined Chinese policy toward other countries. The breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, according to Khoo, led to the termination of the Sino-Vietnamese partnership. “The increasing Sino- Vietnamese conºict from 1964 through the mid-1980s,” Khoo writes, “was one of the multiple effects of the de facto termination of the Sino-Soviet alliance” (p. 16). Khoo views the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia as a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union. This emphasis on the Soviet role in the decline of Sino- Vietnamese relations is not new. Scholars like Robert Ross have made similar arguments. Although Khoo breaks no new historical ground, which is not surprising for a political scientist, he effectively adduces historical evidence to buttress his theoretical contentions. Bucking the trend in security studies in recent years, Khoo dismisses the role of ideology as an explanation of how China chose a principal enemy. Instead, he consid- ers Maoist China “an archetypal neorealist state.” He believes that China’s international conduct after 1949 was in keeping with Kenneth Waltz’s neorealist theory of international relations. Under the structural condition of anarchy, Khoo asserts, China lived in a situation of uncertainty and sought to maximize its security “by adopting in- ternal and external strategies to balance against the most powerful state in the international system, deªned in terms of material capabilities” (p. 155). Khoo’s explanation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy toward Vietnam in 1979 is simplistic. By privileging the Soviet factor over other developments such as Sino- Vietnamese bilateral issues, domestic politics, and the personal preferences of individual leaders, Khoo tends to simplify the complex causes for the fraying of Sino- Vietnamese ties. It is true that Deng Xiaoping saw the Soviet Union as posing a major

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threat to China’s security. But can his fear of the Soviet Union alone satisfactorily explain his decision to “teach Vietnam a lesson” in 1979? In accounting for Deng’s choice of attacking Vietnam, Khoo makes no mention of Deng’s domestic considerations and desire to establish his authority and control over the party and the military after his return to power in 1978. Khoo implies that the geostrategic condition of So- viet power and hostility at the time meant that whoever was in the leadership position in China in 1979 would have launched a military strike against Vietnam. But if Hua Guofeng had stayed in power in 1979, it seems very doubtful that he, like Deng, would have chosen to attack Vietnam. Attributing Deng’s war against Vietnam solely to his apprehension of Moscow’s plan to encircle China is simplistic and reductionist. Khoo’s volume exempliªes some typical problems of a dissertation turned into a book. It is earnest and informed, but also repetitive and burdened by long quotations from his sources. Khoo also has an annoying tendency to refer to Chinese and Viet- namese ofªcials sometimes by their last names and sometimes by their ªrst names, with no attempt at consistency. Finally, the publisher cannot take pride in the production of a book that is so full of typographical errors. In a volume that has gone through the editorial process at a university press, such sloppiness is inexcusable.

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Priscilla Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World beyond Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. 577 pp. $65.00.

Reviewed by Lorenz M. Lüthi, McGill University

The product of an international conference held at Hong Kong University in early 2000, this volume provides a fascinating cross-section of recent research on the Indochina conºict from the 1950s to the 1970s. The more than a dozen revised and expanded conference contributions by scholars from three continents cover aspects ranging from Beijing’s and Moscow’s support for Hanoi’s struggle, John F. Kennedy’s policy toward the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the impact of China’s evolving relations with France in the mid- 1960s and with the United States in the early 1970s on the conºict as a whole. The roster of contributors amounts to a who’s-who in the ªeld of international studies on the Vietnam War. The book falls into three asymmetrical sections. The ªrst, from colonial rule to escalation, includes an excellent introduction by Yang Kuisong to Mao Zedong’s views on the Vietnam War; three essays on particular aspects of Soviet, French, and U.S. policies; and a chapter on the impact of the escalating Vietnam War on the Chinese economy. The second, and longest, part, on the widening of the war from the mid- 1960s to the mid-1970s, covers various international aspects of the conºict, such as Sino-U.S. relations, the faltering of Sino-Vietnamese relations, and Soviet aid. The ªnal, and shortest, section comprises Chinese and Vietnamese documents on the rela-

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tionship between the two countries, all of which have already been published by the Cold War International History Project. The editor, Priscilla Roberts, adds a systematic introduction to the volume, laying out the major themes that emerge from individual contributions. For example, Mao’s views on foreign policy oscillated between revolutionary radicalism (in the early 1950s and most of the 1960s) and moderation (in the mid- and late 1950s and after 1969), which is reºected in his advice to North Vietnam to seek a compromise at the Geneva conference in 1954 and his criticism of the alleged lack of revolutionary con- sciousness of Ho Chi Minh ten years later. Soviet policy toward the Indochina conºict suffered from similar swings between calls for a negotiated solution and the provision of extensive military aid. Behind the Bamboo Curtain gives a snapshot of the issues on which the most cutting-edge research has occurred. Approximately half of the contributors are Chi- nese-born historians who work with recently published Chinese-language secondary literature and even in selected archives in the PRC. As a result, the volume offers fascinating new evidence on the changes in Chinese foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Beijing, as Shu Guang Zhang argues, decided to exploit economic aid for speciªc political purposes and less for the general promotion of world revolution after the Sino-Soviet split. According to Niu Jun, the PRC-DRV estrangement in the second half of the 1960s allowed China to take a more confrontational stand toward the Soviet Union, which had become North Vietnam’s closest ally, and a more conciliatory outlook toward the United States, the greatest source of insecurity for its southern neighbor. Qiang Zhai offers the ªrst analysis of Chinese reactions to the escalation of domestic conºict in Cambodia, arguing that the PRC’s support for the Khmer Rouge was the result of geostrategic, not ideological, considerations. Despite all the exciting ªndings, the volume essentially is a call for more research and greater openness of East Asian and Russian archives. The two superb contributions on Soviet foreign policy, by Mari Olsen and Stephen J. Morris, and Luu Doan Huynh’s interpretative essay on DRV policies, cannot obscure the fact that Russian and Vietnamese archival holdings on this topic are, at best, only partly open. More evidence from these archives would greatly help to reªne and correct claims made in Chinese secondary sources and token archival evidence. In the absence of solid evidence, some assertions made by Chinese leaders at the time have tended to acquire the status of facts—the most prominent being the allegation that starting in 1965 the So- viet Union pursued a systematic strategy of penetrating Southeast Asia in order to encircle China. However, Li Danhui marshals evidence showing the opposite, such as the fact that the weapons sent by the Soviet Union to North Vietnam in the 1960s were of smaller quantity and of lower quality than those supplied to India and Cuba. PRC fears from the time and the fact of closer relations between Moscow and Hanoi in the 1970s tend to obscure Chinese diplomatic mistakes in the late 1960s that seem to be responsible for these developments in the ªrst place, as some contributions im- plicitly suggest. Research in largely closed archives in the Russian and Vietnamese cap- itals would crucially enhance our understanding of Soviet policies.

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However, this state of affairs is by no means the fault of the editor or the contributors. Roberts deserves a great thank you for her efforts in bringing together such a re- nowned group of contributors and editing such an excellent sample of cutting-edge research on the Vietnam conºict. Stanford University Press distinguishes itself in taking the risk of publishing a lengthy book on this fascinating topic.

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Yinghong Cheng, Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Real- ities. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. 265 pp. $60.00.

Reviewed by Hua-yu Li, Oregon State University

In this ambitious undertaking, Yinghong Cheng sets out to examine three social- engineered cases of creating the “New Man” in the former Soviet Union under Vladi- mir Lenin and Iosif Stalin, in Mao Zedong’s China, and in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. By linking such attempts with the ideals rooted in the European Enlightenment tradition and in a global context of twentieth-century history, Cheng elevates our understanding of Communist ideological practice. Cheng addresses three main questions. What are the intellectual roots of the new-man concept? How was this idealistic and utopian goal linked to speciªc political and economic programs? How do the policies of these particular regimes, based as they are on universal Communist ideology, reºect national and cultural traditions? To answer these questions, Cheng provides three case studies dealing with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. He relies mostly on secondary materials for the Soviet Union and Cuba, and original and secondary sources for China. Cheng makes his arguments and analysis convincingly and carefully. Aside from the introduction and conclusion, the book consists of four chapters. In chapter 1, Cheng traces the linkages between Enlightenment ideals and Karl Marx’s vision of the “New Man,” which the book then connects with the Soviet leaders’ programs and practices. The leaders of the Soviet Union believed they could reshape the worldview of their party members and citizens and also remold their behavior, thereby creating new kinds of party members and citizens who would not only support the new regime but also work hard for it. To this end, the party-school system was established to train the future leaders of the regime with the proper ideology. Young Soviet citizens were put through political socialization within such newly established organi- zations as the Young Pioneers and the Communist Youth League. To remold the behavior of citizens, role models of the Soviet “New Man” were created for the whole society to follow (pp. 33–37). The fever of creating the “New Man” who would work hard and selºessly for the socialist state gradually faded away after the 1940s. In its place, material incentives were put in place to motivate Soviet citizens to work hard. By the 1960s, as young Soviet citizens had greater access to the West and could learn how their counterparts there lived, individualism began to spread into the Soviet Union.

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Chapter 2, concerning China, is the longest chapter in the book. Cheng, who was born and raised in China, is in a strong position to provide a more detailed discussion of it. Although he acknowledges that China learned from the Soviet Union and adopted some features of Soviet practice, he argues that China “promoted its own type of ‘New Man’” (p. 48). Cheng’s statement is partly correct because China under Mao engaged in a more intensive program of remolding human behavior than did the So- viet Union. By launching numerous political and reform campaigns and creating an endless string of role models, China was constantly on the move. The driving force behind these efforts was Mao’s determination to prevent what he saw as “revisionism” from taking root in China as it had (he believed) in the Soviet Union. In chapter 3, Cheng studies the Cuban experience. Compared with the USSR and China, Cuba had a shorter period in which to try to create the “New Man.” The process began in the 1960s after the Cuban revolution and ended in 1970 as Castro’s “Revolutionary Offensive” failed. In chapter 4, Cheng examines the global impact of creating the “New Man” in the former Soviet-bloc countries and in some Third World countries. One might question Cheng’s decision to combine his studies of the bloc countries and developing countries. Although the former East-bloc countries did have diverse cultures and national histories, they generally followed the practices implemented in the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia and Albania are the only two major exceptions. Unfortunately for the leaders under study, their social-engineered efforts to create a “New Man” all failed disastrously, even in China despite Mao’s desperate efforts— inspired by idealistic and utopian goals and driven by political, ideological, and economic objectives—to prolong the process. These leaders had hoped that the human mind could be reshaped and human behavior remolded under the guidance of a powerful state, but their dreams overlooked most people’s desire for normalcy. One ºaw in the study has to do with the deªnition of the “New Man.” The reader can get lost in the long list of role models, especially in the case of China, and might have difªculty working out exactly what a “New Man” should be. Cheng’s book offers a serious study of one important practical aspect of Commu- nist regimes in three countries and provides an important contribution to our understanding of efforts at social-engineering aimed at reshaping human beings on a massive scale. His study should stimulate further discussion and study in the ªeld.

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David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy. New York: Doubleday, 2009. 577 pp.

Reviewed by Nicholas Daniloff, Northeastern University and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

During the Cold War, Soviet leaders sought to convince the world that the Soviet Union was a fearsome superpower equal to the United States. They pursued this goal

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by fair means and foul: by blustering statements from the highest level, by seemingly unstoppable missile production, and by startlingly dangerous weapons programs that came to light only after the Soviet Union began to fall apart. David Hoffman, former foreign editor of The Washington Post, has produced a stunning account of these hidden developments. Although some of these secrets started becoming public in the early 1990s, Hoffman has pulled together a fascinating narrative based on classiªed reports from Soviet defense bureaucrats, transcripts of once-secret Politburo meetings, memoirs and diaries of Soviet ofªcials, and interviews with former leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev. The heavy secrecy that shrouded Soviet military programs reinforces the disturb- ing observation made during the Cold War by U.S. defense intellectuals: Unless you are aware that programs exist, you do not know whether you can guard against them. In the era of Vladimir Putin, this issue has resurfaced in Russia: How much do we really know about Russian capabilities and intentions? Hoffman’s reach into the Soviet defense sources is impressive. He has studied the papers and notebooks of Vitaly Kataev, a high-ranking Communist Party defense ofªcial who recorded secret developments in various Soviet military programs. Hoffman has also interviewed Anatolii Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s national security aide, and spoken with a variety of former Soviet ofªcials and even defectors such as Kanatjan Alibek, who headed a top-secret biological warfare program. What seems especially signiªcant is that Soviet leaders, who supposedly main- tained ªrm political control of the armed forces, gave in to pressures from the military-industrial complex and seemed unable to rationalize or stop duplicative programs. Furthermore, when challenged by Western leaders, Soviet leaders prevaricated rather than coming clean. Even a dynamic ªgure like Boris Yeltsin was quick to prom- ise military reform but failed to deliver. Probably the most egregious example of Soviet leaders’ inability to control the military’s appetite for exotic weaponry occurred with biological weapons. In 1969, President Richard Nixon announced the end of U.S. programs to produce biological weapons. Three years later in 1972, the Soviet Union, the United States, and twenty other countries joined in signing the Biological Weapons Convention, committing themselves never “to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological weapons. As a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report in the mid-1980s, I got hints from a disaffected microbiologist that the Soviet Union was violating the ban by secretly continuing research and development of biological weapons. This source told me that an important scientist in this effort was Yurii A. Ovchinnikov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences whose research center was located some- where in Siberia. Hoffman discovered that the Soviet Union was indeed engaged in a major program of producing banned biological weapons in violation of the convention and that the program went far beyond Ovchinnikov in Siberia. The ostensible justiªcation for this blatant deception was the belief that President Nixon had not really ended the U.S. program in 1969. This was an excellent example of miscalculation by “mirror-

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imaging.” Because Soviet leaders were not averse to misleading and lying, they assumed the same was true of their U.S. counterparts. The apparent openness of U.S. society was, in Soviet eyes, a smokescreen behind which to hide a secret program. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, both Britain and the United States received intelligence from well-informed defectors about the secret program. When Yeltsin became president of the newly independent Russian Federation, the U.S. and British governments pressed for an acknowledgement of this major violation. In 1992, Yeltsin provided that conªrmation and added: “I know all about the Soviet biological weapons program. It’s still going ahead even though the organizers claim it’s merely defensive research. They are fanatics and will not stop voluntarily.” He promised to close down the program. On 17 July 1992, Yeltsin spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress and referred to the biological weapons program. He insisted: “We are ªrmly resolved not to lie any more. There will be no more lies—ever.” Later in 1992, Russia signed an agreement with Britain and the United States to end its biological weapons programs. But even now U.S. intelligence analysts suspect that the Russian military retains its interest in these weapons. The actual state of the program is at best unclear. Another example of military imagination running wild was the program known as the Dead Hand, from which the book takes its title. At the height of the Cold War, ofªcials on both sides pondered what to do in case of a nuclear strike aimed at decapi- tating the country’s national command authority. The United States established a “continuity of government” program under which top leaders could go airborne or hunker down in bomb-proof bunkers in the Washington, DC area. For the Soviet Union, the survival issue became particularly acute with the development of U.S. submarines capable of launching highly accurate missiles and with the deployment of Pershing II missiles in West Germany. Valentin Falin, former ambassador to East Ger- many, told me in the mid-1980s that Soviet leaders were deeply concerned that U.S. submarine commanders could launch retaliatory strikes against the USSR on their own authority if the U.S. leadership was eliminated. That possibility held the fright- ening prospect of uncontrollable nuclear chaos. Accordingly, Soviet specialists drew up plans for massive, automatic retaliation against the United States. This involved computer-driven decision-making in the absence of political leadership. Under the proposal, the Soviet military would have lofted special communications rockets capable of transmitting signals to launch Soviet nuclear missiles against the United States. Such a system might have eased the situation for enfeebled leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev in his later years or one of his geriatric successors, Konstantin Chernenko. However, the more the system was studied, the more Soviet leaders realized they would be surrendering their ability to make rational judgments to preprogrammed computers. Faced with resistance from Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, chief of the Soviet General Staff, the system was revised in the mid-1980s. The new system would have allowed a small group of military ofªcers, surviving in an underground globe-shaped bunker, to make a considered decision on retaliation in the absence of political direction. The revised machinery became known as the Perimeter system.

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President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) pushed the Soviet Union into an uncomfortable corner. During the Cold War the Soviet Union copied weapons systems that the United States was developing. When Reagan began promot- ing a “Star Wars” missile defense shield in 1983, the initial Soviet reaction was to de- mand a similar response. The Soviet state security (KGB) apparatus was ordered to give top priority to gathering intelligence about the U.S. program. Hoffman writes, “An avalanche of intelligence began to ºow to Moscow, and stacks of it covered [Vitalii] Katayev’s desk. He observed that the spies were lazy and passive; often they simply sent along press clippings as intelligence....What the agents and military analysts feared the most, Katayev realized, was to underestimate the seriousness of the threat, so they overestimated it.” By 1985 the weapons chiefs pulled together a massive SDI equivalent made up of two umbrella programs, code-named D-20 and SK-1000. These were to have involved 137 projects in research, design, and development, 35 projects in speciªc scientiªc research, and 115 projects of fundamental science. The program would have kept the design bureaus working for years to come at the cost of tens of billions of rubles. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he was only beginning to grasp the enormity of the program and its deleterious impact on a limping economy. Thanks to the calmer heads of such scientiªc leaders as Evgenii Velikhov, a vice president of the Academy of Sciences, and Roald Sagdeev, director of the Space Research Institute, Gorbachev was persuaded to embrace an alternative response that could foil the work- ings of the U.S. “Star Wars” system at a much lower cost. Looking forward to meetings with Reagan, Gorbachev hoped to convince the U.S. president to abandon SDI entirely, thereby reducing pressures from Soviet generals and the military-industrial complex to expand the arsenal of Soviet nuclear missiles. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 merely reinforced Gorbachev’s desire. With the Cold War long over, the Soviet military-industrial machine that seemed to run independently of political leadership has been stopped. A much diminished Russia has emerged on the world scene and is mentioned relatively infrequently in mainstream media in the West. Yet we should not forget that the new Russia is the outgrowth of the old Soviet Union and inevitably carries with it parts of the old bu- reaucracy and elements of the old mentality. This is especially true when it comes to openness, the control of information, and the protection of rulers from popular criticism. No doubt we need to work with Russia on areas of mutual interest like arms control, terrorism, climate change, nuclear energy, and space exploration. But we should be mindful that even today something might still be hidden in politics and defense matters.

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Joseph Maiolo, Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931–1941. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 473 pp. $35.00.

Reviewed by Michael Sherry, Northwestern University

This book will not be to every reader’s taste. In the British style, it is heavily detailed, abounding with mobilization plans and organizational entities, even as its subtitle so bluntly spells out its argument that a reader might be tempted to go no further. Might a snappy article have served better to make that argument? Joseph Maiolo indeed argues that “the arms race drove the world to war,” and he shows in exacting detail how. Fearful or ambitious countries reacted to one another’s advances in weaponry and mobilization by upping the ante in order to deter potential enemies from war-making or from arming further and to prevent them from gaining an advantage should war break out. For political leaders at the time, World War I was the template of what might be done and the example of what could go wrong. One of Maiolo’s themes is how such ideologically diverse parties—the Soviet Union, fascist It- aly, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the capitalist democracies such as France, Britain, and the United States—reacted so similarly to the World War I experience, helping to boost “worldwide arms spending” (p. 141) nearly threefold from 1933 through 1936. In turn, the arms race drove diverse states toward similarly authoritarian systems of state planning and coercion. As “the race sent everyone down the same totalitarian track” (p. 4), all leaders “agreed that war was no longer a contest between rival armies, but a life-and-death struggle between whole peoples and economies” (p. 61). Some leaders eagerly seized the moment—Adolf Hitler obviously, though the result for him was more chaotic and less productive than sometimes recognized by ri- vals who fearfully saw in Germany “a model of Teutonic efªciency, worthy of emula- tion” (p. 332). British, French, and U.S. leaders entered the moment reluctantly, un- easy about eroding democracy and accelerating the arms race, though for the most part they did so more successfully than their autocratic counterparts. Even the French did better than most people recognize, Maiolo suggests, and Franklin Roosevelt did best of all. “The United States,” he writes, “fascinated the total-war systematizers” elsewhere (p. 105). Maiolo’s astute assessment of Roosevelt points to one of the book’s strengths: he writes convincingly about histories far beyond his British home base. The subject may be old-fashioned—the end of the Cold War has meant that the arms races of the twentieth century have rather fallen out of favor as scholarly subjects—but his treatment yields an impressive international history, one buttressed by extensive research, deft use of older and current scholarship, and evenhanded judgment (with no cheap shots at the ºawed leaders he examines or the rival scholars he challenges). Like the arms race itself, the book seems like a closed world, walled off from other currents at the time and from recent scholarly trends. Maiolo maintains a laser- like focus on states and the calculations made by their leaders and planners about the arms race. He writes little about ideological, cultural, and political developments beyond those calculations. Even though Maiolo recognizes that “war never was just the rational application of violence for some deªnable political goal; it was also the har-

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nessing of the irrational passions, such as fear and hate, of the masses” (p. 323), he rarely dips into those “irrational passions” (held, one might add, not only by “the masses”) or explores how they, as much as strategic calculations, drove the world to war. As a result, readers understand the calculations driving the arms race but not the fuel for it. The result, too, is a sense of the inevitability of World War II that burdens most scholarship about its initiation. When discussing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, for example, Maiolo writes that his “diplomacy was doomed to fail, for the great competition was neither in his nor anyone else’s power to stop” (p. 239), just as “the vicious system of military competition locked everyone into place” (p. 271). Yet Maiolo earlier insists that “the tidal-like effects of arms racing did not force anyone to choose war” (p. 5), and he later hints that Hitler, above all others, could have stopped it (p. 272). Was it really “the great competition” that made World War II unstoppable, or were the vaulting ambitions, immense resources, and “irrational passions” of the parties involved, above all Nazi Germany, not also contributors? But this is a criticism of Maiolo for failing to do what he was not attempting—a comprehensive history of the coming of World War II. What he has produced is a convincing, expansive treatment of the interwar arms race as it led to World War II and shadowed the world after that war. Even the reader impatient with the organizational detail and political maneuvering he recounts will ªnd that the book gains in pace and power as it approaches and enters World War II, despite the occasional anachronism—an Italian general’s “shock-and-awe doctrine” (p. 216), for example. Readers will ªnd deft challenges to conventional wisdom about French weakness, Nazi efªciency, “blitzkrieg” warfare (Germany was hardly alone in imagining it and was deeply misled by its initial success), British “appeasement,” and much else. Maiolo’s detailed attention to Benito Mussolini and Italy succeeds in restoring them to the key but largely forgotten place in international diplomacy they had at the time. Even familiar statistics leap out in the context Maiolo employs. “Incredibly,” in his apt adverb, “in 1941 and 1942 Soviet industry out-produced that of Germany in riºes, machines guns, artillery, tanks and aviation by huge margins” (p. 369). “The two- front total war, which Stalin had believed Hitler would never risk, was, as Stalin knew, beyond Germany’s capacity to win” (p. 369). Despite the advent of nuclear weapons, Maiolo concludes, “the same processes and much of the same language and logic of the pre-1941 arms race fed into the Cold War” (p. 403), whose arms race “fatally crippled the Soviet economy and blighted America’s national infrastructure, stunted its social progress, and militarized its culture” (p. 404). For scholars and students who routinely separate the pre–World War II and postwar worlds, Maiolo offers a powerful reminder of the continuity between them.

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N. Piers Ludlow, ed., European Integration and the Cold War: Ostpolitik-Westpolitik, 1965–1973. London: Routledge, 2009. xii ϩ 194 pp. £21.15.

Reviewed by Nicolas Lewkowicz, University of Kent

This compilation of essays attempts to bridge the historiographical gap between the role of Western Europe in the early Cold War and the development of the European integration process in the 1960s and early 1970s, concentrating on the foreign policies of the main Atlantic partners. In an essay on France, Georges-Henri Soutou sets out to contrast the European and Cold War policies of Presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou during the 1965–1973 period. De Gaulle’s concept of détente rested on the premise of a “new European security system, not unlike a modernized Concert of Europe” (p. 12), that would include the Soviet Union but not the United States. Within this system France would be guaranteed the greatest possible freedom of action through privileged Franco-Soviet cooperation, the containment of Germany, and leadership of Western Europe, organized through interstate collaboration. Con- versely, Pompidou’s vision was that of a collaborative Western world. Although he was not an Atlanticist and was committed to upholding French independence, Pompidou did not wish to induce a U.S. withdrawal from Europe. His strategy did not rely on tacit cooperation with the USSR. Instead, it was built on the possibility of “France’s leadership of Western Europe and on a central role between the two sides of the Atlan- tic as the ªrst European partner of the United States” (p. 23). Garret Martin looks at a crucial period, from September 1967 to April 1968, exploring how the mounting frustrations of France’s Eastern policy were intimately connected to growing isolation vis-à-vis its Western partners in matters pertaining to French withdrawal from the integrated military command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the reform of the international monetary system. Wilfried Loth’s chapter on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) focuses on the crucial relationship between Chancellor Willy Brandt and President Pompidou in relation to the evolving pattern of East-West relations and the possibility of building a more political Europe that would be able to assert itself more clearly from the United States on the question of détente. Loth concludes that the relationship produced the emergence of the European Community as “an independent actor in détente” (p. 63). Andreas Wilkens’s chapter explores the radicalism of the FRG’s Social Democratic government, tracing its evolution from Brandt’s formative years as mayor of Berlin in the 1950s and early 1960s. Wilkens argues that Brandt’s Eastern policy was rooted in the early success of the FRG’s Westpolitik. Wilkens maintains that West “Germany’s European policies evolved according to their own criteria and did not really intersect” with other issues related to the Cold War (p. 78). Turning to Britain, Helen Parr’s essay identiªes the reasons for Harold Wilson’s belated conversion to the idea of European integration and elucidates how the Labour government hoped to prevent de Gaulle from vetoing Britain’s latest bid to enter the European Economic Community (EEC) just as he had earlier vetoed Harold Macmillan’s application. Seeking to reverse the UK’s isolation, British policymakers

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strove to “manage the rise of German power, to prevent the spread of Communism across the West, to prolong Western Europe’s ties to the Atlantic and to ensure that America remained committed to the defence of Western Europe” (p. 100). Parr demonstrates that the question of EEC membership was one of the aspects of early Euro- pean integration for which the connections with the overarching Cold War were most clear. Ultimately, according to Parr, de Gaulle’s veto signiªed the end of French domination of the EEC. James Ellison’s chapter studies Anglo-American relations in the context of the two countries’ response to de Gaulle’s March 1966 decision to with- draw France from NATO’s integrated military command. According to Ellison, despite asymmetrical tactical approaches, “the Americans and the British shared a common vision of the architecture of the West and a mutual resistance to de Gaulle’s contrary vision” (p. 123). Jan van der Harst’s chapter examines how the Netherlands emerged as a resolute adversary of de Gaulle and a staunch defender of Atlanticism. The Netherlands re- sisted the creation of any European security structure that might compete with NATO, preferring “the hegemony of a remote superpower, the US, over what was thought to be a less credible leadership and a more immediate domination by France [and] Germany...inamilitarily independent Europe” (p. 134). Piers Ludlow’s chapter explores how the EEC institutions themselves remained somewhat detached from the Cold War and the question of East-West relations throughout the 1960s. Ludlow maintains that is impossible to understand what went on in the Brussels institutions without being aware of parallel developments in the Cold War, which were “a crucial element in shaping not simply the relationship between the EEC’s founding members but also the wider international environment within which the Community developed” (p. 149). Jussi Hanhimäki shifts the focus to the United States, arguing that Washington was less centrally concerned with European affairs in the late 1960s and early 1970s than it had been a decade or so before. According to Hanhimäki, “Europe represented but one—and never the central—piece in an increasing global puzzle” (p. 170). U.S. policymakers devoted more time and energy to strategic arms control talks with the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, triangular (Sino-Soviet-American) diplomacy, and the Middle East than to transatlantic matters. By way of conclusion, Ludlow quite appropriately refers to the need for historians to explore the nature of the international system, a subject more often left to specialists in international relations. With regard to the links between efforts to forge a degree of European unity and the overarching East-West conºict, readers would be advised to peruse my book The German Question and the International Order, 1943– 48, which tackles the origins of the Cold War by making explicit reference to the process of integration in Western Europe, derived from the political emasculation of Ger- many and the U.S. sponsorship provided by the Marshall Plan.

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Alessandro Orsini, Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-Set of Modern Ter- rorists, trans. from Italian by Sarah J. Nodes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 317 pp.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland, College Park

Alessandro Orsini’s informative and valuable study of the fanaticism that inspired It- aly’s Red Brigades terrorist actions from the late 1960s to the 1990s draws our attention to a long-standing shortcoming of the realist tradition in political science, namely, that it is of little use in analyzing ideological politics. The Italian realist canon is rooted in Niccolò Machiavelli and his modern heirs such as Wilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, “according to whom politics in the end comes down to the struggle for power.” Orsini correctly observes that this apparent realism “can illuminate only some minor aspects” of the Red Brigades (p. 26). This is the case because their eschatological ideology “is not simply a reºection of underlying material concerns” or an instrument used in the struggle for power. Rather, Orsini views it as having been the driving force of the Red Brigades’ thought and action—the driving force that inspired political violence and terror intended to “exterminate their enemies.” Orsini offers abundant evidence of the close connection between extremist “theory” and terrorist practice. He also informs us, rather surprisingly in an early footnote, of the remarkable extent of the carnage caused by political murder in Italy in these decades. Indeed, the Italian scholars G. Chailand and A. Blin have argued that “Italy was by far the country most affected by terrorist activities between 1969 and 1985.” This is a plausible statement within the European context (which includes the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Action Directe in Belgium and France, and ETA in Spain) but is less convincing if one con- siders Palestinian terrorism against Israel or the actions of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. That said, the Italian mayhem and bloodshed does appear to have been the worst in Europe in those years and has not received the attention outside Italy that it deserves. According to the Italian political scientist Luigi Manconi in his Terroristi italani, as cited by Orsini, “333 people were killed in attacks and massacres in Italy from 1969 through 2007. Of these, 144 can be ascribed to left-wing terrorism, 54 to right-wing terrorism; 135 were killed in massacres” (p. 1). Orsini sets himself the task of reconstructing the ideological outlook and mental universe of the participants in the Red Brigades. He focuses on the “history of revolutionary Gnosticism” and the “pedagogy of intolerance” with which the Red Brigades degraded their enemies to “subhuman species,” “pigs” whose lives no longer had any value before they chose to kill or maim them. Orsini views the Red Brigades as successors to previous fanatical advocates of terrorist violence from Thomas Munzer, the Jacobins, Karl Marx, and Russian populists who displayed a “gnostic mentality.” The Gnostics regarded themselves as an avant- garde who see the world as immersed in pain and sin and infected with evil substances that threaten the end of this forsaken order. Once the existing order has been de-

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stroyed, evil will be punished in a violent revolution that will bring about an abso- lutely perfect world of justice and equality. The goal of perfection justiªes the use of terrorist killing to bring it about. The history of the Red Brigades is also a history of a religious sect and “is an authentic part of the tradition of political messianism” whose goal was to create “heaven on earth” (pp. 6–7). These are familiar themes for historians of the intersection of ideology and politics in modern history but are less so for political scientists schooled in the canonical realist texts. Orsini’s reading of the massive verbiage left behind by the Red Brigades offers powerful evidence that terms such as “puriªers of the world” and “exterminating angels” captured an essential quality of their justiªcations for murder and were a causal variable of the ªrst importance. In addition to murdering and wounding hundreds, the Red Brigades left a large paper trail of pamphlets, manifestos, interviews, and letters recording their beliefs and justiªcations that are variations on familiar themes of New Left and Marxist-Leninist denunciations of modern capitalism. In 1969, a Brigadista wrote to her mother that the city of Milan “seems like a ªerce monster that devours everything that is natural, human, and essential to life....This society does violence to us all the time” (pp. 12–13). A war against such a society would destroy and purify at the same time and save human- ity by means of a “catastrophic and revolutionary implosion/explosion” (pp. 13–14). Although Italy had a functioning liberal democratic political system, free press, and freedom of assembly, the Red Brigades believed that “guerrilla warfare” was indispens- able because all other avenues for change were supposedly closed for those who regarded the political world through the binary categories of friend and enemy, light and darkness, good and evil. Orsini offers important documentation of the ideological dehumanization of various opponents whom the Red Brigade terrorists disparaged as “parasites,” “shit,” “ªlthy worms,” “swine,” “pigs,” “rabid dogs,” “servants,” “drudges,” “wretches,” “ªlthy bastards,” and, of course, “neofascist bastards” and “Zionist pigs.” Hence, none of them had lives of any value. As one Red Brigade member wrote about his targets: “If you see him as a human being, you can no longer kill him” (pp. 58–59). Another wrote that “we saw death as an act of justice, and that was that” (p. 62). Orsini includes descriptions of various acts of murder and sadism inºicted on assorted enemies and traitors, acts that were rationalized by the perpetrators’ revolutionary ideology. Perhaps because Orsini is a political scientist and feels a need to convince fellow political scientists that he can offer a “model” to explain this madness, he suggests a pattern of DRIA (disintegration, reconstruction, integration, and alienation) to explain the path from ideological commitment to integration into a revolutionary sect and then detachment from reality. He need not have bothered. His careful examination of the written record offers sufªcient evidence to conªrm that these killers lost touch with the realities of Italian politics and society. The value of his work does not lie in this conceptual model. Rather it consists of his understanding of the causal importance of the beliefs and passions of the Red Brigades, his willingness to scrutinize the key documents of their beliefs, and his ability to demonstrate the connection between fanatical ideology and murderous practice. Orsini also offers an interesting reading of several works by the iconic Italian

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Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who is known in the English-speaking world as an advo- cate of a more sophisticated Hegelian Marxism in contrast to the authoritarian scient- ism of the Marxist orthodoxy of the early twentieth century. Orsini mines some of Gramsci’s essays from the years after World War I to reveal a Communist for whom revolution would mark “the hour of redemption” (p. 126). In an article on the Com- munist Party published in September 1920, the famous historical materialist wrote that “in the present period the Communist Party is the only institution that can seri- ously be compared with the religious communities of primitive Christianity.” The party, he wrote, possesses a “magical-sacral” power and is composed of “martyrs” who are able to perform “miracles” (pp. 126–127). Italian Communism had multiple traditions, but one of them, Orsini suggests, is that of gnostic fanaticism, which was turned against the Italian Communist Party itself when the party embraced reforms during the Eurocommunist era in the 1970s and 1980s. For scholars working on terrorism as well as for historians of postwar Italy and Europe, Anatomy of the Red Brigades offers a welcome turn away from social science reductionism and toward close examination of the ideas that inspired left-wing political murder in Italy. The gnostic fanaticism that Orsini examines has remained with us in other forms, making his book of interest not only for historians but also for scholars and policy analysts grappling with contemporary ideological justiªcations for terrorism. With rare exceptions such as Raymond Aron and Stanley Hoffmann, political scientists in the realist tradition too often are unable to appreciate the causal signiªcance of ideas and ideologies in politics. Orsini’s work offers a valuable reminder that realism, in the conventional sense of the term of facing realities, demands close attention to ideologies, even when, as in the case of the Red Brigades, these beliefs are absurd and contemptible.

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Francesco Adinolª, Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Gen- eration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 376 pp. $84.95 cloth, $23.94 paper.

Reviewed by Stephen Gundle, University of Warwick

The return of “lounge music” in the 1990s revived a whole series of sounds, practices, styles, and attitudes that had been forgotten by all except fans of 1960s B movies. Al- though James Bond—still very much with us today—is a product of the type of masculine world that generated the adventurously escapist pleasures of the early Cold War years, only those in the know would associate John Barry’s celebrated theme tune (in fact composed, as several court cases established, by Monty Norman), Bond’s love of martinis (“shaken not stirred”), indulgence in sophisticated travel, and taste for dis- posable fantasy women with a particular conªguration of Western popular culture. Francesco Adinolª’s delightfully off-beat exploration of the peculiar mixture of sounds and sound effects that provided the aural backdrop to the afªrmation of the postwar

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consumer society in the West gets to the heart of that very mix of fantasies, dreams, and yearnings. His book, the result of years of painstaking research that included interviews with several composers and performers of jazz and musical exotica (many of them now deceased), is encyclopedic in mapping the way orientalist and colonialist motifs dating back to the nineteenth century informed musical currents in the early twentieth century before blossoming as a full-blown exotic genre after World War II. Adinolª gives much attention to semi-forgotten maestros such as Martin Denny and Les Baxter, as well as to television shows, ªlms, nightclubs, and performers who were identiªed with the idiom. Adinolª, who was not yet born when most of the music and customs he examines ºourished, accurately records the revival in the 1990s of interest in lounge music. He even contributed to this renewed interest in his capacity as a radio host and print journalist in Italy. But his book is no superªcial revel in past ephemera, even though his love of the music he discusses is obvious. On the contrary, he provides a sophisticated analysis of a diverse international phenomenon that has not previously, to my knowledge, received any serious attention. Expertly translated from the original Ital- ian by Karen Pinkus with Jason Vivrette, and informatively introduced by Pinkus (a professor of French, Italian, and comparative literature at the University of South- ern California), the book offers a penetrating but accessible treatment of a musical genre as well as of a peculiarly masculine set of pleasures and practices, of which exotic music was but one element. The social ªgure at the heart of Adinolª’s book is the swinging bachelor. Most histories of postwar consumerism highlight the leading role of the housewife and rele- gate men to a supporting role. Postwar masculinity has repeatedly been depicted as being in crisis, with actors including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean acting out on the silver screen the torments of a generation. Adinolª takes us into areas in which unmarried men were ostensibly at ease with themselves, even if they required fantasies to construct their self-images. The celebrated Rat Pack, founded by Humphrey Bogart but more famously associated with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, was a high-proªle example of the stylish, suave, and cynical world of the swinging bachelor. A habitué of nightclubs and hotel bars, the cool bachelor trans- formed his domestic milieu or pad into a theater of seduction, to which the enchant- ing sounds of the recordings of Denny, Baxter, and company provided a necessary soundtrack. Adinolª ªnds in feline female ªgures (singer Eartha Kitt, model Bettie Page, and others) the bachelor’s ideal imaginary counterpart. The book looks in depth at the connections between sounds and places. The former are strikingly varied. Adinolª identiªes a long series of subgenres of exotica that include space-age jazz and crime jazz, as well as Hawaiian motifs and African rhythms (sometimes researched by their composers, at other times simply imagined). He also dwells on some important performers, such as the sexy and sophisticated Yma Sumac, who were very well-known in the 1950s but who have since been largely forgotten. The places Adinolª examines are, if anything, even more varied. Not only does Adinolª evoke the usual nightspots, he also pays attention to domestic spaces, movie theaters, and restaurants. The book contains interesting reºections on the way exotica

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fed off cross-cultural inºuences and contaminations. Within the range of places considered, Adinolª gives particular attention to the way his native Italy became a key outpost of exotic sounds and experiences. In Rome, in particular, nightclubs and bars did not merely import or copy U.S. experiences (although a performer like the bandleader Xavier Cugat prolonged his declining career in Italy). Rather, the fashion- able Via Veneto provided a forging ground for artists and composers who created a speciªc aural backdrop to the swinging dolce vita (subsequently immortalized in Federico Fellini’s 1960 ªlm La dolce vita). Musicians such as Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani cut their teeth in this environment and provided moody and evocative soundtracks for the numerous ªlms being churned out of the Italian capital’s Cinecittà ªlm studios. This part of the book is exceptionally well documented. Adinolª’s basic thesis is that exotic paradises provided a fantasy alternative to a world of tensions and fears. At a time when the Cold War was at its height and fears about the end of the world were widespread, exotic music and milieux captured im- pulses of nostalgia (felt by soldiers who had been stationed in the Paciªc), as well as a vaguer yearning for the primitive manifested, for example, in the popularity of the Tarzan ªlms. In a world that was increasingly organized along rational and bureau- cratic lines, they supplied a welcome dose of mystery and romanticism. Only profes- sional entertainers appeared to live full-time in the imaginary realms of seductive primitivism, but many others escaped into them brieºy when they drank a cocktail (perhaps at Trader Vic’s), relaxed in a low-lit bar, or put on the record-player at home. Adinolª captures the pleasures involved in many of these practices while not shying away from confronting their darker underside. Crime, colonialism, racism, and sex- ism all informed exotica and to some extent shaped its subconscious appeal. If there is a contradiction at the heart of this fascinating book, it is precisely this. Adinolª clearly admires and enjoys the music of exotica. He catalogues and celebrates the work of its leading exponents. Yet he also highlights in a contemporary way the discriminatory and hierarchical structures that made such music possible. The enjoyment of Polyne- sian melodies or African beats is seemingly not diminished by such knowledge. But then, this perhaps is the music’s secret. Its special appeal, both then and now, is the way it can magically transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, creating a sense of otherness and displacement and covering power relations with an aural blanket of bird calls and rustling breezes.

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Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin 1946–1949. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 348 pp. $80.00.

Reviewed by Barbara Marshall, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK)

This book attempts ambitious objectives: On one level it is a detailed Alltagsgeschichte, an analysis of everyday life in Berlin from 1946 through the end of the Berlin Block- ade in 1949. Paul Steege chose 1946 as a starting date because by this stage Berliners

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had settled into life among the ruins and emerged as actors in their own right. By tracing in meticulous detail events and developments “on the ground,” Steege also aims to demonstrate how local conditions and actors inºuenced the emerging Cold War. The book is based on an impressive trove of material, particularly Steege’s close reading of contemporary sources. He discusses a wide range of issues and succeeds in offering new perspectives on many known facts. From the outset, Berlin’s economic situation was desperate, with 50 percent of its housing stock completely destroyed. Surprisingly, until the Soviet Union began systematically dismantling industrial facili- ties, 65 percent of industrial capacity in Berlin had survived the war in working order (p. 30). Even so, the recovery of the city was hindered by the disappearance of entire industries. In 1946 Berlin’s gross industrial production remained at only 37 percent of 1936 levels. The important electrical engineering sector was operating at only 26 percent. As late as 1950, Berlin’s mechanical engineering production was at only 30 percent of 1936 levels. (In the western zones comparable ªgures were 155 percent and 106 percent—see p. 31). This helps explain why food and daily necessities assumed such great importance for the citizens of the city and also for political developments. Steege shows in detail how this worked particularly against the Soviet Union and the East German Communists (SED). Their priority was essentially political, believing in their own propaganda of 1945 as the “zero hour,” the beginning of a new, anti-fascist Germany. But they miscalculated not only the degree of political continuities in Ger- man public opinion with its radical rejection of Communism—as expressed in the elections of autumn 1946. More importantly, Berliners were disillusioned by the failure of the SED and its Soviet backers to “deliver” on their promises of food and other vital necessities. The concerns of the German population with survival undermined SED policies and the party’s attempts to establish overall control (p. 191). These pri- orities also meant that the isolation of the city during the blockade was never as com- plete as suggested in studies that focus on the international aspects of the Cold War. Although the Rosinenbomber did much to bolster the morale of the Berliners, the resi- dents’ own efforts to provide for themselves need to be acknowledged. Not only did individuals go on hamster tours in the surrounding countryside, but deliveries were formally organized: “the extent of supply and trade trafªc that the Soviets or their German partners ofªcially authorized to pass in and out of the western sectors’ needs to be recognized” (p. 221). The image of the completely isolated city thus needs to be revised. The book provides extensive detail on the impact of the introduction of different currencies in the city, the breakdown of the administration for the whole of Berlin, and the problems surrounding the policing of the black market. The book is full of illuminating information and gives excellent insight into the multilayered events that together formed the background for the emerging Cold War. However, Steege is more ambitious in that he attempts to establish a wider theoretical link between developments in Berlin and the impact and relevance of these events for the Cold War itself. “Everyday history elaborates not only ‘history from below’ but en- gages the tension between every day lives of ‘ordinary’ people and the symbolic mean- ings that they shape, engage and contest in the spaces through which they move.” But did “everyday Berliners” really become “vital shapers of an international Cold War”

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(p. 15)? Traditional interpretations of events in Berlin see local developments more as a consequence of Allied disagreements. Although Steege rightly emphasizes the role of Berliners, he may have read too much into their impact on the ºow of events. This reservation aside, Steege’s book is a highly original attempt to reconceptualize the Cold War.

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Mikhail Suprun, ed., Kholodnaya voina v Arktike [The Cold War in the Arctic]. Arkhangelsk: Pomor State University Press, 2009. 380 pp.

Reviewed by Alexey Golubev, University of British Columbia (Canada) and Petrozavodsk State University (Russia)

The ªeld of Cold War studies in Russia is dominated by scholars based in Moscow and St.Petersburg. The reason is obvious: As with almost everything Soviet, the participation of the USSR in the Cold War was a centralized effort, and key documents related to this period are stored in central Russian archives to which regional scholars have no access without traveling to Moscow. Heavy dependence on these “central” sources, which convey views of the Soviet establishment, also leads to the current historiographical situation in which most original Russian publications are written within the conventional Cold War paradigm and represent its events as a grand confrontation between Moscow and Washington while ignoring other actors and aspects, including regional perspectives. In this respect, The Cold War in the Arctic, published by Arkhangelsk’s Pomor State University, is not part of the dominant trend and might, one hopes, augur some decentralization of this ªeld. The scope of the book also makes it particularly interesting for a specialist in Cold War studies. Although both Western and post-Soviet traditions have produced signiªcant research bibliographies on various aspects of the Cold War in the Arctic, neither has yet put out a comprehensive book-length study of the phenomenon of the Cold War in the Arctic. The editor of this book, Mikhail Suprun from Pomor State University, is a highly acclaimed historian who came under investi- gation by the Federal Security Service (the former KGB)—perhaps, the highest ofªcial recognition a historian can receive in Russia—because of his research on German prisoners held in Stalin’s northern concentration camps. Suprun’s book is based on papers presented at the international conference “The Cold War in the Arctic,” held at Pomor State University on 12–15 September 2008. More than ªfty Cold War researchers from nine countries, including Russia, the United States, and Norway—the three primary Cold War actors in the Arctic—dis- cussed multiple aspects of the Cold War in this region. The resulting book consists of 28 papers, including nine written by Western historians and published in English and nineteen written by Russian scholars and published in Russian. A book divided between two languages might seem strange, but it is not the main problem a reader of the book might notice after even a glance at the book’s contents. What is most disap-

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pointing is the lack of any reasonable scheme to impose a common perspective on the collection of essays. The volume is inconsistent in terms of chronology, geography, methodology, and scope of narration. Some essays deal with narrow topics such as a U-2 operation in northern Russia, whereas other authors aspire to conceptualize much wider issues, such as overall “lessons” of the Cold War in the Arctic. The timeline of the volume jumps from 1945 to 2008 and back several times, and although most of the essays do have the Arctic perspective, several focus on more “southern” issues, sometimes going as far as Cuba. This inconsistent approach under- mines the central aim of the book: “to create the ground for a further complex study” of the Cold War in the Arctic as a separate research ªeld. After all, the contributors say nothing about Danish or Canadian dimensions of this aspect of Cold War history. The book is thus not a history of the Cold War in the Arctic per se, contrary to what the title claims. Instead, it is a compilation of papers, many of which are of excellent scholarly quality, yet combined they do not provide even a hint of the overall picture of the Cold War in the Arctic. Nonetheless, this hardly means that the volume will be of no interest to scholars of the Cold War. First, most of the chapters do reveal new aspects of the Cold War in the Arctic or introduce new regional sources. Publications from the ªrst group deal mostly with political and social developments in the Arctic region. Kristian Etland from the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment in Oslo presents a thorough analysis of Mikhail Gorbachev’s so-called Murmansk Initiative of 1987 aimed at de- militarization off the Arctic. Etland argues that Gorbachev’s emphasis on “soft” security issues—such as international resource development, scientiªc research, and envi- ronmental protection—in this initiative had a positive effect on “hard” security issues in the Arctic region for both the USSR and Western states, particularly Norway. An essay by Suprun discusses the political background of negotiations between Norway and the USSR on the withdrawal of Soviet troops from northern Norway in 1945. He carefully analyzes available sources and concludes that the abandonment of early So- viet demands for concessions in northern Norway and Svalbard and the withdrawal of the Red Army from Norwegian territories stemmed from secret guarantees given to Iosif Stalin by the Western allies that they would refrain from establishing military bases in Finnmark, a Norwegian county bordering on Soviet territory. Andrei Podoplekin from Pomor State University analyzes changes in Norway’s post-1945 foreign policy doctrine. Although some of his remarks are strangely close to traditional Soviet views on Norwegian politics—for example, he writes that the Norwegian par- liament had “a painful and ideologically biased understanding of the February 1948 events in Czechoslovakia” (p. 171)—his extensive use of archival and published Soviet and Norwegian sources allows him to demonstrate how pressure emanating from the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Norwegian society shaped the international positions taken by Oslo during the ªrst postwar decade. Podoplekin also discusses the continuity between early postwar and contemporary foreign policy doctrines of the Norwegian government. The social dimension of the volume is presented in three chapters. Karl Kleve from the National Norwegian Aviation Museum addresses the social impact of accel-

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erated development of military and civil aviation in northern Norway during the Cold War. He demonstrates how the extensive airªeld network that makes Norway the second most ºying European country after Iceland was initially developed for the needs of NATO military aviation. Tomas Bresky, a journalist from Luleå in northern Swe- den, focuses on the “witch hunt” in Swedish society during the Cold War. The widespread spy mania, stemming from legitimate fear of Soviet espionage, resulted in a di- sastrous judicial error in the so-called Fritjof Enbom affair in which several people accused of spying for the USSR were sentenced to long prison terms without actual evidence. Finally, Dmitrii Kozlov from Pomor State University examines the dissident movement in Arkhangelsk. His is a largely descriptive narrative focused on several no- table individuals rather than on the movement as a social phenomenon. The chapter nonetheless helps to explain why the Soviet Union lost the battle for the hearts and minds of its citizens. Another large thematic section of essays deals with technological or military developments in the Arctic. These chapters focus mainly on narrow and specialized topics, a sort of patchwork of facts and evidence. Pavel Lizunov and Maria Balova from Pomor State University coauthor a chapter recounting the Soviet Union’s efforts to develop and build its ªrst nuclear submarines. Two essays, one by Cargill Hall from the Marshall Institute (USA) and the other by Chris Pocock, the defense editor of Avia- tion International News (UK), deal with U-2 operations in the Arctic region prior to the famous 1960 U-2 incident. Two essays bring a civil dimension to this section by addressing the Soviet merchant ºeet and its operations in the Arctic during the Cold War. Viktor Koponev and Vasilii Makurov from the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences write about Karelia’s role in the shipping of nuclear missiles to Cuba during the 1962 crisis, and Lev Krasavtsev from Pomor State University analyzes the Soviet government’s efforts to move into world markets and compete successfully with capitalist economies. The only chapter in this section that aims to conceptualize factual information— one of the best chapters in the volume—is written by Natalia Yegorova from the Insti- tute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences. She describes the conceptions, contradictions, and actual results of the Soviet naval buildup in the Arctic Ocean. Yegorova gives particular emphasis to the transition from Stalin’s conception of the Red Banner Northern Fleet performing purely defensive missions to Nikita Khrush- chev’s desire to create a nuclear submarine force that would diversify the country’s means of nuclear weapons deliver and be capable of dominating in the Arctic and eliminating U.S. nuclear superiority. Even if The Cold War in the Arctic fails to provide a comprehensive picture of the ªeld, the book’s importance is greater than the sum of the individual essays. The volume sheds valuable light on the sort of historical research on the Cold War now under way in Russian regions. With almost no private research universities in post-Soviet Russia, regional academia remains almost completely state-funded. Current government measures to make the funding of higher education more effective have led to a struggle for available resources among regional universities. Pomor State University has had an upper hand in this competition over other northern Russian universities

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because in April 2010 it became a part of the so-called Northern Federal University with lavish funding from Moscow. The downside of this success was that becoming a federal university required an increased demonstration of loyalty to the current political establishment, a tendency clearly seen in the volume under review. Many of the Russian essays in the volume have a strong anti-Western message, as in the concluding chapter, “Lessons of the Cold War in the Arctic,” by Boris Grigor’ev, a former state security ofªcer and Soviet diplomat to Scandinavian countries. He harshly criticizes the post–Cold War foreign policy of the West as driven exclusively by hostility toward Russia. Referring to the August 2008 conºict between Russia and Georgia, he writes, “The latest and dirtiest trick of Washington and NATO is the aggression against South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Despite clear evidence, the West extends its protection to the puppet government of Georgia and declares that Russia is the aggressor.... Even Hitler and his accomplices kept within limits and had shame, a notion that has been long and completely forgotten by the current U.S. rulers” (p. 370). Other Rus- sian essays are somewhat more subtle in their efforts to discredit U.S. or European politics, but they adhere to the same motif that the West is using the legacy of the Cold War to weaken contemporary Russia, a tendency Russians must counter by adopting a stronger position in the international arena (pp. 24–37, 325–327, 356– 359). Fortunately, this is only part of the picture. The volume is also substantially inºuenced by liberal trends in Russian academia. The book was partly funded by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which allowed international participation in the project. Regrettably, the choice of invited scholars seems to have been based on the personal contacts of Arkhangelsk historians, and as a result the volume includes essays outside the stated scope of the volume (e.g., an essay about Western naval attachés in the USSR and another about Swedish submarine incidents). Conversely, many leading specialists on the Arctic dimension of the Cold War did not take part in the project. This type of academic networking based on personal rather than institutional contacts is one of the reasons the volume does not produce a coherent picture of the Cold War in the Arctic. But at least the essays by Western historians do create some balance of opinions. Curiously, the volume starts with an English-language poem written by one of the Norwegian contributors that ends with the following lines: “Putin sure is doing his best / To keep us on our toes / And put the West to the test” (p. 4). This makes for a striking contrast to Grigor’ev’s concluding essay with its com- parisons of the United States to Nazi Germany. The coexistence of these widely di- verging views undoubtedly helps to explain why the publisher avoided translating English papers into Russian or vice versa. If published in one language, the “alternat- ing personalities” of this volume would seem schizophrenic. Keeping the text divided into two languages removes direct conºict between them. The impossibility of recon- ciling these positions also accounts for the inconsistency in chronology, geography, and scope of presented research. Eliminating the inconsistencies would require a common or at least overlapping ground for all participants. The division is, however, more complex than a simple East-West divide. Several Russian historians in the volume, including Suprun, avoid the ideological bias that

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characterizes other Russian essays. Moreover, because the Russian historians were able to combine Russian and Western sources, their work is the most insightful and credible in the volume, providing the basis for a future comprehensive narrative about the Cold War in the Arctic. Unfortunately, these essays are outnumbered by the essays that reproduce the ofªcial discourse of the Cold War imposed by the Russian establishment. This split between “liberals” and “statists” in today’s Russia has a genera- tional basis. Among the Russian historians who contributed to the Cold War in the Arctic, the desire to combine Russian and Western perspectives is typical of scholars who received their degrees in the 1980s and 1990s. Those who received their degrees earlier or later, before the 1980s or during the years under Vladimir Putin, tend to regard Western historiography and sources as “hostile” or simply ignore them. This recent tendency to restore the “blame game” to Russian Cold War historiography is partly imposed from above but also welcomed from below, and the new generation of Russian historians is actively—and voluntarily—getting involved in the process. Of course, as with any generalization, there are exceptions. A cogent essay about the Arkhangelsk dissidents’ resistance to the Soviet regime was written by the youngest contributor, a graduate student at Pomor State University. Exceptions aside, the general pattern is clear and well symbolized by the fact that the two most biased essays were coauthored by representatives of the younger and older generations of Russian historians. Western readers can ªnd in The Cold War in the Arctic a range of new interesting facts about the northern dimension of the East-West confrontation, as well as a sense of how regional Russian academics are exploring Cold War studies. The current state of the discipline perfectly resembles one of Russia’s national symbols—the double- headed eagle—and Cold War in the Arctic is a typical example of this. One can only hope that in the future the eagle will live on and its statist head will not ultimately pre- vail.

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Leopoldo Nuti, ed., The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985. London: Routledge, 2009. 285 pp.

Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny, Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security

The decade preceding the dénouement of the Cold War is a challenging one to inter- pret. Known not only for “the crisis of détente” but also for the “Second Cold War,” it is a period in which both the reasons for the unexpected peaceful ending of the Cold War and the origins of the subsequent international system are to be sought, yet not easily found. Its short-term signiªcance pertains mainly to Europe and North Amer- ica, its long-term signiªcance to the rest of the world. The opening and rise of China, as well as of Vietnam, started at that time and continued regardless of the end of the Cold War. So did the democratization of Latin America. The book focuses on Europe. It is not, contrary to the publisher’s blurb, “the ªrst

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detailed exploration” of the subject. That distinction belongs to the volume from the 2002 Nobel Symposium, The Last Decade of the Cold War, which happened to be published in the same series. Nevertheless, The Crisis of Détente breaks new ground in several ways and enhances our understanding of the period. This is largely thanks to Leopoldo Nuti’s judicious selection of fewer than a half of the papers presented at the mammoth 2006 conference at Artimino, where the elusive subject was “The Global- ization of the Bipolar Confrontation.” The rationale for the selection is clear from his excellent introduction of the main themes. Among the themes, military issues loom large, as they should because they were looming large at the time. Nuti’s chapter on the origins of the Euromissile debate shows how Soviet deployment of the SS-20 missiles unwittingly “provided the West with the necessary leverage to implement a project” (p. 68) that would eventually re- verberate to Soviet disadvantage. Dima Adamsky gives Soviet strategic thinkers credit for the best theoretical insight into the “Revolution in Military Affairs,” though not enough credit to their U.S. counterparts for outsmarting them in practice with the AirLand Battle doctrine. In exploring the ever controversial and inconclusive question of how dangerous the military confrontation really was, R. Craig Nation underlines “the increasing irrationality of any attempt to resolve differences between great powers through the instrumentality of warfare” (p. 133). In the end, missiles, strategic theories, and military plans proved notably irrele- vant in determining the outcome of the Cold War. Appropriately, the book pays much attention to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which dealt mainly with “non-traditional” dimensions of security. Several contributors use the wealth of new evidence from different national archives that has become available with the passage of thirty years. The record tends to undermine the Helsinki myth of the CSCE as a tool for challenging the Cold War order and to underline the importance of the conference as the forum for hammering out trans-Atlantic disagreements about strategy. Douglas Selvage demonstrates that West Europeans, though originally the ones who introduced human rights into the CSCE’s agenda, became reluctant to stress these provisions once the Polish crisis threatened to destabilize the established Euro- pean order. Marilena Gala documents the growing U.S.-European disagreements about strategy during the Reagan administration, as does John Prados in his scathing critique of the administration’s “policy entrepreneurs.” Nevertheless, contrary to the admirers of the president and of his hawkish advisers, the United States, too, had a stake in the preservation of the existing order. None of the Western countries pursued a strategy aimed at dismantling that order. The chapters bearing on the “battle of ideas” during the 1975–1985 decade are most instructive in showing how off-base most of those ideas were, even though not all the authors would want to accept that conclusion. The Italian contributors, Laura Fasanaro, Duccio Bassosi, and Giovanni Bernardini, justiªably make short shrift of the short-lived idea of Eurocommunism. Bernd Rother shows that the concept of a “Third Way” between Communism and capitalism, promoted by Chancellor Willy Brandt as the head of the Socialist International, may have helped democratization in

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Latin America but remained stillborn in Europe. Less convincingly, Oliver Bange argues that West Germany’s rapprochement with the East German regime on grounds of their alleged “common responsibility” (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft) for the nation’s future advanced the cause of German uniªcation. The true harbinger of the future was the process of European integration because of its institutional and procedural features that allowed for the eventual integration of the whole of Europe. In this respect, Maria Eleonora Guasconi’s study of the innova- tions related to the introduction in the 1970s of the European Monetary System is particularly enlightening. The chapter by Bassosi and Bernardini emphasizes the importance of the economic recovery of the West?but not the East?during this period. In the longer term, 1975–1985 was the time when, for better or for worse, consensus prevailed on the left and the right about the need for “privatization and deregulation of capital ºows,” presumably to lead to “enlarging the pie rather than redistributing it” (p. 261). To give full justice to the complexity of the period bookended by the signing of the Helsinki Final Act and the ascendance of Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, much remains to be done. In breaking the path, this book marks an important step forward.

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Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propaganda in the Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. x ϩ 349 pp. $39.95.

Reviewed by Michael L. Krenn, Appalachian State University

With the tidal wave of ªrst-rate works on the issue of race, civil rights, and U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War that have appeared in recent years, one might wonder whether anything else of signiªcance can be said on the topic. Books and articles by Brenda Gayle Plummer, Penny Von Eschen, Thomas Borstelmann, Carol Anderson, Mary Dudziak, Cary Fraser, Gerald Horne, and a host of others have been published in the last decade or so. Any new scholarship, therefore, faces the somewhat daunting task of ªnding something original and signiªcant to add to the literature or run the risk of reinventing the wheel. The Opinions of Mankind: Racial Issues, Press, and Propa- ganda in the Cold War, by Richard Lentz and Karla K. Gower, manages to do a bit of the former and, unfortunately, much of the latter. Lentz and Gower perform a herculean bit of research in scouring U.S. newspapers and magazines, as well as some English-language versions of foreign print media, in pursuit of their main tasks. They seek to illustrate how America’s race problem was portrayed by the U.S. media to both domestic and foreign audiences and to explore how that coverage simultaneously helped to damage the U.S. image abroad and motivate change and civil rights progress at home during the years 1946 to 1965. Using a straightforward chronological approach, the book focuses on major events in the civil rights struggle in the United States and then summarizes the press coverage from both

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U.S. and overseas sources. In doing so, the authors add some interesting information to the existing discussion on race and U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Al- though most of the scholarship has focused almost exclusively on African-Americans, Lentz and Gower devote separate chapters to the roles played by Native Americans, Latin Americans (and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic Americans), and Asians and Asian- Americans in the propaganda battle between the United States and the Communist bloc. This is an extremely important contribution and will, one hopes, spur additional research. The book also performs a useful role in collating so much of the press coverage at home and abroad dealing with the race issue in the United States. The wide-ranging coverage tracked by Lentz and Gower gives extra credence to the argument that the civil rights struggle in the United States was one of international importance. In addition, the focus on press coverage from Communist China is an interesting addition to the discussion, which so often relies entirely on the attacks leveled by Soviet newspapers and magazines. Despite these contributions, the book too often re-tills familiar soil. In part, this can be attributed to the authors’ lack of attention to some of the most signiªcant works in the ªeld. They make no references to Plummer’s work; Von Eschen’s 1996 book, Race against Empire; Cary Fraser’s important article on the Little Rock crisis; books by Borstelmann and Thomas Noer analyzing U.S. relations with white minor- ity regimes in Africa; or my 1999 book on African Americans as diplomats in the Cold War. Instead of breaking new ground, therefore, much of the current volume is spent on unnecessarily repeating what is found in these earlier studies. Much the same holds true for the authors’ discussion of U.S. racial attitudes toward Latin America. They present their arguments as signiªcant contributions, without any mention of the works of Frederick Pike, James William Park, or John J. Johnson. This is particularly unfortunate because other topics, including South Africa, the fascinating role of people such as Carl Rowan (who served as both unofªcial critic of American racism and director of the United States Information Agency during the Johnson administration), and the 1964 murders of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, are either skimmed over or ignored altogether. A particularly troubling example of these kinds of omissions occurs in the chapter dealing with Sputnik and the Little Rock crisis. The infamous “Unªnished Business” exhibit on the grounds of the U.S. pavilion at the World’s Fair of 1958 was the ultimate expression of American propaganda torturously dealing with the intersections of the civil rights issue and the Cold War. Despite the heavy press coverage of this event, the book makes no mention of it. The book’s contentions about the role of the press in the propaganda battles between the United States and the Communist bloc over the issue of civil rights are over- whelmed by repetition and an avalanche of quotations, with fully one-third of the book devoted to endnotes. Instead of sustained analysis, the authors too often rely on moving from one summary to another of this or that newspaper or magazine story or government report. They contend that the coverage “about race had considerable impact abroad” (p. 211). However, this argument is supported almost entirely by citing

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the sheer numbers of news outlets and publications. The precise nature of the “considerable impact” is left undeªned. In addition, the relationship between the press and the U.S. government is somewhat hazy. The authors argue several times that the news media and foreign policy ofªcials in Washington often exhibited the same attitudes and opinions. Was this simply the result of a shared Cold War ethos, or was the connection between the two groups more intimate than is commonly assumed? Finally, although the authors cite African-American media sources, the conclusion that “the press put those perceptions [of America’s race problem] in the context of the global Cold War” (p. 211) does not give enough credit to those sources. In fact, it was the unrelenting efforts of African-American newspapers and magazines that ªnally led to the wider acknowledgement of the connections between the U.S. civil rights struggle, anti-colonialism, the battle against apartheid, and the propaganda war with the Soviet Union. In conclusion, this book might have been more effectively presented as one or two tightly argued articles dealing with the truly important contributions noted earlier in this review. Without a more thorough grasp of the signiªcant work that has already been done in the ªeld of race, civil rights, and the Cold War, the authors spend far too many pages reinventing scholarly wheels and missing opportunities to explore other topics and events that might have proven useful to their analysis.

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