The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years.

• Author: Jervis, Robert

Changes in historical accounts are driven mainly by developments, if not fashions, within the historical profession, by current political concerns, by the availability of new sources of information, and by the way in which the events being explored turned out. Although the first two factors are not to be dismissed, I believe the second two are of greater importance in our current efforts to understand the Cold War. Most obviously, recent years have seen the release of major documents from Russia's archives, and the rise of a new generation of Russian historians to help analyze them. In some cases these documents have at least temporarily settled previous debates and in others have surprised us all - the most obvious example of the latter being the revelation that the Soviets deployed large ground forces armed with tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba in 1962. But although these gifts are certainly welcome, they have been limited in number and quality, and it appears that much of what we would like to know was never written down. Indeed, even if all documents were open (and none had been destroyed), there would still be much to argue about, just as we still argue about the causes of the First World War.

Archives can never fully answer questions about human motivation or fully elucidate the sincerity, let alone the sources, of the beliefs expressed. Nor can they tell us how each state would have behaved if others had acted differently, in part because people often do not know how they will respond to a situation until it arises. Archival research alone can provide no magic bullet, no sudden revelation that explains all.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the way the Cold War ended has had at least as strong an influence on how we interpret its origins and course as have the new documents. More specifically, the close temporal association between this epoch and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union makes salient the connections between domestic and foreign policy. Marxists are not alone in stressing that the wellsprings of a state's foreign policy almost always come from its domestic social, economic, and political systems, a perspective that has been reinforced by the recent arguments that, just as idealists have long claimed, democracies have many singular virtues. Unlike every other political system, they rarely fight each other and seem to do a better job of dealing with disputes among themselves.

This perspective is shared by all three of the books under review, but is most central to that of John Lewis Gaddis. I think he is right. Stalin said as the Second World War drew to a close, "This war is not as in the past. Whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system." But Stalin did not get it quite right, and his lack of understanding is crucial both to our moral judgments about the Cold War and to the course it took: the immediate postwar occupation period excepted, the United States did not have to impose its system on others, but Stalin's USSR did. Although Gaddis and others have been accused of "triumphalism" for believing that the West won the Cold War because of the ethical and practical superiority of its values, societies, and politics, I think that this view is nevertheless correct, and can be maintained without denying the many faults of democracies in general and of...