Today at Reader's Corner, Sergei Radchenko, author of the new book, To Run the World, the Kremlin's Cold War bid for global power.I'm Bob Custer.Welcome to Reader's Corner.What would it feel like to run the world?
Leaders in Soviet Russia spent the Cold War trying to figure that out.In his latest book, To Run the World, Sergei Radchenko provides a panoramic new history of the conflict that defined the post-war era.
A deep dive into the psychology of Kremlin's decision-making, Radchenko's book reveals how perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape the world.
Sergei Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies.
He is the author of Two Sons in the Heavens and Unwanted Visionaries, the Soviet Failure in Asia. Sergei Radchenko, welcome to Reader's Corner.Your book is not the first, nor will it be the last, about Russia that we read here at Reader's Corner.
And just in case our listeners are asking why the focus on Russia recently, we're quite concerned about the war in Ukraine, about its impact across the globe, and most scaring, perhaps a nuclear war could come out of it.
More on that later, because I have a quote that supposedly came from Putin that I will ask you about later in our conversation.
For now, let's note that your book serves as a very valuable reference source for how we try to get inside the Russian mind, and let's say Putin's head, in order to figure out what comes next.
You tell the reader in your first chapter that this is a great moment to re-examine the Cold War in light of newly discovered or unclassified materials. Just what did you access that is or was unavailable in time?
First of all, thank you for having me on the show.I'm always excited to discuss my book.It is a long book, and I always warn readers, it's 800 pages.
It's a bit of a struggle to get through, but it's exciting, and it's exciting precisely for the reason that you mentioned, i.e.there's so much new stuff that is there.
in terms of the new materials that allows us to tell the story of the Cold War from new angles that we hadn't thought about before, maybe add some evidence to stories that we knew already.Now, why is this stuff available?
Well, to make a long story short, after the collapse of the USSR, many of the Soviet documents after a brief period of openness under early Yeltsin were closed down.
and historians, people like myself, could not get to them until maybe about 10 years ago, when suddenly this gigantic treasure trove of materials about Soviet leaders, about their foreign policy, about their domestic policies, well, suddenly became open to researchers in Moscow.
And I was, I guess, the first, one of the first people who was working with this materials for a number of years, right up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Now i can no longer go there and i cannot recommend that any of my friends or colleagues that they do, since we're a tendency occasion was to take people hostage.
So unfortunately those materials will remain off limits to researchers but i was able to use them in my book and another thing that i was able to take
advantage of was a relative openness in China when I lived there just at the turn of leadership from Hu Jintao over to Xi Jinping.
Remember that period that seemed like China was a little bit, it was like moving somewhere else and then it became oppressive once again.
Well, I was there just at that moment and I was able to access a lot of Chinese materials about the Cold War and brought that into my narrative as well.So there's a lot of new evidence because of that as well.
Well, let's start with Stalin.Help us understand how Stalin, his pathological obsessions, insecurities, as you call them, play a major role in the outbreak of the Cold War.And of course, Stalin is Putin's patron saint.
I mean, this is a guy who really respects the work of Stalin in his day.But I'll let you take it from there.
Well, exactly.Putin sometimes references Stalin.Sometimes he has been critical of Stalin in the past, but he also praises Stalin as a state builder.He also has a great affinity for Russian czars like Peter the Great, etc.
He uses those people as his role models, evidently. I mean, for me, Stalin was interesting because, of course, he is the leader of the USSR just as the Soviet Union emerges from the ruins of the Second World War and into what became the Cold War.
And for me, it was interesting to figure out what drove Stalin, what really was the, you know, what was sort of behind Soviet foreign policy at that moment and I discovered that it was very imperialistic.
Stalin was very imperialistic, hardly surprising in his outlook.What was interesting was to read all the materials that were prepared sort of from 1943
to 1945, indicating Soviet plans for how they would effectively assert control over large parts of Europe.I mean, as far as Sweden, you know, they saw even Sweden falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.
And also, you know, other countries obviously closer to them, Eastern Europe, Turkey.And the reason they thought that they were entitled to these territories, this sphere of influence, was because Stalin felt that he had the strongest army in Europe.
And the Americans just simply had to recognize this reality.But this emphasis on recognition is something I talk about a lot in my book.
I basically argue that although Stalin valued power, what he valued even more was legitimacy of power and he wanted American recognition of what he thought was his legitimate sphere of influence as a way to kind of make this sphere more secure.
Now the Americans of course were not going to give this recognition to him.And that is how we ended up in the situation that basically brought on the beginning of the Cold War.
And that theme of recognition does, in fact, run throughout your book.And I'm going to move right along to the era of Khrushchev.
Now, most Americans will think of the Cuban Missile Crisis when you think of Khrushchev, and maybe they'll even think of his banging his shoe at the UN on the desk.But
more importantly, help us understand Khrushchev's role in what I think you say is craving American recognition of greatness.
Well, Khrushchev, of course, emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union just at the time that the Soviet Union and the United States were going through what became known as the nuclear revolution.So the Soviets had, by 1955, had a thermonuclear bomb.
They were also developing missiles.
By 1957 their first intercontinental ballistic missile was tested and that gave Khrushchev a sense of great power, almost an omnipower, sort of the sense that nobody could mess with the Soviet Union and therefore everybody would have to recognize the Soviet Union was this
great superpower and equal to the United States.And that's despite the fact that actually in many other areas, Soviet economy was not even close to the American economy.Yes, the Soviets had certain breakthroughs.
Everybody remembers the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the launch of Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961.There were some breakthroughs, but
by and large Soviet economy really struggled and it became increasingly struggled in the starting from the really from the early 1960s and as we progress into the late 60s and 70s the problems become ever graver and more visible but Khrushchev
He, knowing that he had nuclear weapons, thought that he still deserved and that the Soviet Union still deserved that place of honor and place of greatness among nations.But, and this is the key issue, he wanted America to recognize him as an equal.
He reached out to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.He traveled to the United States, began what camaraderie almost with Americans.He felt like he was equal to Eisenhower. But at the same time, Russov remained deeply insecure.
And a lot of his foreign policy adventurism, for example, in Berlin or in Cuba in 1962, when he launched, when he sent the missiles there, which brought us very close to nuclear war, were really born of this insecurity and his feeling that although he claimed that the Soviet Union was this great power that must be respected by everyone, in reality, it really wasn't measuring up to the power of the United States.
You're listening to Reader's Corner.My guest today is Sergei Radchenko, author of the new book, To Run the World, The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power.You characterize Brezhnev's leadership as attempting detente anyway.
Tell us how that works out.And that leads, of course, to the next question.And all of my questions are related to this idea of Russia needing this recognition of American greatness right down to Putin.
But let's have you comment just briefly on Brezhnev's leadership.
So the book spends a lot of time on Brezhnev, and that's a little bit unusual for histories of the Cold War.I mean, who was Brezhnev?We remember Brezhnev as this quite senile old guy who was barely able to move or talk.
But this is all, you know, this is late Brezhnev.Earlier on, after he replaced Nikita Khrushchev in an internal coup in 1964, Brezhnev actually was fairly dynamic.He was a fairly charismatic individual, and he pushed forward the policies of detente.
Now, why is it that he was so interested in detente?There were several reasons.First is the Soviet fear of China, and that actually is really brought out in my book.I talk about
Brezhnev's absolute obsession about China, how he thought the Chinese were untrustworthy, how he thought that you could never reach any agreements with them.
And of course, in 1969, China and the Soviet Union nearly went to war over disputed territory in eastern Siberia. Well, China was a big issue on Brezhnev's mind.
Another issue was that he wanted economic relations to develop, and in particular one of the things he really wanted to do was to sell oil and gas to Europe, and ultimately also to the United States, and buy American and Western technologies in his turn.
And finally, there was a certain hollowing out of the Soviet ideology.Nobody really believed all that much in the prospects of communism anymore.
And as I mentioned, Soviet economy was struggling and Brezhnev needed to replace this with something else.And his ideology became this idea of greatness and solving world problems together with America.This is what I refer to in the book as the
a proposed Soviet-American condominium.Now, this is something that Brezhnev wanted to accomplish.
And he reached out to Nixon and felt that he really could develop a good personal relationship, a friendship with Nixon, and proceeded with this all the way until Nixon resigned in 1974.And after that, Brezhnev's
the fortunes of detente also decreased, but Brezhnev himself suffered a breakdown and became a shadow of his former self, so that by the late 1970s he was no longer really capable of developing a proactive foreign policy.
Well, let's fast forward to Gorbachev and his new thinking, as you call it in your book.Tell us exactly what that new thinking focused on, and I think we all know what happened, but you might at least comment on Gorbachev's
Pizza Hut commercial, which I found rather amusing.
I do talk about the Pizza Hut commercial and the conclusion to the book, of course, which takes us all the way to Putin.
But with Gorbachev, you know, I when I was writing the Gorbachev chapters of the book, I felt that those were the most controversial because
this is where I focused on continuities and the book does emphasize continuities in Soviet foreign policy and indeed continuities between Soviet and Russian foreign policies both pre-Soviet and post-Soviet as it were there's a long kind of arch of history here and we're talking about same underlying motives and desire for recognition all of those things you know they were there from Stalin to Gorbachev to Putin so Gorbachev also had that
And I talk about his desire for recognition in the book and how he wanted to be recognized by the entire world as a prophet of reformed socialism and as a man who could bring the Cold War to an end.And this is what he was...
bringing to the Americans and his conversations with Reagan and later with Bush, he would say, well, look, the Cold War was a bad idea.Therefore, let's finish it.
And we can say we did not lose the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but the Cold War lost itself, as it were.And now we're going to develop a new kind of international consensus where the Soviet Union's position is properly recognized.
Of course, he never got very far with that and, you know, the Soviet collapse ensued for unrelated reasons.The Soviet economy, as somebody who actually grew up in that era, I can tell you was not, you know, was not a very
it did not promise much to the average Soviet citizen.
Anyway, so that is what I talk about in the book, but I also talk interestingly about new thinking and how this new thinking that Gorbachev was trying to sell had much in common with some of the old thinking, including Brezhnev's desire for kind of superpower peace, Pax Soviet Americana,
and Khrushchev's desire for peaceful coexistence.And this is where the controversy would be, because a lot of people would say, well, no, Gorbachev was completely different, something else.
But actually, in my book, I say that, yes, there were differences, but there was also a lot of continuity.And some of the ideas that Gorbachev was peddling came from an earlier generation of Soviet leaders.
You're listening to Reader's Corner.My guest today is Sergei Radchenko, author of the new book, To Run the World, the Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power.
So what role does Yeltsin play following up Gorbachev in destabilizing Russian politics in this era after the fall of the Soviet Union?
So Yeltsin occupies a lesser role in the narrative, and that is simply for the reason that the archival openness that I talked about brings us up to the end of the Cold War, but not much far beyond.
So people interested in the 1990s and the proper kind of archival based history of Russian foreign policy, I think would have to wait for a long time.
And by the way, you know, that archival openness I was talking about is no longer even there because now they're increasingly making it more and more difficult for scholars to go into the archive.And that's a development. that really started in 2022.
All of which is to say is that I don't know when we'll actually have a proper archives-based history of Russia under Yeltsin, but I took the narrative forward and I talked about some of the continuities and how Yeltsin's desire to be recognized
as an equal of Bill Clinton.And they had a pretty good personal relationship, the Bill-Boris relationship, for at least a few years.
But then Yeltsin was constantly reminded of his inferior status and complained about it endlessly, especially he complained about NATO enlargement. which he thought was a great humiliation for Russia, as he put it to Bill Clinton.
But the point for me was simply to stress continuities and to say that this desire for legitimation by America through this kind of recognition, through recognition as a partner, was still very much a part of Russian thinking even after Soviet collapse.
In 1997, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO.What role does this play in Russian-U.S.relations, and especially in the mind of Putin as he considers invading and conquering Ukraine?
Well, so Putin has talked about this many times, and he blames NATO for enlargement.He also talks about so-called broken promises allegedly NATO or the United States had promised Moscow not to enlarge NATO and those promises were later broken.
Now I talk about this episode in my book in some detail because you know both Putin and commentators in the West have talked about this but not with archival documents and of course I had the archival documents at my disposal so I could look very closely at what was promised or not promised and my argument the book was that actually
Putin more or less makes it up in the sense that there was no deal.No deal was ever concluded about NATO non-enlargement.
But Putin finds it useful to argue that NATO enlargement was something that broke faith or that it was despite the promises that were given to Russia.
And that is because he has to sell his aggressive position, not least in Ukraine, to the Russian public. So he's trying to basically say, well, you know, the NATO and the West, they're trying to undermine Russian security.
They are not recognizing Russia's legitimate sphere of influence.And note here the connection to Stalin's thinking about spheres of influence.And therefore we have to push back.
And so his whole invasion of Ukraine is evidently underpinned by at least some considerations of this nature.But we should, of course, not rule out the more obvious and blatant consideration, and that is Russian traditional imperialism.
And Putin very much shares in that old tradition that goes back to the Soviet times and indeed predates the Soviet times.
What does he cite when he talks about the double standards of the United States?Putin, that is.
uh... well his usual his usual citation is kosovo he argues that uh... you know the west uh... metal in the balkans and and uh... recognize kosovo and therefore when russia recognizes it's been various breakaway unrecognized republics they are like a positive self-assertive or the or if they don't boss republics there are you know this is just
doing what America does anyway.So he likes to talk about that.
And he also likes to talk about the fact that the United States had launched wars in the Middle East and therefore violated the rules of international order, even though today it's accusing Russia of violating the same rules of international order.
So this kind of rhetoric, I mean, this kind of narrative sells in Russia because it's not entirely false.There are bits and pieces of that that actually do reflect reality.
And we know that the long years of American involvement in the Middle East were perhaps not the brightest chapter in American foreign policy.
But anyway, Putin uses that in order to justify his own aggression and the policies that he pursues in Ukraine.
By the way, we may have skipped over this, but tell us about Gorbachev's Pizza Hut commercial as to whether or not it worked as he would have assumed it did.
So the Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial, I think it aired in 1997 and your listeners will have to know that in 1991, after Gorbachev effectively stepped down as Soviet leader, he quickly ran out of money.
Not entirely, I mean, he had some sources of funding.He had a little foundation in Moscow, where some of the people who worked for him in the late USSR found a kind of a refuge.
And so, in order to keep this foundation running, and obviously himself funded, he agreed to star in a Pizza Hut commercial where it's filmed in Moscow and Gorbachev walks into this restaurant where people are criticizing Gorbachev for everything.
But then somebody says, well, you know, you'd have to watch it, it's on YouTube.Somebody says, well, but at least we now have the Pizza Hut.So, but this actually, but here's the point, this commercial did not air
In Russia, because of course, for a lot of Russians, the collapse of the USSR was something deeply traumatic.And therefore Gorbachev's reputation was not particularly great in the 1990s.
And when he tried to run against Yeltsin in the presidential elections, he barely won any votes at all.It erred in foreign markets, not in Russia.
Well, what I'd like to do, Sergei, is bring your book up to date, apply it to what's going on immediately around us these days.
And I heard a Russian-American analyst say recently that the Russian people are really not engaged in this war against Ukraine.
And thanks to oil exports from Russia to places across the globe, the war has had little or no impact on lifestyle in Moscow.What's your take on that?
So this is partially correct.First of all, the oil exports, that is very correct.Despite sanctions that have been adopted against Russia, Russia has been able to export oil, maybe not as much or not
as expensively as it wanted, but it has supplied oil to China and India at a substantial discount, nevertheless earning a considerable amount of money, which actually allows it to pursue this war effort.
So in this sense, Russia or Putin has to thank the oil industry of Russia for his ability to continue his various delusional imperialistic pursuits.So that's one.Oil is still very important.
By the way, there's a continuity here with the Soviet times, as I talk about in the book, because in the 1970s, actually in the 1960s already, the Soviets discovered these gigantic deposits of oil and gas in Western Siberia.
And then later, by pumping this oil in particular, they were able to import grain in the 1970s, which allowed them to maintain a moderate, reasonable standard of living for the Soviet people and therefore postpone much needed reforms.
So there's a continuity here.I mean, oil basically comes to bail the Kremlin out.In the 1970s, much as it did today now with Putin, Gorbachev was less lucky because just as Gorbachev embarked on perestroika in the USSR, oil prices collapsed.
So this was not great. But anyway, so oil is very important.Now, about the standard of living in Russia, when the war began, hundreds of thousands of people left Russia.
Some of them returned, but we have to remember that the people who left Russia are the younger people, the more professional, the more knowledgeable people, people whom Russia really needs.It's not a great thing in the long term for Russia.
That is very clear. Now, another hundreds of thousands of people were also massacred in Ukraine.Both Russian soldiers, obviously, Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of people have died.
So that is also not a great thing in the long term for Russia as a state.But they have been able to maintain a reasonable standard of living in Russia.
explains, I think, the popular support for the war, at least the public probably doesn't really care all that much.
What they do care about is to have a reasonable standard of living, and Putin's regime has been able to deliver on this, unlike the USSR in the 1980s.I mean, you don't have the gigantic lines to get bread, right, that you had in the USSR.
So it's a different story now.
Well, now the next question is the one I referred to at the outset of our conversation today, Sergei.I heard this comment from Mikhail Zygar, who you know, uh, and I think, uh, America now knows was convicted.
by a Russian court sentenced to about nine years in prison, I think.Fortunately, he's not in Russia.He fled Russia at the beginning of the Ukraine war.
I heard a question asked of him, and the question was a simple one that I think we're all worried about.Putin has mentioned tactical nuclear weaponry, which he has, and I would argue that he's probably threatened to use it, not overtly, but he
weaves it into his comments in such a way that it's supposed to scare the West, scare the US.So the question of Zagar was, what about this?How dangerous is this man?And I will call his answer the rat theory.
And I'm not quoting it verbatim, but it says, basically, when Putin was a kid, he was hanging around with the wrong crowd.And one day, these kids decided to chase a rat.And they chased the rat into a corner.
And they got this rat right where they thought they wanted him.And all of a sudden he turned on them and attacked them.And Putin is telling this story to the former president of Poland.
And he is saying to the president of Poland, what I learned from that is that you have to be very careful what you do on offense because it can have a very dangerous reaction. on defense.And therefore, says Zygar, Putin is, you might say, bluffing.
Those are my words, not his.And also he points out that Putin is a health nut that goes back to his cancer in 2013.He sits at this long, long, long table that I've seen where his aides are at the other end of it.
I'm not so sure that the guy is allowed to have people around him. Anyway, sorry for the long question, but I hope you have a fascinating answer.
Right, right.Well, Mikhail Zygart is a fantastic journalist.By the way, he has a new book out about the Russian war in Ukraine called War and Punishment.
It's a really interesting book, and I certainly would encourage listeners to read that book as well, shorter than my book, to give an advertisement.Anyway, but that only talks about Ukraine.
Now, what I was going to say about the nuclear aspect, you know, what worries me with Putin, and I talk about this in the book in a different context, you know, I talk about nuclear crises that we had with the Soviet Union, and that includes, of course, the Berlin crisis 1961 and also the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, which were some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War.
And what I argue is that when, you know, Khrushchev was a risk taker, he was a gambler, when he was put in a difficult situation, or when he put himself in a difficult situation like he did over Berlin in 1961, he backed off.
He would back off times and again.And you know, there's a very interesting story with this.In 1961, during the height of the Berlin crisis, Khrushchev suddenly recalls a moment in history from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
He was at that time in Kiev, and one of the commanders of the Soviet armed forces, somebody called Nikolai Vashugin, turned up at his headquarters and said, I lost a tank army.What should I do?And Khrushchev was like, well, what do you propose?
And this guy, Nikolai Vashugin, pulled out a gun a handgun and blew out his brains right in front of Khrushchev.So that's a dramatic thing to witness.You'd have to agree.
But what's interesting is Khrushchev talks about this in the context of the Berlin crisis.What he's trying to say is that you cannot trust human rationality.
Yes, it doesn't make sense for the world to have a nuclear war over Berlin at that time, right? or today we might say Kiev or Ukraine.
It doesn't make any sense, but we simply cannot know for sure that at the moment of crisis, leaders will not press the proverbial red button.
And so for Khrushchev, this memory of the Second World War, the horrors that he himself experienced, and by the way, he lost his son in the Second World War.I mean, he was at Stalingrad.He saw it with his own eyes, the horrors.
He did not want a repetition. Now with Putin, Putin believes himself to be this great strategist.And he thinks that he can outplay and outsmart the United States through psychological operations.
And his nuclear sabre rattling is a psychological operation.He loves these things, right?Even the war in Ukraine is not called a war in Russian.It's in the Russian propaganda, it's called a special military operation.
So special operations is what he does.He feels he's very good at it.And so he's using, he's deploying nuclear rhetoric to basically threaten the United States and intimidate the United States into reducing its support. for Ukraine.
Now, what should our reaction be to in this kind of situation?That's a very difficult question, because as reasonable policymakers, for example, in Washington, look at Putin's statements, they have to take him seriously.
You know, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and say that the Russian nuclear threat does not exist because it does exist.It's out there.This is a country that has thousands of nuclear missiles that is capable of destroying the world, literally.
And this was the same during the Cold War.At the same time, yielding to nuclear blackmail is also not exactly a good strategy, because that would invite only further aggression.
So, the right strategy, I think, here would be to combine firmness and a desire to maintain open channels of communication.I think that's the wisest strategy that you could have, and this is the main lesson of the Cold War.
Talk to your enemy, make sure they don't go crazy, and make sure they don't become that rat in the corner that Putin likes to refer to.
What a perfect conclusion to our conversation and to your book, Sergei.I want to remind our listeners again, the book is called To Run the World, the Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power.
The author, who we've been listening to, is Sergei Radchenko.He's done a fantastic job with this book, and your interview has just been great. We really appreciate your insights into a vexing problem confronting the world.
Sergei Radchenko, thanks for joining us today at Reader's Corner.
Well, thank you for inviting me.I'm really happy to be able to talk about this book and bring those ideas out to the listening public.Great.
Thank you.Thank you very much.
OK, take care.Reader's Corner is presented by Boise State Public Radio News.The engineer for today's show is Eric Jones.With production by Joel Wayne.I'm Bob Kustra.
Please join me next week as we talk to today's leading writers about the ideas and issues that shape our world at Reader's Corner.
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