• Russia

As the war in Ukraine drags on, it is difficult not to wonder what Russians themselves think about the return of monuments to people responsible for so much death in so many Russian families. One of the few who’s asked is BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg, who sought opinions about the bloody tyrant in street interviews in Moscow in May. A young Russian man replied that Stalin is “unfairly hated.” A young woman opined that “there is good and bad in everyone.” An older woman said that “Stalin is our history.” Asked explicitly about his millions of victims, her answer echoed the famous closing line of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot: “Well, it happens. Nobody’s perfect.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and as more and more of Stalin’s terror came to light from Soviet archives, it seemed that honoring and defending Stalin would be unthinkable for the vast majority of Russians. How wrong we were. Russian 20th century history is in flux. All the more important, then, to gain a view of this history from not only a Western perspective, but also a Russian one.

Vladislav Zubok’s The World of the Cold War 1945-1991 fits this bill. Born in Moscow in 1958, the author was raised and educated in the Soviet Union, spending almost half of his life amid Soviet communism’s decline and collapse. Armed with degrees from Moscow State University and the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, also in Moscow, he continued his career at Western universities, whose doors were open to ambitious Russians. Zubok focused on the history of the Cold War with an emphasis on the Kremlin’s perspective. Currently, he is an international history professor at the London School of Economics.

The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991, Vladislav Zubok, Pelican, 544 pp., £25, May 2025

His latest book is not only a summary of years of research, but also an opportunity to present his interpretation of a period whose importance for international politics never seems to end. And for good reason: It is difficult to understand the origins of today’s geopolitical crises without referring to the Cold War. While monuments to Stalin and Dzerzhinsky are making a comeback in Russia, the last remnants of Soviet communism are being removed in Ukraine. The statues put back on their pedestals in one country—and removed from them in another—symbolize competing world views that are still shaping our world in the 21st century.

The memories of that previous era are personal, too. The three most powerful men in the world are all well over 70 years old. The twists and turns of the Cold War, from nuclear war scares to détente policies, shaped this triumvirate—perhaps even more than they shaped Zubok. All three were born while Stalin was still in power. Vladimir Putin was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1952. Chinese leader Xi Jinping was born in Beijing in 1953. The oldest of the group, U.S. President Donald Trump, was born in New York in 1946. Their socialization, coming of age, and character development coincided with the peak years of the Cold War, which was primarily a confrontation between global empires. After their alliance in World War II, the United States and Soviet Union suddenly found themselves on opposite sides. After the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, slowly but surely, communist China joined the two in this global competition.

As Zubok’s book reminds us, key political decisions of recent years mirror Cold War paradigms of success and failure. An obvious example is Putin’s attempt to build a buffer zone around Russia composed of annexed land and vassal countries it more or less controls. Their opinions on this don’t matter—just like they didn’t under Stalin. Equally important, Trump and Joe Biden also plugged into old Cold War templates, viewing Moscow as a global peer competitor (when today’s diminished Russia is anything but) that must not be engaged in open confrontation, lest it trigger World War III. U.S. hesitancy and indecision over aiding Ukraine, even as the Russian military has been greatly weakened, were all informed by the Cold War script.

When Trump dreams of grand peace summits and superpower “deals,” he is surely remembering the meetings between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong or Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. In such agreements among titans, as in the past, other countries count for little.

Xi’s current course—restoring Mao-era control, seeking technological autarky, and aiming to leapfrog the United States to global leadership—similarly harkens back to the strategies China pursued during the Cold War. There are too many other histories of the Cold War to mention. Zubok’s book is unique in that he presents the view from Moscow in a way that is understandable to Western readers. It may well be the best post-Soviet history of 1945 to 1991 for a general readership. The book has a clear structure and is not overloaded with scholarly details. Instead of taking a narrow perspective or focusing on new research, Zubok adheres to the traditional emphasis on empire and leadership.

In his view, the Cold War was largely a dance between Moscow, Washington, and Beijing. Its choreography was dictated by history, geography, and economics—and was accompanied by miscalculations, pettiness, or simple ignorance on the part of the three countries’ leaders. And yet, precisely because the superpower standoffs of the 21st century imitate the politics of the Cold War era to such an extent, political commentaries have recently been swarming with references to a “second Cold War.”

While there are many details of the Cold War that are disputed among historians, the overall picture is largely familiar and uncontroversial. The most thought-provoking parts of Zubok’s book, therefore, come near its end, where Zubok presents his interpretation of what happened between 1989 and 1991 and beyond. Here, Zubok steps out of his professional role as a historian and becomes a kind of commentator, letting his creativity and subjectivity run wild in order to speculate on what might have happened if history had gone differently.

And this is a fascinating series of “what-ifs.” If the United States had taken advantage of the pro-Western euphoria in the USSR and acted as magnanimously as it had toward post-war Japan and West Germany—never mind that these two countries were militarily occupied after unconditional surrender, something Soviet elites would hardly have countenanced—it could have prepared the ground more effectively for democratization and developed a peaceful world order. If the United States, under then-President George H. W. Bush, had quickly invested as much money in Russia as it did in communist China, history might have taken a different course. If it weren’t for the predatory privatizations and shock introduction of market economics in the 1990s—which Zubok subsumes under Western-style “neoliberalism”—perhaps the transformation to democracy would have enjoyed broader social acceptance among Russians. If President Bill Clinton had not made the mistake of supporting Boris Yeltsin’s authoritarian turn of 1993, things might have turned out differently, too. And so on.

Zubok’s long series of what-if scenarios is significant for understanding the litany of Russian political resentments in the 21st century. Characteristically, Zubok writes with less passion about what Russians could have done differently in putting their country on another course; the greater part of his fervor is aimed squarely at the West. Although Zubok admits that many of these scenarios were impractical and had no chance of coming to fruition, a thick layer of bitterness remains. The shift of political responsibility from East to West is all too evident in Zubok’s telling. He presents the period from 1989 to 1991 as a missed opportunity for the West to build democracy in Russia.

Zubok’s choice of hypothetical scenarios is highly revealing. Blaming the West for Russia’s post-Soviet travails—based, no less, on questionable counterfactuals—is nothing less than a factory of contemporary Russian resentment toward the West. Unwittingly, Zubok’s book shows how that resentment is manufactured from a skewed view of the past.

It’s intriguing that Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, born and raised in the Soviet Union almost at the same time as Zubok, often refers to the same Cold War facts in his works, yet tells a story with a completely different conclusion. For Plokhy, the Soviet collapse was not a reason to complain about the West but an opportunity for the Soviet Union’s constituent republics to peacefully gain sovereignty and build something new. In a December 1991 referendum in Ukraine, the decision for independence was supported by an overwhelming majority of the population, including the majority of Russian-speaking citizens. From the perspective of history presented by Plokhy, there is no question of a slide into resentment due to disappointment with the West, even if the reasons for disappointment are plentiful. Rather, Plokhy’s Cold War concludes with a historical opportunity that can be seized—or missed. In this reading, history moves forward, not back. It is not sealed shut with resentment, but open to different choices.

The comparison of the two former Soviet scholars is fascinating because it clarifies the price of Zubok’s adoption of the imperial lens. The lives, interests, and tragedies of entire nations, social minorities, and individuals are relegated to the background. Even the history of anti-communism is told from the imperial center. Andrei Sakharov is mentioned more than 10 times in the book, Vaclav Havel not even once.

A crowd of people wave small flags of Soviet Ukraine and the United States as they turn out to see U.S. President George H.W. Bush in Kyiv in 1991. Dirck Halstead/Getty Images

It seems obvious that Zubok’s readers from small and medium-sized countries—from Estonia to Taiwan to South Korea—are likely to disagree with his perspective on the end of the Cold War. His book’s attempt to establish an equivalence between Soviet and U.S. actions during the Cold War may also raise objections, because it downplays the differences between the political systems of the two countries. This elision leads Zubok to another misconception about why and how the Cold War ended: The desire for a Western-style political system was the fundamental reason for the reluctance of the Kremlin’s vassal states to remain in alliance with Moscow.

Zubok’s book is a page-turner. It may be one of the most accessible and least fact-dense accounts of the Cold War on the market. And it is precisely this accessibility—the fact that he does not conceal his subjectivity behind the scholarly craft of the historian—that makes it easier to see the all-too-common distortions and resentments of the Russian perspective. For that and more, it is worth reading.