For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War

"I’ve chosen books which combine sound scholarship with readability. Melvyn Leffler’s book admirably meets those criteria. He covers the Cold War from beginning to end, but focusing above all on the US-Soviet relationship. He is particularly strong on the American side of the story, having done a great deal of fruitful archival research, including the archives of every relevant Presidential Library. He combines that with wide reading of the memoirs and of the specialist academic literature. There is a lot of debate on the Cold War, not least on its ending. Leffler’s judgements on the contentious issues are among the most solidly based and wisest. There is a widespread view that the Soviet Union was forced by American military superiority, or by its inability to keep up with the West economically, to concede defeat in the Cold War. Tempting though that is for many in the West to believe, it glides over the fact that when, in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the US had an undoubted military superiority over the Soviet Union, Communism continued to expand. From the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had acquired approximate military parity with the US, and that was still the case in the mid-1980s, Reagan’s increased military spending notwithstanding. Since each military superpower had the means utterly to destroy the other, why should the Soviet side be forced to make concessions at a time of parity which it did not make when it was manifestly the weaker of the two rivals? Then there is the economic determinist explanation of the Cold War’s ending. While it is true that the Soviet economy lagged behind its Western competitors (and was being overtaken by the newly industrializing Asian countries), it was not in crisis in the mid-1980s. The system remained stable, and the Soviet state could have muddled through economically for decades to come, while maintaining censorship, the highly authoritarian system and the image of the United States as a dangerous enemy (in the face of which citizen unity and eternal vigilance were required). “While it is true that the Soviet economy lagged behind its Western competitors, it was not in crisis in the mid-1980s” The economistic argument falls flat because Gorbachev proceeded to give far higher priority to radical political reform (which did nothing to improve the economic performance) than he did to marketization of the economy. He embraced the principle of the market only in his last two years as Soviet leader—as late as 1990—and even then it was in principle only. His intellectual acceptance that a market economy would do more to raise living standards than the centralized command economy could achieve did not lead him to risk the transition to the market, for in the short term this would have added to the country’s economic woes and to popular discontent. Gorbachev’s fundamental difference from his predecessors, and from any of his potential rivals for the Soviet leadership in 1985, lay in his commitment to radical reform of the Soviet political system (by the summer of 1988 that meant for him systemic change) and to ending the Cold War. Reagan policies that were for other Soviet leaders reasons to ramp up still further Soviet military spending were for Gorbachev merely additional evidence of the need to put an end to the senseless arms race. He had to overcome the resistance of the country’s vast military-industrial complex and of skeptical colleagues in the highest party echelons. With great political skill, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, he persuaded or cajoled the Politburo into acquiescing with fundamental change of the political system and of foreign and defense policy, even though a majority of the members of that top policy-making body harbored grave doubts about what they were signing up to."