In October 1962 I was just out of my teens and I thought I was going to die. I was not alone. The Cuban missile crisis was the closest humankind came to nuclear annihilation.
The Soviet Union under Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. A nuclear holocaust was in the offing. At least that was what we thought.
There were people who knew better. There were talks going on behind the scenes and after six days Khrushchev was seen to blink. The Americans, we were told, had scored a huge victory over their communist nemesis. It was not as simple as that and we learned decades later that a secret deal had been done by which the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba and in return the US would remove its missiles from Turkey. In To Run the world Prof Sergey Radchenko of Johns Hopkins University, with the help of archival material, gives even greater detail of what was going on behind the scenes not only in the course of this crisis but in the broad sweep of the cold war.
Kennedy’s initial reaction was to invade Cuba and he had the wholehearted backing of the US military.
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But the cooler heads of Robert Kennedy and the consummate Soviet diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin prevailed.
The US accepted the Cuba-Turkey deal provided it was kept secret. The Soviets kept their promise to stay mum and the world was saved. Radchenko’s portrayal of the pressurised meetings at the White House and the Kremlin from notes taken at the time give the reader even greater detail of what was going on.
This archival material brings us from Stalin’s dominance, through the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the Suez Crisis, the Vietnam War, the period of détente and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union to the arrival on the scene of Vladimir Putin.
Some details from the archives provide new insights, others serve to confirm previous views and others still tend to challenge widely held beliefs. In a conversation with the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas in 1945, Stalin spoke of the Soviet Union’s ability to impose its system on the areas conquered by the Red Army in the second World War. This has been taken by many historians as evidence of Stalin’s plan to “run the world”. The archival materials unearthed by Radchenko indicate that Stalin played it by ear as each case arose rather than having a thought-out general plan, but expansion of Soviet territory and influence was always in his mind.
Opportunities for expansion arose to the greatest extent at the end of the second World War before the inevitable rift between the Soviet Union and its western allies.
There was talk of bases on the Bosphorus, in the Dodecanese islands in the Mediterranean and even of a Soviet occupation of Palestine. The latter idea had been put forward by Maxim Litvinov, the commissar for foreign affairs. Litvinov’s ideas on Palestine may have stemmed from his Jewish background. At one time during his pre-revolution exile he lived with his sister in Belfast and taught in a Jewish school there.
A rare Soviet territorial gain outside Europe as a result of the war was the return from Japanese rule of Sakhalin Island, where, incidentally, Radchenko was born.
A theme that runs through the book is the rivalry, sometimes verging on antipathy, between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Moscow and Beijing were at odds on so many issues when they were both under communist rule but now when China has remained nominally communist and Russia is nominally capitalist, the two countries have become friends. In the realist view of world affairs, of course, countries do not had fiends; they have interests.
Another consistent theme is that of the leaders of the USSR seeking acceptance by the West as a superpower in the full knowledge that, apart from it nuclear arsenal, it was not.
Much is made of Khrushchev’s boorishness, including his performance at the United Nations, where he took off his shoe and banged it on the desk.
This can be explained not only by his impetuous nature but also because he rose through the Communist Party ranks in the rough-and-tumble Yuzovka, a mining town later renamed Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, where diplomatic niceties were seldom observed.
His successor Leonid Brezhnev, who like Khrushchev was a member of Communist Party’s “Ukrainian clans”, is described almost as a sycophant towards his opposite number, Richard Nixon. Perhaps their mutual attributes of political and personal corruption helped bring them close.
Mikhail Gorbachev is given credit for taking “just four years to change the Soviet Union beyond all recognition” and Yeltsin’s bloodthirstiness in dealing with Chechen separatism is also given attention. All of the above-mentioned leaders, even Stalin, are seen not only to seek world status but also to want it acknowledged by Washington. This brings the reader to the Kremlin’s incumbent, Putin, and his gradual descent from support for the US in its response to the 9/11 atrocities and even his approach for Nato membership, to his gradual hostility towards US exceptionalism and his eventual invasion of Ukraine.
Nato’s eastward expansion is shown as a big contributor to Putin’s changing attitude. When they met in Moscow in 1995 he described it to Bill Clinton as “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.
Radchenko opines in the final paragraph of the book that Putin, by creating chaos, could “with the right combination of chutzpah and good luck” bring Russia one day to “recover its illusive greatness and its unsatiable [sic], self-destructive ambition to run the world”.
There appears to be a conflation here between the Russia that intends to run Ukraine and the Soviet Union, often led by non-Russians, that may have wanted to run the world.
In today’s context Russia’s ambitions towards world domination, if they exist, will face opposition not only from the US and the West but from its current “friends” in Beijing.
Seamus Martin is a former international editor and Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times.
