Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened

Melvyn P. Leffler

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996

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Summary:  A new conventional wisdom is forming on the Cold War, but the records do not support its hard line. The Soviet Union did not aim at world conquest. It was afraid, and its clients got out of hand. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. share responsibility.

Only three or four years ago, historians of the Cold War worked without knowing what was in Soviet archives. They relied heavily on Western records, inferring the motivations and goals of Soviet foreign policy. But the Russians and their former Warsaw Pact allies have begun to open their records for research. The Chinese, too, have opened selected materials, especially ones that illuminate the duplicity and depravity of the men in the Kremlin. Regime changes and liberalization in many countries have made former officials more reflective and more willing to write about their years in power.

Pondering the archival documents, memoirs, and new assessments, one asks how they might affect debate about the origins and evolution of the Cold War. They reveal a Soviet system as revolting as its worst critics charged long ago. Some scholars go further, asserting that the archives confirm not only the genocidal actions and fundamental brutality of the regime but also its ideological underpinnings and hegemonic aspirations. The highly publicized 1994 television documentary Messengers from Moscow resuscitated the old claim that Stalin planned to conquer the globe for Marxism-Leninism, declaring that interviews and documents prove the Soviet leader sent hundreds of agents abroad after 1945 to foment revolution. The historian Steven Merritt Miner cautions readers to be wary of the memoirs and sensitive to the selectivity of the newly released documents, but announces, -Ideology is once again central [to the study of the Soviets? conduct of the Cold War], after having been played down by scholars for two decades. John Lewis Gaddis, the leading U.S. expert on the Cold War, maintains that America?s containment policy was indispensable in thwarting the march of the Soviet behemoth, and America itself a beacon of hope to a world menaced by Stalinist totalitarianism. Other scholars share Gaddis? view that the new evidence affirms the most traditional interpretations of Cold War events.

A close reading of the books and articles based on the archival materials suggests more nuanced conclusions. The Cold War was not a simple case of Soviet expansionism and American reaction. Realpolitik held sway in the Kremlin. Ideology played an important role in shaping their perceptions, but Soviet leaders were not focused on promoting worldwide revolution. They were concerned mostly with configurations of power, with protecting their country?s immediate periphery, ensuring its security, and preserving their rule. Governing a land devastated by two world wars, they feared a resurgence of German and Japanese strength. They felt threatened by a United States that alone among the combatants emerged from the war wealthier and armed with the atomic bomb. Soviet officials did not have preconceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea. Soviet clients, moreover, could and did act in pursuit of their own interests, sometimes goading the Kremlin into involvements it did not want.

Although Soviet actions were more contingent than previously thought, probably nothing the United States could have done would have allayed Soviet suspicions in the early ...

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