Vladislav Zubok on What the Cold War Actually Was

27:49Then what you have is detente and arms control. That was a major outcome of that ideological reconciliation that the Soviet leadership and particularly the guy after Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev said, you know, but we want peace. We don't renounce our ideological belief that capitalism would perish and communism would triumph, but we have to do it peacefully. Our main duty is to struggle for peace. And in the old days, let's say 20 years earlier, such guys like Brezhnev would have been denounced as, yeah, I don't know, heretics, revisionists, I don't know. But in the 70s, it was all right. So in a sense that ideological innovation opened the way for detente, peaceful policies, but Brezhnev.

28:35And with all kinds of good consequences for Europe, with the American Soviet detente flourishing briefly, but flourishing under Nixon. And looking backwards, you begin to realize that without this period of Brezhnev and the struggle for peace, otherwise you wouldn't have had Gorbachev. And of course, without Gorbachev in the late 80s, from 85 to 1991, you cannot imagine the end of such conflict as the Cold War, because Gorbachev was a major part and single-handedly did many things that made the end of this conflict possible, thinkable, and actually it happened.

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30:50Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options and bonds, and a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by Backed Crypto Solutions, LLC. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Tracy, I just want to say one thing. One area where I think the Soviet Union was objectively better is that it's a country where a chess grandmaster would be so politically influential. I would like to live in such a, you know, that was one aspect I would like. A country where chess is valued. Yeah, where Botvinnik writes a letter, that's influential.

31:19Well, at a cultural, small cultural note for our audience, I mean, not everybody played chess in the Soviet Union. That's to begin with. So when CIA experts or somebody else would point out that the Soviets are so devious because they all play chess and all outfox us in the West, it's not true because the political leadership played domino. Much more simple game. They played domino. They were much more primitive. That's where they got the domino theory from. Anyway, Tracy, go. Right, right, right. Okay. Well, Vlad, as you keep repeating, this is such a sprawling period in history, and I have so many questions, but one I want to make sure we actually get to is just sort of bringing everything up to date.

31:58And Joe mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is because one thing you hear nowadays— One of the pretenses. One of the pretenses, other than he read the book, is this idea of the U.S. and China being in a Cold War. So when you hear someone say, oh, this is the new Cold War between the U.S. and China, what is your immediate reaction? No, I don't believe it's a Cold War between the U.S. and China. Well, unless you want to, you know, let me rephrase it. It may be called the Cold War if you take very superficial or rather abstract theoretical take on what the Cold War is.

32:37So it's just a competition between great powers that for some reason, primarily because of the existence of nuclear weapons, never turns hot. Well, if you take this kind of abstract, generic approach, then you may say, oh, another Cold War. And probably because of the existence of nuclear weapons, if we're lucky, we'll have a series of the Cold War into eternity. Right. But I'm not a fan of this approach. I'm much more into specific historical interpretation of the Cold War, which I said was, above all, a context between the two ways of modernization, capitalism and non-capitalism, called socialism.

33:19And a capitalist won that, you know, all rounds of that competition handily. And this is why essentially the Cold War ended the way it ended. But where are we now between the United States and China? It's much more narrow in really more geopolitical context. Who would be the top in the hierarchy of capitalist powers? Yes, somebody would say, oh, it's about freedom versus lack of freedom and authoritarianism in China. But it's a much weaker argument, really, in my view. A, because China evolves in its own way, you know, through hundreds and hundreds of years. so, but nobody said that ultimately China would not begin to vote and have political parties.

34:07Who knows? Maybe in 200 years, China will develop into some sort of democracy. So I would never say no to that. My approach is more specific that for now, I don't believe we are facing as profound, as dangerous, as essentialist and existential conflict as the Cold War had been, particularly in the first two decades of the Cold War between 1947, let's say 1962, 68, whatever. So this is my answer to the question there as the conflict, but I would hesitate to call it the Cold War. However, however, we should all learn from 40 years of Cold War history to make the Sino-American conflict manageable, or at least more manageable.

35:00And I have a few ideas about this by just looking at the Soviet-American interaction during the previous major conflict. One idea is, of course, diplomacy should work. And I'm always struck how important was diplomacy, even at the worst moments of the Cold War, even at the time of McCarthyism in the United States, even at the not to mention the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged all those famous messages that ultimately led to the peaceful outcome of the crisis. So diplomacy is hugely important. The second point I want to make about the Sino-American confrontation today, that the danger of tunnel vision.

35:48People should learn to think outside the box. There was in the Cold War, so many people who said there cannot be any way of talking to those communists, to those Ruskis. And there were many hardliners in the Soviet Union who never wanted to trust or talk to the Americans. And yet they were always people thinking outside the box and finding cultural, diplomatic, and other ways of interaction. That's really important. A third observation, some people would say tariffs, economic sanctions, and arms race would solve this conflict today between China and the United States. I would say the entire Cold War actually shows that it was nonsense.

36:36Arms race did not solve political sources of confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. The development of capitalism, the development of where global economies solved that conflict, the fundamental underlining issues of that conflict. So if the United States wants to outspend China, more sophisticated weaponry, AI intelligence to manage the weaponry, that's another deadlock. That's like forgetting fundamental lessons of history. And finally, look at the cover of my book, Falling Domino. One major problem of Cold War mentality, particularly on the American side, but also on the Soviet side, of course, was thinking once we make this one concession anywhere, there will be the falling domino effect.

37:34And that will be the end of our credibility, the end of our position. That will be the end of our whole global position in the world and our camp. So what did Americans get by following this falling domino theory? They ended up in Vietnam. And what did the Soviets gain by going along this line? They actually collapsed at the end of it. So it's not a good way. It's not a good way to resurrect the falling domino mentality by saying, if God forbid, if China moves against this island somewhere, you know, and we do not defend this island by military force, then that's the end of the world we know. It's a falling domino.

38:16It's a classic falling domino theory. When I was growing up, terms like human rights, it never would have occurred to me when I was younger that these could be loaded terms, that there could be anything bad about a human rights group or a human, you know, whatever it is, or minority rights or so forth. I thought these were just unalloyed goods. And one of the things, you know, I've been thinking about that recently, again, actually in current geopolitical context, because just a week or two ago, Trump was in the Gulf and he, you know, made all these agreements and we're going to sell lots of semiconductors to Gulf countries and so forth.

38:56You know, Saudi Arabia still does a lot of executions by beheading and things that would horrify people in the United States, all kinds of things in the human rights realm that would horrify people in the United States, but we can still do business with them. We can still sell them a lot of semiconductors and buy their oil and so forth. One of the things you point out in your book is the role of human rights groups at times throughout this story of undermining detente. And sort of when we were having these sort of softer moments that ultimately the human rights groups in the West, They were not helpful on that front.

39:32Could this be a more productive, peaceful path in the United States to perhaps be more willing to just accept, you know what, we can do business with countries, we can sell arms and chips, and we don't have to worry. It's just not our business how they conduct their internal affairs. Well, you know, this is one of those moments during the long Cold War when Americans played very proactively and Americans were in a vibrant society. Let me use this loaded term, free society, unlike the Soviets. But ironically, American human rights movement was ignited by something that was happening inside the Soviet Union.

40:14To begin with, there was a group, very small groups of human rights defenders called dissidents in the Soviet Union that evoked huge admiration in American societies as sort of good Russians versus evil Russians, you know, people whose names were household names at the time, and few people remember them now, like, you know, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov and then another, you know, great names at the time. And then came the issue of Jewish emigres who wanted to leave the Soviet Union to go to Israel or to go to other countries, and American Jewish groups who faced discrimination at home and wanted to sort of assert themselves at the same time at home, they found a great cause, a good cause inside the Soviet Union to help their brethren to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

41:05So that was the true emergence of the human rights movement in the United States that conflated with other great currents that's already been there, like civil rights movements and anti-racist movements and feminist movements and environment movement. So it was a great moment in American history. So what happened, I think it would be foolish on anybody's part to blame human rights movements for undermining detente, because detente was very shaky and very, very fragile thing to begin with. But detente was, in a sense, the Soviets were doubly unlucky during the 70s, because they thought that with a sheer agreement on the equality of armaments and the agreement on like taming the arms race, they would create the foundation for the etant.

41:53And that was really, really naive to think so. Because again, back to one of my points, arms races or taming arms races, taming arms races is good, but arms races in a sense, they're crucial to solving real political issues. So these arms agreements that the Soviet Union was so proud of, Well, they didn't play any role in the end. What played the role was human rights movement inside the United States that delegitimized the taunt in the eyes of millions of Americans. Plus, of course, there were other issues dealing to decolonization in Africa, the fall of the Portuguese empire and the Soviets jumped in immediately, guided by the Marxist-Leninist kind of fraternity solidarity mentality.

42:34And American hotliners said, you see, they aren't changing. They keep rolling it, you know, they keep undermining global stability and whatever they can. And there were other things as well. So which sadly led the Soviets to their own falling domino mindset and overreaction in Afghanistan that you mentioned. So everything was a reaction to something. But I would place the rise of the human rights in context. What indubitably happened, however, then was that people like President Carter and then President Reagan quickly realized that this is a moral course to follow. And it also was expedient course politically because by championing global human rights campaigns, the United States were back as a leader of the free world.

43:27And they were back with much more credentials, like finally being not only the leaders of the free world, but the leaders of the just world, which was usually something claimed by the Soviet Union, right, in earlier years. The Soviet Union always was against racism, against Jim Crow, against colonialism. And suddenly the United States grabbed all of that and redirected it against the Soviet Union and said, and you, Ruskies, are actually hidden colonizers, you're authoritarians, you don't let your people emigrate and all that. So it was a decisive ideological turning point in the Cold War, which the Soviets at first didn't realize was that way.

44:11And then later they became pathetically defensive and just couldn't find a good way to deal with that. Until Gorbachev finally said during his presidency, let's not be afraid of human rights. Let's basically accept that we also can be free and just society. And he began to liberalize the Soviet society with the outcome that we already know.

44:47I want to go back to something you said very early on in the conversation, but you mentioned that the Cold War wasn't really written about in the Soviet Union, I guess, when you were living there, when you were studying and in school. And I'm really curious about personal experiences during the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the best books I ever read on the subject was by Svetlana Aleksevich, I want to say. Secondhand Time, which is a sort of oral history of Russians experiencing this transition from communism to capitalism. So I'm just very curious what your personal experience was and I guess what the sort of messaging was to the Russian population about that huge transition and transformation.

45:30Well, that was, as you said, unexpected and huge transition that amounted to the complete loss of identity. And you may say that by that time, very few people seriously took ideological promises of arrival of communism. and many people began to think that life in the West was not awful, but actually much more superior. And that particularly turning point in the 89, 90, 91, when the Soviet press liberated by Gorbachev began to beam to Soviet audience through television. It wasn't like something that foreign stations did. It was the Soviet television began to convey this information about the much better life in the West.

46:14So all pillars of Soviet mindset, sort of Soviet worldview, began to collapse simultaneously. And it led to several fateful consequences. First was that sense of cynicism, dejection of any certainty, any moral, any kind of ethical certainties in the society, which was accompanied by a huge wave of domestic crime and violence and mostly economic violence. Secondly, that was this kind of realization, well, if capitalism is the only way for humanity to exist and evolve, anything to gain money to make profit is allowed. So again, the combination of collapse of ethical norms with sudden spread of capitalist practices led to that, you know, wild East mentality, much more so than the Wild West was in America, I would say.

47:12And ultimately, the void was filled by nationalism or some kind of at least, and I wouldn't say totally filled, but, you know, some kind of expectation that if everything collapses around me, it means that either I choose my family and myself as the only sort of bulwark in the future, or I would believe in another superego, which is nation, nationalism. And so the nationalists and ethnic conflicts sprung up immediately as Gorbachev began to dismantle the old sort of the old mentality, the old system in the Soviet Union. And that was highly dangerous and highly destructive. And of course, in part, those nationalists militated against the past and passed grievances in all the people killed by Stalin and Lenin and all that.

48:04But they also kind of satisfied the new need for a renewed sense of identity. So I used to think that the Soviet collapse was relatively peaceful until the current war in Ukraine, because clearly, you know, this new wave of Russian nationalism is linked to the continuing lack of idea, a continuing void in the heart of Russia, why so many changes happened and what's the meaning of those changes. So it was possible, as it turned out, as I'm saying, with deep sadness for the leader of Russia to fill that tremendous vacuum with another refurbished idea of Russian imperial and national domination. So I just have one last question.

48:51We could talk for a long time and have lots of things, including we could talk about the war in Ukraine and how actually Kennan himself predicted that that could be a consequence of Clinton's NATO expansion and things like that. But, you know, I want to ask one last question. The way you depict it, and also especially in your previous book, Collapse, you're pretty hard on Gorbachev and you sort of castigate him at times for his unwillingness to use force at times. But, you know, one of the things that you can see in this book is that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, there was a big economic element.

49:25The Soviet Union could no longer supply cheap oil to East Germany and other countries and so forth, and that the economic dysfunction of the Soviet Union played a significant role in the failure to keep those military allies on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But then you sort of say Gorbachev unilaterally disarmed, more or less, the USSR, that it was an unforced collapse, that it was sort of an internal choice. Why shouldn't we assume that the economic dysfunction that led to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, which you acknowledge, would not have eventually led to the disintegration of the USSR itself and the emergence of all these countries pursuing some conception of freedom and national identity?

50:10Oh, yeah, I keep struggling with the same question because history is never linear and it can go different ways. And of course, those who look back at the history of the 20th century, and in fact, the 19th century, see the immense force of nationalism and national self-determination. But this is one way to say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable and that it was just a matter of time for all those different nations to find a road to their statehood and sovereignty and all that. But in other ways to look back at history and see the perils and dangers of sudden collapses, sudden collapses of empires, we see essentially this tremendous instability in Europe, paving the way to fascist and Nazi dictatorships rooted in the sudden collapse of empires as a result of World War I.

51:03So the suddenness of this collapse, the fact that they create this immense vacuum and destroy the old common identities and common links, immense common links between different ethnic groups and across different ethnic groups, this is a hugely dangerous moment. And in fact, I tried to strike a balance in collapse, looking at both sides, but sort of probably knowing what would follow after Gorbachev, maybe I overdo the second part. You're really hard on Gorbachev. I'm hard on Gorbachev because he raised expectations tremendously. And I was among his followers and millions of people looked up to him for leadership.

51:44And when particularly he made tremendous changes in the late 88, 89, not right away. You know, the first two years were very kind of very frustrating. I remember that. But then he made that huge leap forward, huge leap forward. And that leap forward contained elements of the future collapse because it had many misguided premises. He believed in Leninism. He believed in that sort of many things that he shouldn't believe in. But he did. But then by taking this leap, Gorbachev kind of got frozen in the process of this leap. He suddenly lost his initiative. He became famously slow or infamously slow in taking other steps.

52:31So with such tremendous changes, you have to maintain the momentum or you lose it to others. And he lost that momentum to Yeltsin, to the Russian sort of leader, who essentially pulled Russia from under Gorbachev and destroyed the Soviet Union. Not the Balts, not Georgians, not Ukrainians destroyed the Soviet Union. Yeltsin did, in my view. So by looking at this story, I'm harsh on the later Gorbachev because the book is mostly about three years, 89, 90, 91, during which Gorbachev had already done his greatest kind of leap into the future and got scared somewhat. Couldn't find a new path. got outgunned by his rivals.

53:15So my harshness on Gorbachev, maybe he's guided by the fact that I would very much prefer him to succeed because other options were very, very, very clear for us now what other options led to. For those who admired in Washington, people admired Yeltsin and thought that Gorbachev was still a communist. True, Yeltsin turned into anti-communist, but look, It was Yeltsin who gave us the current Kremlin leader, after all. Vladislav Zubak, this was fantastic. We could talk for a long time. After I read Collapse, I sort of thought, by the way, that Gorbachev sort of seems like an Obama-type character.

53:56Nobel Prize winner, but then, you know, in the wake of it, maybe some lost momentum. We could talk for a long time about all this. Really appreciate you so much for coming on. Everyone should read your book. I will reread it again because I apparently missed the entire point. But really, thanks for coming on OddLot. Well, thank you very much for talking about history. It's a rare moment.

54:30Tracy, I really do have to reread the book. I apparently, I was like, I love this book. And then I missed the entire point. How did that happen? My reading comprehension isn't that great. People say, Joe, how do you read so many books? The answer is by not paying attention to the words on the page. Well, good thing we're not basing a bunch of podcast episodes on your reading and understanding of history books. OK, that was fascinating. I did. I did think. Well, first of all, I keep recommending that book secondhand time to you. And I really think you should. And I think one of the important takeaways from that conversation and from other conversations that we've had in the past is this idea of like, just how big an existential crisis the collapse of the Soviet Union actually was for Russia.

55:14And Vlad's point that you ended up replacing the communist ideology with nationalism. I mean, we are still living through the consequences of all of that. No, we totally are. We didn't really get into it too much. And he sort of ends the book and talk about the US-China relationship. And one of the points that he makes, whereas the US-Soviet relationship was really something that was always handled at the diplomatic level. The U.S.-China relationship has, especially in the last, you know, 30 years, 40 years, whatever, has really been driven by the business community specifically, which sort of makes it a very different story to the Cold War.

55:52And it just has not been about that sort of ideological battle per se. In fact, there was a really good article, I think it was in the Financial Times last year, where there was like Cuba was asking China for some advice on economic growth. And I think the Chinese leader is like, well, you could try introducing market competition. You maybe give that a shot. So while, you know, obviously China wants to expand its influence, it seems like, you know, it does it by building factories and stuff like that and expanding its economic footprint much more than asking its trading partners to, you know, commit to its specific model.

56:27Well, speaking of building factories, one episode I do want to do, because this keeps coming up, is why were communists so obsessed with steel? And, you know, Vlad mentioned the idea of like India asking Russia for help in building some steel factories. And it feels like sometimes I think the Cold War could have been, you know, we could have avoided the Cold War if we just had some sort of steel manufacturing off competition between the great world powers. And whoever made the best steel would be declared the winner and their economic model would be, you know, embraced by the rest of the world.

57:02We should have gone down that route. Did you know that the name Stalin was a nom de guerre? That means man of steel. I did actually know that. I didn't know that up until recently. You know, steel, you could tell a really good story about the Cold War just through the medium of steel. Someone should write that book. Odd Lot series, the history of the Cold War. As told through the medium of steel. That might be a little niche. Yeah, just a little. Okay, shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

57:34And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Vladislav Zubak. He's at Vladislav Zubak 1. And definitely check out his new book, The World of the Cold War. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these things 24-7, including books, including history, in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the history of the Cold War, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

58:14And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

58:49Thank you.

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