The East-West Contest With No End

Vladislav Zubok’s wonderfully crafted The World of the Cold War is sensitive to the era’s many anomalies. A Soviet-born historian at the London School of Economics, Zubok has long illuminated the Soviet Union from within for English-language readers. He first did so in Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, an archivally grounded 1996 study of Soviet foreign policy. More recently, Zubok published Collapse, a sweeping chronicle of the Soviet Union’s slide from great-power prominence in 1980 to self-destruction a few years later. The Soviet Union’s sudden disappearance remains the greatest of the Cold War mysteries, and Collapse details it not from the perspective of the Reagan White House but from the Kremlin’s inner sanctums.

The Cold War is historically anomalous. It was awkwardly long, with no clear origin or conclusion. It was awkwardly vast, more genuinely a world war than either of the two 20th century world wars. And it did not fit within any obvious narrative genre. It was a tragedy and a comedy and an epic all at once—tragic in its bloody consequences, comic (at times) in its mutually assured madness, and epic in nature, a decades-long titanic struggle. The Cold War is and was strangely elusive, as both a body of foreign-policy lessons and a collection of horrific mistakes. Who won the Cold War? Who lost it? These remain living questions.

The Cold War is historically anomalous. It was awkwardly long, with no clear origin or conclusion. It was awkwardly vast, more genuinely a world war than either of the two 20th century world wars. And it did not fit within any obvious narrative genre. It was a tragedy and a comedy and an epic all at once—tragic in its bloody consequences, comic (at times) in its mutually assured madness, and epic in nature, a decades-long titanic struggle. The Cold War is and was strangely elusive, as both a body of foreign-policy lessons and a collection of horrific mistakes. Who won the Cold War?