Misinterpreting the Cold War: The Hardliners Were Right

Now admittedly, Solidarity endangered the Soviet regime, but its threat was of a moral, not military, nature. The Polish trade union demonstrated to the world the hollowness of communist claims to represent the working class and showed how workers, in collaboration with intellectuals, could circumvent the seemingly fail?safe internal security precautions of communist regimes. Its ability to do so aroused panic in Moscow, which feared that Russian workers might be tempted to copy the Polish example. This fear served as a stimulus for reform. Clearly, Solidarity was more than a pawn in the geopolitical contest. But Mr. Garthoff refuses to acknowledge the impact of Solidarity on the evolution of communism because he treats all internal dissent in communist countries as a sideshow. Thus, the Czechoslovak Charter 77 movement rated no more than a footnote in the first volume, Solidarity has no separate index entry in the present one, and the Soviet Helsinki Monitoring Group goes unmentioned in both. It is such superficially realistic thinking, blind to human aspirations, that has led most Sovietologists to grievously underestimate the weaknesses of communism and then to be surprised by its collapse.

What renders this book anachronistic is the author's persistent justification of Soviet aggression in terms that echo the official Soviet line of the time, terms that have been publicly repudiated by Russia's own democratically elected leaders from President Boris Yeltsin on down. In a speech to the U.S. Congress in June 1992, Yeltsin implicitly aligned himself with Reagan's view of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and the primary instigator of the Cold War when he declared: "The world can sigh in relief. The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed." These are not the words of someone who sees no significant difference between the parties involved in the Cold War. During the past several years, other ex?Soviet political and military figures have openly admitted their country's aggressive intentions and manipulation of Western liberal opinion. Although newly released archival materials confirm these revelations, Mr. Garthoff, unfortunately, finds no room in his narrative for this evidence.

In the Russia of today, the only public figures who share the author's benign interpretation of Soviet Cold War policies are the reactionary nationalists of the "red?brown" coalition. How paradoxical that an American liberal should find himself in the camp of unregenerate Russian communists and fascists, while the elected president of Russia makes common cause with Western cold warriors!

REAGAN VINDICATED

Proceeding from the premise that in the Cold War the Soviet side acted almost exclusively out of fear for its security, Mr. Garthoff heaps scorn on Reagan and the "ideologues" in his entourage, who, he claims, drove the president to engage the Soviet Union in military and rhetorical confrontations. He does not address the question of why the conciliatory policies of Presidents Nixon or Carter were accompanied by a relentless military buildup and foreign intervention that culminated in the invasion of Afghanistan. He depicts Reagan as a passive accomplice of policies orchestrated by others, an ignoramus driven by a visceral anticommunist sentiment.

Admittedly, Reagan showed little curiosity about the kind of data that Mr. Garthoff has accumulated with such tenacity. Nevertheless, he displayed great discernment and the instinctive judgment of a true statesman, being inspired by a strong moral sense and a sound understanding of what it is to live under tyranny. As someone involved in the formulation of Soviet policy in the first two years of the Reagan administration, I can attest that the direction of this policy was set by the president and not by his staff, and that it was vigorously implemented over the objections of several more dovish secretaries. It rested on a keen grasp of the vulnerabilities of the Soviet regime.

Mr. Garthoff claims that in the early and mid?1980s no one "expect[ed] or fores[aw] that within a decade the Cold War, communist rule, and the Soviet Union itself would come to an end." The statement certainly holds true for him and his colleagues in the Sovietological community. It is demonstrably wrong when applied to President Reagan. Reagan acted with the conviction that the Soviet Union was not strong but weak, that its power rested on police terror at home and nuclear blackmail abroad, and that, being in the profoundest sense unnatural, it did not have long to live. In a speech at Notre Dame in May 1981, to cite but one example, Reagan asserted that "the West will not contain communism; it will transcend communism," and dismissed the whole communist experiment as a "sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."

Such pronouncements, which ran counter to the academic consensus and earned Reagan in some circles the reputation of a dangerous right?wing fanatic, did not rest entirely on intuition. In the early 1980s the U.S. government occasionally received intelligence reports that depicted in stark terms the internal crisis afflicting the Soviet Union -- intelligence not all that different from the "unvarnished internal reporting of the KGB," to which Mr. Garthoff gives much credit for informing the Soviet leaders that their country was in trouble. The grand strategy of the Reagan administration with regard to the U.S.S.R. was to exploit this crisis by every available means in order to push Moscow toward reform.