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The Tragedy of Cold War History

By John Lewis Gaddis
January/February 1994
Article Summary and Author Biography

Historians of the Cold War were powerfully influenced by fears that America was betraying its ideals in the course of that long struggle. The real tragedy of the Cold War, however, was that faced by Stalin's victims. The newly available archives from the East seem to bear out Western hard-liners.

John Lewis Gaddis was President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992. This essay was the 1992 presidential address and has previously been published, in a different form, in Diplomatic History, with whose permission it appears here. Gaddis is also the author of The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations, (Oxford, 1992).

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