History, however, is full of surprises. One is what Radchenko describes as a “deluge” of Cold War–era documents, released over the past decade, from Soviet government and Communist Party archives, as well as from the personal papers of Kremlin leaders. Radchenko doesn’t try to explain why this has happened; he’s content instead to make the most of the opportunity it presents to “know” Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and their associates at a “very personal level.” It’s like being a “psychological counselor,” he writes, “in a session with a client who tells the same stories over and over again to reveal the underlying passions and fears.”
HOME AND AWAY
So what, from that vantage point, can one learn? Radchenko’s most significant finding is how great the gap was between the ideology on which the Soviet Union was founded, on the one hand, and the topography on which it sought to impose its authority, on the other. “What the Soviets saw as their ‘legitimate’ interests,” he writes, “were often not seen as particularly ‘legitimate’ by anybody else, leading to a kind of ontological insecurity on the Soviet part that was compensated for by hubris and aggression.”
Take, for example, Joseph Stalin’s simultaneous commitment to world revolution and to securing the state he ran. The Soviet Union, he believed, deserved a place of honor in international affairs as the first nation to have aligned itself with the class struggle, the previously hidden driver of modern history. Its security, however, required brutalities: agricultural collectivization, indiscriminate purges, exorbitant wartime sacrifices. The difficulty here, Radchenko points out, is that unilateral imposition secures neither honor nor safety: respect, if genuine, can arise only by consent. That left Stalin seeking to enhance the Soviet Union’s external reputation without compromising its internal safety while maintaining, in both domains, its and his own legitimacy. In short, a three-body problem.
Radchenko defines legitimacy as satisfaction with things as they are, and there are various ways of obtaining it. Marlon Brando, in The Godfather, spoke softly but left a horse head, when needed, on selected bedsheets: offers followed that recipients couldn’t refuse. Stalin was capable of such efficiencies, but only within realms he fully controlled. Beyond these, his preference was to convene bosses like mafia dons dividing up territories—hence his expectation at the World War II conferences in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam that his U.S. and British counterparts would acknowledge Soviet authority over half of Europe. But Stalin saw this, Radchenko argues, as only a temporary arrangement. The Anglo-Americans, being predatory capitalists, would soon go to war with one another, Stalin believed, leaving Europeans not yet within the Soviet sphere to voluntarily choose communist parties to lead them, in close correspondence with Moscow’s wishes.