They can’t help staring at a weird explosion of colors, vaguely reminiscent of a bronze sculpture they have seen before. The Monument to the Soviet Army, erected in 1954 in gratitude for the Red Army’s role in World War II, has been rendered unrecognizable. A sprayed inscription reads “abreast of the times”—below an army of superheroes and cartoon characters including Superman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, The Joker, Ronald McDonald, and Santa Claus. The American flag is painted behind the composition.

The municipality calls for sponsors to pay for cleaning up the monument. The “Russia-Bulgaria Forum” is the first to react to this call, and the monument is cleaned within a couple of days. Prosecutors start pre-trial proceedings against unknown perpetrators.

One of the bronze lions at the Palace of Justice in Sofia, Bulgaria, as transformed by Destructive Creation in 2013. Image courtesy of Destructive Creation.

But meanwhile, the superhero makeover sparks national and international interest. Bulgarians have been debating the monument’s meaning and future since the beginning of the transition to democracy in 1989. Is it a piece of history that must be preserved or does it reconfirm the ugly lie that the Soviet Union was our savior? But nobody had previously seemed to care that much about the monument’s appearance and condition. Now they do.

A photo of the transformed statue is featured on BBC and CNN. Bulgarians take selfies and make appointments in front of the monument. The place becomes a cultural phenomenon everyone seems interested in. Discussions and arguments erupt. Some hold that the socialist monument should be demolished. Russophiles are utterly disgusted by the monstrous vandalism; the Russian Minister of Exterior Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the vandals should be punished. Bulgaria’s Minister of Culture himself condemns the statue’s new look and calls it an act of vandalism.

Whether it was that, or art, the act has provoked serious pro and anti-Russian discussion in the Bulgarian society.

The repainting explicitly expressed the split between Bulgaria’s traditional relationship to the Soviet Union and the modern influence of American pop culture and western Capitalism. The monument’s transformation raised questions about history and the way we interpret it, national identity and cultural belonging, globalization and consumerism.

Several months later, an urban art collective called Destructive Creation takes responsibility for the repainting. Its members want to remain anonymous. Fame has no appeal for them, they say; their goal is to make their actions speak for themselves. The only thing they want visible is their art. In fact, they don’t even call it art—they see it as pretentious to consider themselves “artists.”

In an interview for the Bulgarian national television (he was standing with his back towards the camera to keep his anonymity), a member of the collective described the scene-setting of the Monument to the Soviet Army as a “terrifying” experience—the risk of getting caught on the spot and charged with a criminal offense was extremely high. But the artists-who-don’t-think-they-are-artists were not done making political statements.

Image courtesy of destructivecreation.com

Two years later, in 2013, a suspiciously similar makeover affects another national symbol. One of two giant bronze guardians of the Palace of Justice is transformed overnight into something like Batman’s antagonist the Joker. The spray-painted inscription says “20 years of total circus.” Destructive Creation explain in a statement: “The state government is a circus and the political leaders are clowns.”

The tainted sculpture is, again, immediately cleaned, but in the meantime, the image once more hits the media. The lion-turned-clown grows in popularity and raises eyebrows. It addresses an important issue—omnipresent corruption and a promised change that never happens. Again, people have mixed feelings about Destructive Creation’s intervention; some say it’s а vicious mockery of national symbols, while others applaud it. They insist that the real outrage is how long the corrupt political elite has been laundering money at the expense of citizens’ prosperity.

Destructive Creation doesn’t just send strong messages about Bulgarian politics, it also sheds light on global issues. In 2014 the collective commemorated the 28-year anniversary of one of the greatest nuclear disasters of all time—Chernobyl. The artists came up with an installation made up of 400 gas masks sprayed bright yellow. “30 years ago this happened … nothing,” says the caption. The painful reminder refers to the Soviet Union’s decision to keep the communist eastern-bloc countries in the dark about the tragic event and its malignant impact on people’s health and lives.

Apart from making statements through sporadic acts of “art profanity,” Destructive Creation seem to really care about urban areas. In recent years, its members have undertaken intriguing and thought-provoking art installations and urban area “improvements.” These have included wooden rocking horses, with signs saying “wait a little,” positioned at bus stops so that bored commuters can have some fun; bus stops repainted in bright colors (yes, they do make the everyday routine more tolerable); repainted carts for homeless people; a stage for street musicians; an open-air library (with a beautifully painted bookstand for free book exchanges) in a park; and a bike-repair gazebo.

Though almost everything they do is illegal, the artists of Destructive Creation are to be “blamed” for a lot of urban improvements—at the cost of just a handful of coins, more or less. Minor urban changes really make a difference, fostering the spirit many of us would love to see more of in our city.

Image courtesy of destructivecreation.com

Indeed, by combining attention-seeking political messages and urban improvement, Destructive Creation is sending a larger social message—of the need for citizens to participate in moving beyond the past and shaping their own future.

Sometimes the collective makes this specific. Not long ago, a bright pink wheelchair was placed in a highly visible spot in front of the national stadium. The caption under the wheelchair read: “For the National Paralympic Team and for all the people for whom the Olympics are everyday.” The message was clear: Disabled people are fighting a battle every day of their lives.

They followed up with a campaign installing a “forbidden for disabled persons” sign above a Sofia sign. On its website, Destructive Creation celebrated the sign ironically: “We are an ancient people and we have ancient traditions that command that only the stronger survive. In spite of changes and time and different epochs, Sofia has remained accessible only to those of us who are healthy and there is no space for the imperfect ones.”

A follow-up message bitterly clarified the intent: Elections were soon taking place and candidates had given no priority to the issue of “making society more inclusive.”

The post Is That a Soviet Soldier—or Superman? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Global domination was indeed Moscow’s declared aim. The issue, however, was whether this goal was at all practicable.

The Red Scare blended neatly with popular hostility to mass immigration in America, particularly against a surge of Jews fleeing the anti-Semitic heartlands of Eastern Europe. Responding to hostility, many Jews embraced the inclusive internationalist ideals of Communism rather than the outlandish idea of building a Jewish state in the deserts of British-controlled Arab Palestine. But they were a minority, drawn in by radical idealism and anti-fascism. And the American opposition to wider Jewish immigration from these areas was clearly colored by racism, especially the anti-Semitism of the time.

Although there was little justification for the scare-mongering, the hysteria was enough to spur the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which put a halt to the inflow of immigrants without visas. Fears began to dissipate. The 1927 execution of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchist immigrants accused of murder on doubtful evidence, marked the high tide of the irrational anti-red (and mostly anti-foreigner) hysteria in American life.

Ironically, it was around this time that real dangers actually began to emerge. But, having cried wolf once too often, doomsayers then faced an uphill task through the ‘30s trying to convince the government and the American public that Communist threats of any kind actually existed.

Fear of Communism and fear of Soviet espionage were closely entangled because a few members of the miniscule American Communist Party were, in fact, involved in spying for Moscow. Most adherents had no idea this kind of thing was going on—the practice was confined to the shadows, restricted to a few specially chosen for what they had to offer. But, as was the case with Communist Parties elsewhere in the world, those recruited saw it as their duty to serve. And recent archival revelations from Moscow show just how persistent the Kremlin was in its attempts to penetrate the American system.

Initially the civilian branch of Soviet intelligence—OGPU, then NKVD—had little luck recruiting American spies. Yuri Markin (codename Oskar), the illegal “rezident”—as the Russians called their station chiefs—from from 1932-1934, was murdered by persons unknown, the victim of a violent encounter in a New York bar. His replacement, Boris Bazarov (codenames, Kin, Da Vinci, Nord), worked in tandem with the ‘legal’ rezident (who was under diplomatic cover), Pyotr Guttseit (codename Nikolai). He had much better luck, including recruiting sources with direct access to the State Department and one connected to President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle. But the successful spy was recalled to Moscow in 1937, where he became a victim of Stalin’s paranoid purge of those seen as connected to foreigners (mass executions that included even George Kennan’s dentist at the American embassy). His successor, Ishak Akhmerov (codename Yung), took over and married a distant relative of Communist Party chief Earl Browder. Browder himself ensured that ties to Soviet intelligence became indistinguishable from Party work; his wife, Kitty (‘Gipsy’) Harris, worked for the Soviets and assisted (and slept with) their British spy Donald Maclean in London and then Paris in the late ‘30s.

The most successful operation at that time, however, came from a group of covert operatives organized by the American agriculturalist Harold Ware. The ring included Alger Hiss, Donald, and other federal officials who were convinced that the need to confront the threat from fascism eclipsed all other loyalties. They believed that the road to socialism was inevitable, and that the socialist-leaning policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were merely the taste of things to come. This operation came under Soviet military intelligence, known as the Fourth Directorate, the NKVD’s main rival. Although their infiltration went deep, none of it added up to much—it was simply ‘music of the future’.

The stakes were raised, however, when the U.S. entered WWII in December 1941—and the Americans joined the British to develop the atomic bomb. Soviet focus on scientific and industrial intelligence (NTR), which had its own section within the NKVD, switched abruptly from London to Washington. Though intelligence boss Lavrenty Beria dragged his feet on the issue, the NTR foresaw the significant role the bomb would play and pushed it to the forefront of their priorities. Once the directive was set by Stalin in 1942, Soviet efforts knew no limits. Operation Enormoz, directed at uncovering the secret of atomic bomb construction, took high priority. The Kremlin was looking ahead to the aftermath of war. The balance of power could ultimately depend who had the bomb. And those who volunteered for the cause were putting their lives at risk, as they were soon to find out.

The American authorities had absolutely no idea what the Russians were up to until very late in the game. Good liberals scoffed at the idea that Moscow could be spying on a wartime ally, even as some of their best friends were actually secret members of the Communist Party and spies for Russia. The Roosevelt administration declined to follow up on tips about suspected infiltration. It wasn’t until the very public defection of a Soviet Embassy cipher clerk, who snuck out documentation showing the magnitude of Soviet atomic espionage that had been going on, that the issue finally came to a head. Soviet spy networks were quickly rooted out. The consequences proved cataclysmic for Americans caught serving the Communist cause. Among those swept up were Julius Rosenberg, an engineer who handed Moscow classified information about the U.S. atomic program, and his wife Ethel (against whom there was little solid evidence).

By the early 1950s, when the Rosenbergs were executed, Washington was again gripped with widespread hysteria about Communist penetration of American society and government.

The Russians, meanwhile, had been closing down all operations in the late 1940s in order to save their agents; and only well after the death of Stalin in 1953 were they able to begin seriously rebuilding their networks in America. But these networks never acquired the significance they had once had. Atomic espionage in the United States, carried out by misguided idealists who saw in the Soviets a progressive force, proved the high point of Russian intelligence operations targeting America.

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, destroyed any remaining allure Moscow may have held for young idealists in the West. Thus, although President Lyndon Johnson dearly hoped to uncover Moscow’s clammy hand at work behind the protest movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, no amount of effort by the FBI and CIA could uncover anything of significance. International communism, whatever challenges it still posed overseas, no longer posed the threat of creating a fifth column at home.

Though the Russians did have dramatic success in penetrating both the FBI and CIA in the 1980s, it didn’t impact the American psyche as they would have two decades earlier. Yes, they were serious security lapses, but they involved lone, disaffected or greedy double agents like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. There was nothing idealistic, nothing connected to a larger Soviet appeal, in their betrayal.

By the 1980s, the issue of socialism in American political life had become completely divorced from the issue of relations with the Soviet Union. And as the USSR dissolved from within and came to an end in 1992, the long dark shadow it cast over America finally passed forever.

Even when revelations of post-Soviet Russian spying reemerged in more recent years; most Americans just shrugged their shoulders, or met the news with a nostalgic chuckle and a mention of the good old Cold War days. Other challenges, most prominently 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, had reconnected domestic internal security concerns with international relations in an even more dramatic manner. And as the generations move on, distant memories grossly exaggerated fears recede from our shared consciousness.

The post The (Actual) Communist Agents Who Lurked Among Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kennan arguably played a larger role in shaping the U.S.’s view of a major foreign power, and thus our relations with that power, than any other American in modern history. That the power in question was the Soviet Union, and the time in question the crucial period after World War II, made his outsized influence all the more remarkable.

He brought an authoritative blend of scholarship and experience to posts as diplomat, ambassador, State Department policy adviser, and Princeton-based professor—exerting his influence on American strategy from both inside and outside the government. For an entire generation of U.S. officials who guided the nation’s foreign policy in the Cold War, Kennan became the preeminent guide of all things Russia. His main legacy: Advising Americans how best to restrain the Soviet threat.

Yet despite the key role he played on the U.S. side of the adversarial relationship, Kennan was deeply enamoured with Russia. In diplomatic postings across Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s, he mastered the language – “No American spoke Russian the way George did,” according to one colleague. Over the course of his long life (Kennan died in 2005, aged 101), he read and re-read the great works of 19th-century Russian literature and travelled the country as frequently and extensively as he could. While in London in May 1958, he went to see a performance of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and recorded a powerful reaction in his diary:

Seeing The Cherry Orchard stirred all the rusty, untuned strings of the past and of my own youth: Riga, and the Russian landscape, and the staggering, unexpected familiarity and convincingness of the Chekhovian world—it stirred up, in other words, my Russian self, which is entirely a Chekhovian one and much more genuine than the American one—and having all this prodded to the surface in me, I sat there blubbering like a child and trying desperately to keep the rest of the company from noticing it.

His Russian self and American self would make for uneasy Cold War companions. And although Kennan profoundly admired the nation, his heart ached for how Lenin and Stalin had so brutally altered its path.

Kennan’s warm feelings toward Russia were even known by Mikhail Gorbachev, who met Kennan in 1987 in Washington, D.C. and told him, “We in our country believe that a man may be the friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.” This recognition by an adversary made for a moment of profound personal satisfaction for the former diplomat.

Kennan was best known to most Americans as the Cold War’s Paul Revere who sounded the alarm in 1946 that the Soviets were coming (into Central and Western Europe). Frustrated by the Truman administration’s inability to appreciate the magnitude of the threat posed by Stalin’s Soviet Union, the then American chargé d’affaires in Moscow cabled Washington in what was to become the most famous communication in the history of the State Department. In his nearly 6,000-word “long telegram,” the diplomat emphasized that the Soviet Union saw no path to permanent peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. Stalin—fuelled by nationalism, deep-set fears of external attack, and Marxist-Leninist ideology—was determined to expand his nation’s power. But, Kennan explained, the Soviets were weak, and if the Western World made it clear they would put up a strong resistance at any incursion, the opportunistic menace could be contained.

The telegram’s impact was profound. Circulated quickly and widely, it was read by the secretaries of War and the Navy, and later by President Truman himself. It became required reading for senior members of the armed forces and was also cabled to America’s embassies and missions abroad. The sheer force of the argument persuaded many in power in part, as one Truman aide remarked, because “Kennan tied everything together, wrapped it in a neat package, and put a red bow around it.”

Kennan was recalled to Washington in May 1946 and made Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs at the National War College. Ten months later, writing anonymously under the letter “X,” Kennan published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” that elaborated on his long telegram’s diagnoses and recommendations, this time for a public audience. Mr. X, as the author became known, compared the Soviet Union to a wind-up toy that would move relentlessly in a particular direction unless a barrier was placed in its way. He pulled from his extensive knowledge of Russian history to create a psychological profile of a totalitarian regime where truth was fluid and worldviews were informed by “centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast fortified plain” and assaults over the centuries from Mongol hordes from the East and Napoleon’s and Hitler’s formidable armies from the West. These memories of death and destruction melded with an expansionist communist worldview. The result was a state determined, no matter how long it took, to amass a powerful empire that would protect the motherland from any enemy. In other words, there was to be no meaningful engagement with this Russia for a long time to come.

To restrain Moscow, Kennan advised that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” This sentence was to become his policy legacy. Finally, here was a compromise between an all-out war of superpowers and a passive peace strategy that would invite opportunistic Soviet aggression. Be patient. Show strength. Wait for the inevitable fall. In addition to then President Truman, who put this strategy into full force as the Cold War began, eight more presidents would go on to subscribe to variations of this seminal policy.

Although he continues to be best known for his advocacy of containment, it is important to note that Kennan largely intended it to keep communist incursions out of Western Europe and Japan via non-military means: economic aid, propaganda, political warfare. This vision was played out in policies such as the Marshall Plan, which he played a key role in designing as the first-ever head of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. His narrowly tailored vision of containment, as we now know, didn’t last. From the end of the Korean War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kennan consistently criticized the ways in which his policy was hijacked—from justifying militarized containment of low-stakes countries like Vietnam to defending the anti-Russian flames fanned by demagogic McCarthyites to being used to rabble-rouse ordinary Americans into supporting the nuclear arms build-up under Reagan. Though he continued to weigh in on major foreign policy debates from posts as U.S. ambassador and as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, he lost most of these battles.

Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kennan continued bemoaning what he considered the misappropriation of his views. In an op-ed for The New York Times in 1997, for example, Kennan prophetically warned that Bill Clinton’s eastward expansion of NATO would be a fateful error. The move to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the Cold War-era military alliance, he wrote, would only serve “to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”

Kennan correctly surmised that NATO expansion would sour future U.S.-Russian relations. Although the man had many blind spots, particularly in his elitist and ethnocentric resistance to a more democratic and heterogeneous vision of America, his read of how Washington’s actions would be perceived in Moscow was almost always on point. And it was probably Kennan’s “Russian self”—his deep knowledge and empathy with the history, language, land, and literature that animated the Russian people—that made him so much more adept than his American-minded contemporaries. George Frost Kennan may be remembered as the architect of Western “victory” in the Cold War, but he was also one of the most empathetic American friends Russia has ever had.

The post The Man Who Explained the Soviets to America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course that American ambivalence towards things Russian eventually changed, and we know exactly when it did: November 7, 1917, the day the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and the American idea of “Communist Russia” was born.

Though Lenin quickly irked the West by pulling out of World War I, Communist Russia was hardly a great boogieman to ordinary Americans. Thousands of justifiably anti-Communist Russian emigrés tried to convince them otherwise. They told Americans that Russia was no longer an obscure country “overseas”; rather, it was a vehicle for the spread of international communism and, therefore, a real threat to the United States. During the first “Red Scare” immediately after the war, American politicians took up this same argument, and they even arrested—in manifest violation of the Constitution—a bunch of American radicals and not-so-radicals. But, among ordinary Americans, the “Russians are coming” cry fell largely on deaf ears. The Bolsheviks couldn’t even hold Warsaw, let alone Washington. They were, well, all bark and no bite.

But while Americans weren’t worried about a Red invasion, per se, they were horrified by what the Bolsheviks were doing inside Russia. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks dispossessed, dislocated, and discombobulated millions of their own in the name of communism. To Americans reading about these inexplicable horrors in the newspaper, what the Bolsheviks were doing in Russia became synonymous with communism itself.

After Hitler foolishly declared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Stalin became America’s ally against the Nazis. Propagandists in Washington and Moscow worked night and day to make sure that frightening “Communist Russia” became friendly “Russia” in the eyes of Americans. The murderous Stalin underwent an image makeover to become “Uncle Joe.” It worked for a time, though of course the Bolsheviks were no less frightening during the war than they were before or after it.

America’s professional Russia-watchers—men like the diplomat George Kennan—knew this well. They told their American political masters the truth: the Russian alliance with the “capitalist powers”—as the Bolsheviks called them—was simply a tactical move required to beat the “arch-capitalist” Nazis. The USSR’s strategic goals remained the same: a completely communized Russia and world revolution directed from Moscow. Inside Russia, radical social engineering continued during the war: Stalin moved millions of ethnic minorities around the USSR like so many chess pieces. And yet, as of February 2, 1943, the day the German Sixth Army surrendered to Soviet forces at Stalingrad, it became evident to anyone paying attention that the Soviet Union would defeat Hitler largely on its own (an uncomfortable truth for the Western allies), and emerge from the Second World War as one of only two “superpowers.”

The overwhelming nature of the Soviet victory over Hitler had a massive impact on the American view of Russia. Suddenly—and particularly after the USSR developed (stole, really) the atomic bomb in 1949—Communist Russia was a real danger to the United States. Just as they promised, Lenin’s successors had begun the process of spreading communism throughout the world: they had helped themselves to a “liberated” Eastern Europe, they were threatening Western Europe, and they were deeply involved in so-called “Wars of National Liberation” all over the globe. American concerns over Soviet ambitions and its leaders’ regrets over not having stopped Hitler early on led to Washington’s obsession with the domino theory, the idea that if you give in anywhere to your nemesis, you might as well succumb everywhere. And so it was that countries like Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and many other, lesser known places became strategically vital to American policymakers.

But Americans didn’t only contain the Russians, they also studied them for the first time in American history.

And this is where I come in. I was one of those people trained by the government to study them. Though I was much more interested in basketball than books in high school, I happened to read George Kennan’s turgid Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin. Just why my father had a copy I’ll never know; he wasn’t much of a reader (duck hunting was his thing). But it was the only read available when I was bed-bound with mono. Later, I mentioned that I’d read it in some college application materials and, lo and behold, the college of my choice assigned a Russian historian to be my freshman advisor! He essentially “sold” me Russia as a career. When, four years later, I told my duck-hunting father that I was going to grad school to study Russian history, he thought I’d lost a screw. But I explained to him what I’d been taught: the Soviet Union was hugely important to the U.S.; we had to know everything about it. For much of the next decade I studied Russia, largely on the government’s dime. Then in the following decade or so, several posh universities hired me to teach America’s youth what I’d learned.

Looking back, what I find most remarkable about the salad days of “Russian Studies” is how fascinated ordinary Americans were with the USSR. During the Cold War, Americans wrote about Russia, discussed it, and fought about it to a degree that is, even today, completely unimaginable. You could have a good conversation about Russia in a bar. In the course of this completely unprecedented national discussion, ordinary Americans developed rich, sometimes sophisticated views about Russia. The essence of what Americans believed about the USSR remained the same throughout this discussion: it remained, as always “Communist Russia.” But the American image of Russia was no longer crude and monolithic; rather, it became subtle and varied, and more accurate. People argued over terms like détente, and over whether Pershing missiles in Europe or Olympic boycotts would make things better. I can remember NFL broadcasts being interrupted for updates on the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev.

Then, on December 26, 1991, it ended: the Soviet Union collapsed and with it most of what mattered about Russia to ordinary Americans. Americans stopped talking about Russia in bars. My classes got smaller. Russia became again what it had always been in the American mind: someplace else. Insofar as ordinary Americans think of Russia—and mostly they don’t—they see it much the same way their forbearers did before and after the Cold War: huge, cold, ruled by despots, and peopled by the downtrodden.

Of course, the “Communist Russia” legacy can still be sensed in the contemporary American understanding of Russia. Vladimir Putin, like the General Secretaries of old, is still sitting atop a pile of nuclear weapons as he attempts to spread Russian influence. He’s somewhat menacing, but my sense is that ordinary Americans think Russia’s nuclear weapons, much like its society and economy, are somehow broken.

Russia’s days of being our all-consuming nemesis aren’t likely to ever return. The two forces that brought Russia into the forefront of American consciousness during the Cold War—Bolshevism and Russia’s superpower status—are gone. And good riddance to all that, I say, even if it means my fellow citizens won’t pay as much attention to me as I go on and on talking about Russia.

The post Russia Has Been Many Things to Americans, Except an Ordinary Country appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was the early 1980s and Robert Massie had just published his riveting Peter the Great biography (I devoured it on a family cruise, which surprisingly didn’t impress the teenage girls onboard); Warren Beatty had produced his magisterial (super long) Reds; and the ABC TV network broadcast The Day After, a movie about a Soviet nuclear strike that millions of high schoolers across the land, myself included, were encouraged to come together to watch, and then discuss. Because, you know, that really could happen. And so, the adults wanted to know, how did that make us feel?

Well, it made me feel like this Russia, land of despotic czars, earthshattering revolutions and missiles targeted our way, was a pretty happening place. And that’s even before getting to what was on the nightly news. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and shot down a Korean airliner. President Reagan was calling them an evil empire and threatening to build a space-based anti-missile defense system in response to that movie we’d all seen on ABC. The Soviets were threatening to boycott our Olympics, as we had done theirs. The New York Times, meanwhile, spent a lot of newsprint trying to divine the intention of otherwise inscrutable Soviet leaders by their wardrobes. The nattier their suits, went the dubious logic, the greater the likelihood of a peaceful understanding between the two superpowers.

Back then, everything about Russia seemed massive, extreme and epic; contradictory and opaque. Russians had withstood centuries of unimaginable hardship to find themselves the improbable standard-bearers of a global cause that promised universal redemption, but delivered instead a rather grim version of purgatory on earth. Comrade, gulag, Siberia—single words dripping with vivid associations conveyed the price individual Russians had paid to preside collectively over one of two global power blocs: Team Red. The Russians had defeated Napoleon and Hitler; given humanity the gifts of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky; launched the first satellite in space; kicked ass at every Olympics (now we know how); and obsessed weirdly over ballet and chess.

So naturally I said “sign me up” when I had an opportunity to visit the Soviet Union for two weeks while still in high school, as part of a cultural exchange. It was a trippy voyage to an alternative reality. With any genuine revolutionary zeal long extinguished by decades of living under the soul-crushing dictatorship of the proletariat, Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk—their inherent March grayness still festooned with exhortative propaganda banners—felt like a kitschy totalitarian amusement park. Almost. There was nothing faded or fake about the palpable fear of ordinary Russians you’d meet with late at night under the statue of Yuri Gagarin to trade a Sony Walkman or jeans for KGB Border Guard hats or coats.

College deepened the seduction. I was completely in awe of the troika of Yale historians who brought the Soviets’ dramatic backstory to life: Firuz Kazemzadeh, who spiced his telling of the Romanovs’ three-century-long soap opera with vivid imagery of the empire’s Caucasian borderlands; Paul Bushkovitch, who handed out shots of vodka on Lenin’s birthday at our Russian Revolution seminar; and the ever-theatrical Wolfgang Leonhard, the former East German communist intellectual raised in Moscow who had turned on the DDR regime he had helped consolidate in its earliest days. As if the history weren’t enough, there was the brilliant literature and the challenging language, with all those declensions and the funky blending of those sh, ch and jr sounds, and the elongated mix of vowel sounds playing like a string quartet.

Best of all, none of this intoxicating immersion in all things Russian could be dismissed as an esoteric indulgence. Russia mattered; understanding Russia mattered. Couldn’t you see the breathless coverage those Reagan-Gorbachev summits were getting on TV? Know your enemy, and all that. It’s the same reason I see many young ambitious people nowadays rushing to study Arabic. It’s patriotic, career savvy, and intellectually satisfying, given the richness of the underlying culture.
 

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Now don’t get me wrong. No other power has since replaced the USSR as a proper antithesis to the United States. China is a potent commercial competitor and a wary rival for influence in Asia, but its reach and ambitions aren’t expansive enough to turn the entire globe into a bipolar zero-sum face-off, as the Soviets once did. And more immediate threats loom elsewhere, across a series of smaller countries and terrorist groups.

The undeniable nostalgia for the Cold War in American culture is a hard thing to fathom, and it is one of the animating mysteries behind this week’s Inquiry at Zócalo. That confrontation came with a heavy price for Americans, and an even heavier price for people in many parts of the world who were treated as pawns in the two superpowers’ global chess match. And to the extent that after so much sacrifice and effort we’d already “won” it (a regrettable attitude that has gotten in the way of a more constructive relationship with Russia), why would Americans want to go back to the Cold War?

Let’s face it, the alternative to a Cold War with the Russians, has proven less appetizing than we might have expected. It’s not easy being the sole “hyperpower” responsible for all things. And the Soviets were formidable in a way that our more amorphous all-out enemies today—a shifting amalgam of unstable regimes and loosely affiliated transnational terrorist groups—can never be. Extremist Islamist groups aren’t competing head-to-head with our best and brightest to explore space, to cure cancer, to win over hearts and minds in Western Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, or to win Olympic gold.

And yet today’s less worthy opponents are more dangerous because they lack a superpower’s rationality and investment in a bipolar status quo. In our age of asymmetrical warfare and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, you don’t need a Russian-sized nuclear arsenal to pose an imminent threat to our way of life. No enemy we face again will likely have at its disposal the destructive force the Soviets could command, but plenty of enemies we face today and will face in the future are far more likely to unleash whatever destructive force they can muster. There was much to abhor about our Soviet nemesis during the Cold War, but deep down, its leaders never wanted us all dead.

With the Russians, you always felt that if aliens from another galaxy attacked earth, the American president could pick up his red phone and get Moscow to set aside their differences with us and join forces on Team Humanity. When it comes to the likes of ISIS, good luck with that.
 

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The Russian-American rivalry has been playing itself out for one year shy of a century. It was in 1917 that both gigantic nations burst onto the global stage to offer a war-weary world competing visions of an alternative tomorrow. Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin appeared on the destroyed imperial scene as messianic figures, one peddling the possibility of national self-determination to all peoples through his Fourteen Points, the other carrying the torch for the international proletarian revolution that would render nationalism, and social classes, obsolete.

With all its flaws and heinous behavior, the USSR, much like the United States and contrary to most other modern nation-states, was predicated on a universal ideal that people anywhere could rally around. The Soviets’ project was also— again, despite its flaws—a forward-looking one, unlike those of our current enemies who desperately want to turn back the clock.

The formal demise of the USSR in 1991 ostensibly ended the Cold War, and historians will long debate the extent to which the ensuing few years constituted a missed opportunity on Washington’s part to recast U.S.-Russian relations on far friendlier ground. But whether you believe the fault lies primarily with our missteps or inevitable Russian yearnings to remain an antithesis to the West, the fact is that the Cold War antagonism is back.

That’s both maddening and comforting. Russia is less of a global player than the Soviet Union, more of a “normal country,” and it must now share the other end of the proverbial seesaw from us with other U.S. antagonists. So the stakes may not be quite as high, but Vladimir Putin is doing his darnedest to play the part.

The Russians are back, in time to mess with our presidential election, both as a befuddling topic and a devious protagonist. It’s hard to imagine a more Cold War-ish form of belligerence than cyber warfare, and the hacking of our electoral process and of our leaders’ private communications, with an eye towards their public dissemination. Such attacks are a sophisticated technical challenge, no one gets physically hurt, but the mere possibility of these hacks wreak havoc on our nerves, and incite waves of insecurity and paranoia, as well as calls for retaliation and escalation.

The seductive chess match is back on.

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00:00 Soviet ICBMs launch, possibly from Kozelsk or Tatishchevo.

The threats the Soviets posed to America and its vision of global order were at one level ideological, at another imperial, and at another existential. The first two threats were answered quickly. Our answer to communism was democratic capitalism and our answer to Moscow’s expansionism was containment.

00:01 U.S. satellites detect the Soviet missiles.

By the late 1940s, with the circulation of George Kennan’s Long Telegram (and subsequent “X” article), the articulation of NSC-68, and the formation of NATO, the lasting shape of a response to the Soviet imperial threat had taken shape.

There was to be no such tidy, rational response to the unprecedented existential danger posed by nuclear weapons, however. It was not simply a matter of vulnerability, but also a matter of deep uncertainty.

00:04 After confirming the satellite data, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, notifies the designated White House “crisis coordinator” that an attack is underway. That person must then find and inform the president and convene an emergency meeting of top military and civilian advisers.

The Cold War was more than an ideological conflict, it was a psychological conflict as well: A quest for a global anxiolytic.

It’s hard, to this day, to grasp both the immediacy and durability of the nuclear threat. The Soviet development of nuclear weapons meant that for decades people in the United States lived with the knowledge that only 30 minutes stood between us and nuclear annihilation. That was obviously terrifying; it still is. But what made it even more terrifying was that there was no clear way to prevent or cope with this all-consuming threat.

For one, we never really knew what the Soviets had, or when they had it. The American intelligence community woefully and repeatedly misjudged Soviet capabilities. To start, they underestimated how long it would take the USSR to develop an atomic device, leaving Washington scrambling when they it detected their first nuclear test in 1949.

00:09 Military officers brief the president on preplanned emergency launch options, which are detailed in a black binder inside the so-called “nuclear football,” carried by a presidential aide at all times to minimize response delays.

The pattern continued in subsequent decades with unfounded fears of a “bomber gap” and then a “missile gap,” misreadings that highlighted more of an intelligence gap. Our knowledge of the Soviet nuclear program was inadequate throughout the Cold War, and only added to the climate of uncertainty.

Not only did we not know what the Soviets had, we also didn’t know what their intentions were. Many Americans thought that it was entirely possible that Soviet leaders would launch an attack out of the blue one day. U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who headed Strategic Command, even came up with a bizarre metaphor to describe this uncertainty, suggesting that a “gnome in the basement” (presumably Khrushchev) might someday see the light, judge that “the correlation of forces is right,” and decide to launch an attack. The U.S. met this uncertainty by building more weapons, which perversely led the Soviets to do the same. The arms race would then start over again.

00:17 The briefing concludes, leaving the president about two minutes to decide how to respond. If there is any delay, U.S. ICBMs will be destroyed in their silos by incoming Soviet warheads before they can be launched for a retaliatory attack.

Americans were also particularly worried about a nuclear surprise because we had been on the receiving end of conventional surprises. Pearl Harbor was still fresh in the national memory after World War II, and the attack had spurred the creation of the CIA. But the agency failed to predict North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South, and we were caught flat-footed yet again.

00:19 The president selects one of the pre-planned options and communicates it to the Pentagon, which authenticates his identity and formats launch orders.

This new intelligence failure led to the establishment of the Office of National Estimates—an office charged with compiling the best intelligence evaluations and using them to predict the future. But ONE failed repeatedly as well—most notably with a Sept. 1962 estimate that Khrushchev was highly unlikely to put nuclear missiles in Cuba because it would not be rational to do so.

Uncertainty also marked planning for nuclear war: no one knew exactly what to do with the nukes we had. At first, the Air Force treated them as simply more powerful versions of conventional bombs, developing the anesthetically named “Single Integrated Operational Plan-62,” which allowed for a preemptive strike of over 3,000 nuclear weapons if the Soviets made an aggressive move.

00:24 The launch orders are transmitted to American ICBM crews via encoded Emergency Action Messages.

But the truth was that the military had no idea what it was doing. As Alain Enthoven, a former RAND strategist at the Pentagon, once retorted to an officer who found his civilian meddling intolerable, “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have.”

The prospect of nuclear war came at the same time that the military began using operations research and systems analysis to develop conventional war strategy. With these tools at hand, nuclear war at first seemed like just another problem to be solved with the careful application of scenarios and algorithms.

00:27 Having authenticated the EAMs, U.S. Air Force missileers begin the launch sequence.

But there was no scenario under which nuclear war could be considered winnable, and attempts to secure certainty with more weapons eventually morphed into attempts to secure certainty through arms control. Both Russians and Americans seemed to recognize that the existential danger of nuclear weapons was a problem as great, if not greater, than those posed by ideology or imperial expansionism.

00:29 U.S. ICBMs launch.

The fundamental purpose of arms control wasn’t a reduction of numbers, per se, but the establishment of transparency, predictability, and stability—i.e., the antitheses of uncertainty.

Of course, the notion that the weapons and not the Soviets were the problem was seen as dovish silliness by some hawks, the intellectual adjunct to the gut instincts of the …

00:30 Soviet warheads begin to detonate over the United States, destroying Washington, D.C. and killing millions.

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During World War I, admittedly, the two countries weren’t fighting the same fight for long. The United States only joined the anti-German Entente in the spring of 1917, shortly after the prolonged conflict had already helped topple the Romanov dynasty in Russia. Washington welcomed the coalition provisional government that replaced the monarchy, since it made Russia a more fitting ally for Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic war aims—of making the “world safe for democracy”—than the despotic czars had been. But within a few months, the Bolsheviks took power, and withdrew Russia from the conflict altogether, making a separate peace with the Germans.

The regime of Vladimir Lenin convened the Communist International in Moscow to plot revolution across the capitalist world. The Wilson administration, which had joined its French and British allies to support the pre-Bolshevik provisional government and its efforts to remain in the war even as the Russian state was dissolving, found itself sponsoring a military intervention into Russia. Its aims were ostensibly linked to the fight against the Germans, but the move was perceived then, and to subsequent generations of Russians, as hostile and counter-revolutionary. The fact that Washington didn’t recognize the new Soviet government until 1933 only served to prolong the bitter aftertaste of the U.S. intervention.

The World War II alliance was far more consequential. The Soviet Union and the United States worked together not only to defeat Hitler, but also to design the post-war era. The high point of the Allied crusade may have been the Atlantic Charter of late 1941, which set forth such lofty war aims as respect for borders and freedom from want and fear in the coming postwar order. Those ideals became the basis of the Charter of the United Nations.

On a less elevated plane, the Americans and Soviets, together with their British partners, planned the four-power occupations of Germany and Austria, and the joint prosecution of war crimes in Nuremberg. At the 1945 wartime conference in Yalta, President Franklin Roosevelt even tried to make common cause with Stalin against Churchill and the latter’s insistence on defending the British empire.

During the war, the Soviets made the lion’s share of sacrifice and did most of the critical fighting that finally led to the Third Reich’s demise, but Americans provided substantial aid to the Soviet effort. The Lend-Lease program delivered to Russia everything from jeeps to the cans of spam that would figure so prominently in the memories of Soviet children from that era.

Washington worked hard at fostering a public sense of solidarity with Russia. Similarly in the U.S.S.R the censors and propagandists toned down somewhat their traditional anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric to justify their alliance with American and British forces. American movies such as Mission to Moscow were sympathetic to Russia in general and Stalin in particular, depicting a very likable “Uncle Joe” and celebrating the Soviet Union as America’s ally against Germany. Later, many of the filmmakers and writers associated with those films suffered charges of Communist sympathies during the congressional McCarthy hearings after the war, when Washington had reverted to its default mistrust of all things Russian.

For all its far-reaching accomplishments, the U.S.-Soviet wartime alliance always did seem like a tactical adjustment in both nations’ long-term strategic calculations, rather than a lasting substantive shift. The Soviets never forgot the American posture towards them at the time of their revolution, and the Americans never forgot that Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and their perfidious Nonaggression Pact of 1939 was the only reason that this was a joint campaign. And Stalin’s ambitions to control Eastern Europe after displacing its German occupiers was also a source of tension that would inevitably escalate with the Wehrmacht’s retreat.

As a result, the alliance was more tactical and rhetorical than operational; the western allies never had a joint command with the Soviets, as they had with each other.

During the war, the attitude of Missouri Senator Harry Truman, who’d preside over the Cold War’s early days later on from the White House, exemplified the limits of Moscow’s P.R. makeover in Washington. Truman was quoted as saying the U.S. should let the Nazis and Communists fight each other off, without taking sides. That wasn’t official U.S. policy, but Russian leaders were suspicious of how long it took the Americans and British forces to open a second European front with the D-Day landings.

The world never did experience a third world war, thankfully, but there was a final hopeful episode in U.S.-Soviet and then U.S.-Russian relations as the Cold War was winding down with the break-up of the Soviet Union. The administration of George H. W. Bush initially did its best to support the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his call for a common European home from the Atlantic to the Urals, Bush dismissed Ukrainian opposition as “Chicken-Kiev nationalism,” and Gorbachev even supported the first Gulf War in the United Nations. But soon America’s resolve not to appear a vindictive “sore winner” gave way to domestic political considerations, and America once again acted in ways that confirmed every last Russian suspicion. Partly as a result of that, the two nations’ hopes for a very different relationship—and Russians’ hopes for a more democratic society, for that matter—have once again ended up in disappointment and a feeling of betrayal on both sides.

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