Discussion Problem: Which of the three major interpretations do you find the most persuasive? Why?

Historians' Interpretations of the Cold War

Over the course of the last fifty or so years, historians have interpreted the Cold War in three basic ways. Historians who share the same interpretation, by the way, are said to belong to the same "school" (not necessarily the same college or university). Thus, among historians of the Cold War, there are three basic schools. They are known as the orthodox, the revisionist, and the post-revisionist.

Orthodox historians see the Cold War resulting primarily from a Soviet threat to the West: the United States and western Europe. According to this view, these nations, led by the United States, responded by defending themselves and their interests, enunciating positions like the Truman Doctrine, which began the American containment policy. To these historians, this was completely justifiable; it was, in fact, the only responsible course. In this interpretation, the Soviet Union was the main culprit.

Interpretations often result at least partly from the historical period in which historians work. Like other people, historians are influenced by their culture and politics, which color their interpretation. The orthodox interpretation developed during one of the tensest periods of the Cold War, the 1950s and early 1960s, when it appeared to many that Soviet aggression was a possibility and nuclear war a present danger. During this period, when orthodoxy was dominant, most historical writing on the subject advanced that interpretation.

In contrast to orthodox historians, revisionists see the United States as the main villain in the Cold War. There are two variations of revisionism. Historians who propound the first believe that the transfer of power from the Franklin Roosevelt to the Harry Truman was the most important cause of the Cold War. After Roosevelt's death, according to this view, the inexperienced Truman abandoned the conciliatory policies pursued by his predecessor and took a number of steps that alarmed and alienated the Soviet Union. The final one was the Truman Doctrine and the adoption by the United States of a rigid policy of containment.

The second variation of the revisionist interpretation is more radical one and usually comes out of a Marxist perspective. It sees the Cold War arising from the American capitalist system. According to historian Gabriel Kolko, for example, after World War II the American economic system needed to dominate world markets. American economic growth depended on this, and the failure to do so would result in economic stagnation at home. The United States, therefore, could not tolerate the expansion of Soviet influence and socialist economies to other countries; it would deprive the U.S. of those markets. American economic needs, therefore, forced the United States to contain Soviet expansion. As you can see, although these two types of revisionism differed about the mechanism, both maintained that the United States had caused the Cold War.

The third interpretation is post-revisionism. Rather than seeing either the U.S. or the Soviet Union as to blame, post-revisionists believe that Cold War was inevitable. They argue that Americans and Soviets had vastly different historical experiences. These prevented them from understanding each other's intentions. Given its history, the United States placed great emphasis on free expression, constitutional government, and capitalism. On the other hand, the peoples of the Soviet Union had only briefly in their entire history (actually, 1907-17) experienced constitutional government, personal freedom, and prosperity. Also, unlike the United States, which is protected on both sides by oceans, the Soviet Union lies exposed to invasions, which have been frequent in its history. Perhaps the most catastrophic was the just-concluded Second World War, which had cost uncounted millions of lives. For post-revisionist historians, therefore, these sharply-divergent histories made the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States unable to appreciate each other's contrasting viewpoints. For Americans, freedom, democracy, and self-determination constituted the lenses through which they saw the world; for the Soviet Union it was the craving for security from attack and invasion by others.

The end of the Cold War in 1989 caused many historians to reevaluate these positions. One important factor was the opening of Soviet archives--the depositories of government records. This allowed researchers to gain much greater knowledge about the operations of the Soviet government. Partly as a result, Russian historians began publishing books portraying Soviet leaders like Joseph Stalin and V. I. Lenin in very harsh light. They revealed in even greater detail than previously known the violence of Stalin's government against its own people, providing the details of hundreds of thousands of executions and the starvation in the early 1930s of some twenty million people . Other historians portrayed Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state as himself the author of the police state, rather than blaming it on Stalin, as many previous writers had done. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, some American historians have also moved sharply rightward in their reevaluations. Among them is John Lewis Gaddis, a professor at Yale and previously a harsh critic of U.S. Cold War policies. In a recent book, for example, Gaddis concluded that the cause of the Cold War was authoritarian dictatorship and particularly one dictator: Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader.