To run the world: the Kremlin's Cold War bid for global power

In his thoroughly-researched and stimulating book, Sergey Radchenko digs into the psyche of Soviet leaders to understand why the Soviet Union (USSR) nourished both a ‘pathological’ need to ascend and a thirst for greatness (p. 7). Radchenko contends that Soviet leaders relentlessly sought to secure international recognition and legitimacy from the United States in the hope of being treated as an equal and a great power.

In the first part of the book, the author demonstrates that the USSR's role in crushing Nazi Germany ‘engendered a sense of entitlement’ to greatness (p. 17). Following the defeat of the Third Reich, the USSR emerged as both ‘a superpower and … the center of world revolution’ (p. 7). While Joseph Stalin shaped the contours of a Soviet Lebensraum in eastern Europe, he simultaneously sought to acquire a larger sphere of influence and secure a foothold in Libya, expanding the latter's influence in Africa. However, when President Franklin Roosevelt foiled Stalin's imperial ambitions at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Soviet leader realized that he could no longer capitalize on his country's role against Germany to gain recognition from the allies.

Consequently, the USSR joined forces with China to challenge the US. Stalin convinced Mao Zedong to aid North Korea in its invasion of South Korea in June 1950. That first ‘bloody proxy war’ ratified the beginning of the Sino-Soviet alliance, which is the focus of the book's second part (p. 139). As China sought recognition and international standing, ‘Moscow and Beijing were becoming rival meccas of revolution’ (p. 208). Both countries capitalized on the idea that anti-imperialist revolutions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East would bring them precious allies. Mao sought to expand China's sphere of influence: he approached Algerian and Cuban revolutionaries; financially aided Albania; attacked Taiwan's Jinmen islands in July 1958; and defeated India over the Himalayas in 1962. Thus, an Asian hegemon emerged, directly challenging the USSR.

In the third and most engaging part of the book, Radchenko exposes ‘the Sino-Soviet rivalry for leadership in the third world’ during the 1960s and 1970s (p. 331). Following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Cuba in October 1962, Mao attempted to eclipse Nikita Khrushchev and impose China as the leader of international communism. Nonetheless, the USSR remained the primarily ally of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. For Leonid Brezhnev, ‘support for Hanoi was what made the Soviet Union a true superpower, and America's equal’ (p. 353). As the Vietnam War dragged on, the USSR and the US indirectly clashed in the Middle East and Africa. Brezhnev aided Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and supported Marxist revolutionaries in Angola in 1975. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the USSR emerged as an indispensable power.

In part four, Radchenko returns to the situation in Europe and addresses contemporary debates. The USSR's ‘over-bureaucratized, over-militarized economy was not coping with the demands of the modern age’ (p. 538). When he came to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev launched domestic reforms and admitted that only technology, productivity and economic performance could bring international prestige. As German unification loomed large, Gorbachev suggested that Germany should be enmeshed in both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. He then offered to join NATO in 1990, in what Radchenko regards as ‘a sign of desperation’ (p. 581). It certainly was, but it would also have fully integrated Russia in Europe—something that the US (and several European countries) did not want.

Radchenko refers to two statements from Stalin in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War: that the allies treated the USSR as ‘unneeded furniture’ and that ‘perhaps Americans need satellites and not allies’ (p. 63). Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov also contended that the allies no longer needed the USSR as ‘an equal partner’ once Germany had been defeated (p. 61). Radchenko suggests that Stalin alone is chiefly responsible for the Cold War. However, what was the USSR expected to do once Nazi Germany had been militarily defeated? It is unquestionable that ‘two irreconcilable social systems’ clashed on the international level (p. 268). It is also clear that the US could not envision cooperating with a country whose ideology they sought to defeat. This is why it feels like an intellectual dishonesty when Radchenko suggests that Khrushchev missed an opportunity to ‘build a firm foundation for Soviet-American relations’ at the meeting in Paris with John F. Kennedy in early 1960 (p. 268).

Radchenko rejects any Soviet right to a sphere of influence: Stalin had no right to it. Interestingly, and perhaps ironically too, more than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Donald Trump appears ready to concede that Russia is entitled to its own sphere of influence. Perhaps this is evidence that a multipolar world demands a less intransigent approach to international relations, especially with China now regarded as the sole rival that could challenge the US' standing worldwide.