Of revisionist history of the Cold War

Michael McIntyre mmcintyr at wppost.depaul.edu
Sun Jul 1 19:29:06 PDT 2001


A. G. Noorani is a great man. I can think of no one who has done more to uphold civil liberties in India. But placing John Lewis Gaddis among the "revisionists" is simply perverse, as is the suggestion that the older generation of "revisionists" (Kolko et al, presumably) didn't use archives. (And if they didn't make use of the Freedom of Information Act it's because it didn't exist yet!) But hey, Noorani is entitled to a bad day.

Michael McIntyre


>>> uvj at vsnl.com 07/01/01 21:18 PM >>>
Frontline Volume 18 - Issue 13, Jun. 23 - Jul. 06, 2001

BOOKS Of revisionist history

A.G. NOORANI

Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory edited by Odd Arne Westad; Frank Cass, London; pages 382, $64.50 (hardbound), $26 (paperback). IN the past, revisionist history of the commencement and course of the Cold War was confined to a few scholars like Frederick Schuman and William Appleman Williams. Predictably, they invited censure from mainstream historians. Robert James Maddox wrote a scathing critique The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War. Today, revisionism has become pre-eminently respectable because, unlike the revisionists of the 1960s they draw on the archives and are vastly more rigorous in analysis. John Lewis Gaddis' sustained work on George F. Kennan qualified him to a place of pre-eminence in this field. His book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997) remains a classic of its kind. Scholars like James G. Hershberg made their fine contributions. The Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Centre has rendered yeoman service as has the National Security Archive, which cooperates with the CWIHP, actively. Unfortunately the earlier revisionists made no use of the Freedom of Information Ac. They were, besides, impassioned to a degree. The opening of the archives in Moscow, after the aborted coup in 1991, provided a bonanza. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War (1996), based on the archives, was written by Vladislav Zubok, a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive, and Constantine Pleshakov, a writer who lives in Moscow. In 1997 appeared One Hell of a Gamble. It was the Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis based, again, on archival research. It was written by Aleksander Fursenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of Russia's leading historians, and Timothy Naftale who teaches history at Yale. A scholar who won particular note is Vojtech Mastny, whose most recent work is the Cold War and Soviet Insecurity. He is a senior Research Scholar at the CWIHP. Mastny's article in Foreign Affairs (May-June 1999) should be read widely. Entitled ''Did NATO Win the Cold War?'', it debunks many a hoary myth. The volume under review is edited by a historian at the London School of Economics whose work Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1945-1963 disclosed texts of exchanges between the Soviet and Chinese leaders, in some of which India loomed large. The present volume takes stock of new material. Seventeen scholars of repute discuss how the history of the Cold War should be studied, a decade after it ended. It is the first in a new, promising series. Professor Shu Guang Zhang, for instance, analyses "China's Strategic Culture and the Cold War Confrontations". He writes insightfully: "The Chinese traditionally view crises in dialectical terms. The term 'crisis' in Chinese stands for shi (a situation) embodying with wei (danger) and ji (opportunity). Mao genuinely believed that all crises were dialectical in terms of their strong and weak points, their advantages and disadvantages, their dangers and opportunities. Thus, he considered any crisis to be both negative and positive, believing that a dangerous situation could be turne to hi



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