To what extent has the release of evidence after the end of the Cold War changed historians’ views of the origins and early development of the Cold War?

Historiography is both a scholarly and a political process. As it is interpretation of available sources, it is selective, sometimes partial, and constantly under revision. It is therefore natural to think that Cold War History (CWH) could have changed after the release of new evidence. However, it changed less and often in a different way one would have expected. The possible synthesis of Eastern and Western, mainly separate, historiographies, leading to a consensual interpretation, never happened. On the contrary, most historians have proven little inclined to review their theses in the light of new sources and the prevailing tendency has been the preservation of dearly held positions through selective incorporation of new sources into existing explanations. Exceptions included a few scholars who tried to integrate enhanced knowledge into their analysis, but also some who narrowed their worldview even further on the basis of new evidence. Why and how a revision of CWH after 1989 mainly resulted in a renaissance of classical approaches will be the focus of this piece of writing.

I Cold War History interpretations

Most Cold War historians can be identified as belonging to one of three main schools that have developed competing, sometimes barely compatible, approaches to a complex reality. It was less methodological than interpretative differences that led to the formation of three major views: orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist. Arthur Schlesinger has described the orthodox school as ‘originally set forth by the American government [describing the Cold War as] the brave response of free men to communist aggression’, and the revisionist school as recounting a US ‘course of aggression [that] left Moscow no alternative to take measures in defence.’ Between the two, only post-revisionism, whose main tone setter was John Lewis Gaddis, stood for a merger of these, apparently contradictory, interpretations. As data, sources and remaining remembrance was reflected in an ever growing body of literature, each of the schools claimed to be closest to the truth of how, and why, the Cold War actually occurred.

Until the end of the great bi-polar confrontation basically all interpretations suffered from the uncertainties resulting from a very unbalanced availability of archival material - to an extent that this once was described as ‘only one side of a telephone conversation’. But this picture itself was inaccurate as the known ‘half’ itself was incomplete, or even coded. As fittingly described by Richard Aldrich, a lot of the available material was ‘dry-cleaned by the authorities’. There were also restrictions on what historians could dare to write during the early Cold War period, as political pressure caused by McCarthy’s demagogy in the US made it ‘difficult to question the orthodox thesis.’ In that climate, it would have been virtually impossible to state that the Eastern bloc leaders were right when they complained about Western interference or aggressive policy although the anti-Soviet tilt of some Western policies as of 1944 could have been documented. Furthermore, all Eastern historiography was discarded as unworthy of consideration as it was deemed to be merely an instrument of support of the ‘world revolution’. Thus, it was as much political pressure and self inflicted-restrictions as limited access to sources that shaped the views of early CWH.

II Renewal: a missed opportunity

Presumably, one could have expected the end of the Cold War to usher in radical attempts to review the history of the period. First, a ‘more liberal intellectual climate’ may now have contributed to new interpretations both in the West and East. Second, the availability of new sources may have generated the search for new evidence challenging existing historiography. For example initiatives like the Parallel History Project on NATO and Warsaw Pact (PHP), and the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center significantly increase the information available to researchers and broadened its access. Some authors, including established historians did take advantage of new sources to review their own work. Such is the case of Voitech Mastny, who re-wrote his 1979 Russia’s Road to the Cold War. Thus, his 1996 The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity laid new emphasis on US misperceptions of Soviet behavior, as well as the impact of domestic Soviet policies on her foreign policy strategies, which were not part of his earlier writing. Mastny further highlighted the need for reconsideration of writings dating from the immediate post Cold War period – as of November 1989 to the dissolution of the USSR – although it seems difficult to identify a coherent body of CWH literature during these troubled two years.

Mastny, however, appears more as an exception than as a rule. Wolfgang Krieger’s description of CWH ‘as an instrument of cold war politics’ rather seems to be true of most recent publications on the subject. Historiography, whether one considers it a science or an art-form, is deeply intertwined with its subject. It is itself part of the narrative, written in a determined environment, which is constantly exposed to challenges and interference from the political world. Following the end of the Cold War, historians reacted as much to the new political environment as to archival findings. Some of them drew a more nuanced picture from the findings, like Saki Dockrill or Richard Aldrich: others on the contrary abandoned their earlier balance for a more ideologically coloured historiography, like John Lewis Gaddis.

Overall, therefore, even after the release of new evidence the three ‘classical’ interpretations still prevail. New schools appear more as a recasting of old approaches as something truly novel. For example, what had been baptized ‘neo-traditionalism’, or ‘Cold War triumphalism’, is really a reincarnation of orthodox CWH. The writing of Scott Lucas , aimed at challenging Gaddis’ most recent work , has been described as ‘explicitly revisionist’. And even the most recent criticism of ‘Cold War triumphalism’ appears as a form of revisionist interpretation. . Let us now analyse in more detail the forms and reasons of this continuity in the literature.


III Selectivity, subjectivity and writers under influence

As homo politicus and simply, as human beings with their own persuasions historians write under the impact of many sorts of external influences, which they sometimes acknowledge, sometimes not. Simplifying somewhat, it is possible to identify three patterns of selective reception and partial interpretation. They are linked to the impact of the political context, the selective use of sources, and human subjectivity.

III.1 The impact of the political context

In 1961 D. F. Fleming christened a chapter of his is voluminous study on CWH ‘Why we [the USA] lost the Cold War’. In 2006, Aldrich asked rhetorically: ‘After the United States had won the cold war what could be more natural than winning the battle for Cold War history?.’ At 45 years’ interval, the contradiction could not be stronger. In 1961, the US saw itself losing the arms race to the Soviets; in 2006, the prevailing view is that they were the victor and the Soviets the loser.

Some, although few historians, recognize that, in every environment, former convictions and new findings take different meanings, not the least because they are seen in relation to new experiences. For example, today it is not unusual for writers to compare Anthony Eden’s decisions on Suez 1956 to G.W. Bush’s justification for the war in Iraq, approaching the Suez crisis in terms of legitimacy or even legality, concepts that were not part of earlier analysis. O.A. Westad thus readily acknowledges that his writing of the International Cold War History, was done ‘under [the] influence of the international political situation produced by the invasion and occupation of Iraq’ , In that way newly disclosed facts are interpreted in the light of new concepts, which were hardly considered at the time of the events.

The most prominent writer riding on the wave of the moment –and not acknowledging it – is probably John Lewis Gaddis. As of the mid-1980s, he seemed to think that the division of Europe was mainly structurally determined by the logic of bipolarity , however, after 1989 he insisted that new evidence placed the fault directly at Stalin’s doorstep. Gaddis’ Long Peace thesis was based on the idea that Kennan’s doctrine of containment was successful; he disregarded other perspectives that containment worked because there ‘wasn’t anything seriously to contain’ because the Russians had no intention of invasion. Even more explicitly, whilst in his 1972 book Gaddis was careful to take in account American, and other European states interests in order to avoid a single-cause explanation, he eventually concluded in 1997 that not only Stalin’s decisions, but a single aspect of his character, his ‘paranoia’ was to blame for the Cold War. Geir Lundestad appears justified in his analysis that now that Gaddis generally ‘see[s] the objectives of the United States in a benign light’, his writing has become close to ‘unapologetic triumphalist’ historiography.

III.2 The selective use of sources

Selectivity in the use of sources is natural. Indeed, it is part of the task of the historian to distinguish among the mass of information at his or her disposal, which ones are really significant. Selectivity, however, can be conscious or unconscious, depending of whether it reflects individual choices, or a particular atmosphere.

As part of ‘collective selectivity’ one can range a general tendency of scholars to rely on the security of old arguments and explanations when faced with the uncertainty of new facts. Thus, it took about a decade before the publication of findings confirming the revisionist accusations that British and US’ covert operations had intensified tensions between Western and Eastern powers.
More significantly, it is essential to realize that only one half of Cold War historiography has survived the period under scrutiny. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, CWH was very much part of an ideological battlefield. However, after 1989, institutional decisions like the dissolution of the East German Akademie der Wissenschaften, or the ignorance of authors like Julius Mader, who was a typical Janus-faced Stasi officer, but an excellent historian, led to the disappearance of most of the Eastern branch of Cold War historiography, and of its particular opinions and interpretations. This was ‘victor’s history’ in its clearest form.

Individual selectivity is another form of bias that can result from the ignorance of some -and possibly many - sources, or from their instrumentalisation. The first form of selectivity is Gaddis’ book We now know, which disregarded available European research on the Cold War. As evident by his bibliography, he failed to take advantage of any of the excellent studies that had been published in countries that were central to European CWH. This is all the more surprising that his entire approach of the causes of the Cold War focuses on Europe. What we now know, for example, on the complex situation of the division of Germany, is more than Gaddis realizes. Christoph Klessmann’s book alone on the foundation of the two German states and the central role of French foreign policies would have helped him to grasp a historical complexity going far beyond the reach of Stalin’s influence. Domestic policies in both countries, which even Stalin could not have neglected, completely disappear in Gaddis’ book in a kind of ‘realist-historical black box’.

An example of the second is Byrne and Mastny’s claim, in 2005, that new sources would prove ‘a long standing strategy to attack Western Europe that included being the first to use nuclear weapons’. However, a closer look at the documents they refer to shows that those were mostly from the 1970s, going back only to May 1961 at the earliest (documents 16, 20a-b, 21). The explanatory power of these documents as far as relating to reasons for the Cold War was thus mitigated.

III.3 Human subjectivity

Finally, unlike 19th century German positivists thought, evidence is only one aspect of historiography. The greatest historians therefore come to contrary conclusions, using the same sources. Indeed, as Mastny has put it, a ‘lack of complete evidence is not an insuperable obstacle; making the best of evidence at hand matters more than chasing after all the missing pieces that […] may never have existed in the first place’. Saying this, he had in mind the example of British ‘civil servants [who] had destroyed large numbers of files pertaining to the [Suez crisis]’. This however, did not make the historiography of the crisis impossible, as an ongoing stream of literature demonstrates.

The debates between Mastny and Blight, and between Cumings and Weathersby are interesting examples of the work of subjectivity in scholarship. As reported by Geir Lundestad, for Mastny the greatest surprise ‘to have come out of the Russian archives was that there was no surprise; the thinking of the insiders conformed substantially to what Moscow was publicly saying.’ James Blight, on the other hand, was led to completely different results: he stressed that the then recent Soviet Glasnost had made it possible to review former interpretations in the light of contributions from central actors. At least in this case Blight stands for the small group of historians who were open to new interpretations.

Even more striking is the 1996 argument between Cumings and Wheathersby as it relates to a single document, in that case a transcript of a discussion between Stalin and Kim Il Sung, which had just been released. Where Wheathersby saw unmistakable evidence of North Korea’s utter dependence of Russia, implying that any important political move of North Korea, like the attack on Seoul, must have been remotely controlled by the USSR Politburo, Cumings disputed that the document represented any new central finding regarding the early years of the Cold War. He further critisised Wheathersby’s terminology because she introduces the concept of ‘mafioso policy’ to describe Soviet politics. Conversely Weathersby accused Cumings of arguing in a revisionist manner, which he firmly rejected. Both had obviously interpreted the sources in a way that would suit their own persuasion. The two could not agree on the incorporation of these findings into their opinions as one held Soviet policies to be expansionist and the other defensive in character.

Conclusion,

Overall, few historians have seized the chance to come to a more balanced and insightful picture of the Cold War as new evidence emerged. Some did try to better understand the highly complex events at the end of WW II that led to the Cold War; but many used the emergence of new findings to confirm their political opinions. Inevitably, historians’ approach to their subject will be coloured as much by ‘subjective factors […] as by an objective interest in interpreting past events and understanding them on their own terms.’ Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the concept of revisionism, that it is an essential part of the process by which history enlarges its perspectives and enriches its insights. This would have been the approach of new archival findings taken by a historiography less bounded by ideological preconceptions. However, East European, often semi-official historiography has mainly disappeared. Among the leading experts, Saki Dockrill is perhaps the clearest example of a historian who tries to further develop CWH as new evidence comes to the fore. John Lewis Gaddis, who was the tone-setter for CWH for a long period, has missed the boat. He is now fueling the triumphalism of the USA after the Cold War’s end with a very selective book, which is certainly most agreeable to the US public, but blatantly disregards widely non-US perspectives. Melvin Leffler’s advice would seem more judicious and forward-looking, when he remarks that ‘rather than congratulate themselves on the Cold War’s outcome, Americans must confront the negative as well as the positive consequences of US actions.’

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