I kind of handed this sucker in two weeks late, so I probably got a 0/2 for commitment. Still, I scoured the net for examples and couldn’t find anything that our teacher didn’t give us, so I thought a sample project would be appreciated. I got 14/20, by the way, and my topic is "First Period Leads in National Hockey League Games and the Effect on the Final Score."
Plan of Investigation
While watching National Hockey League (NHL) games, I often heard the play-by-play announcer mention at the start of the third and final period how it would be tough for a team to come back from a one goal deficit. This led me to wonder just how difficult it was mathematically, and how much previous periods affected the final one. In this project, I will investigate whether the scores at the end of the first period affect the final score of NHL games.
I will gather the scores of 200 hockey games between 2005-2008 from the nhl.com website. I chose these years because the type of hockey before and after the new Collective Bargaining Agreement is different in terms of goals scored per game, with more goals scored per game on average before than after.
After gathering this data, I will analyze and compare the data. I will make scatterplots, plotting the scores of both losing and winning teams at the end of the first period on the Y-axis and the final score on the X-axis. This will let me see visually whether previous scores affect the amount of goals scored in the third period. I will also use Pearson’s correlation coefficient to see whether there appears to be a correlation between the score at the end of the first period and the final score. I will also try to describe the strength of association by using the coefficient of determination. I will then create a bar graph showing teams who won at the end of the first period and won at the end of the third and teams who lost at the end of the first period and won at the end of the third. Using information from the bar graph, I will use the chi-squared test of independence to see whether the score at the end of the first period and the score at the end of the third period are independent.
Procedure
1. For the dates of the 200 games, I placed slips of paper into a three boxes. In one box were four slips of paper, one for each year between 2005-2008, in another box were 31 slips with the numbers 1-31, and in the final box were 9 slips with the months January-June, October-December
2. Took one slip of paper from each hat and noted the scores of all games played that day. I put the slips of paper back into the box after I noted the scores
3. Repeated this process until I reached 200 games
4. Made two scatterplots, one of the score of the winning team at the end of the first period and the score at the end of the third, and one of the score of the losing team at the end of the first period and at the end of the third
5. Found the line of best fit
6. Used Pearson’s correlation coefficient on the numbers used in the scatterplots
7. Used the coefficient of determination on the numbers used in step 5
8. Made bar graph of teams who won at the end of the first period and won at the end of the third versus teams who lost at the end of the first period and won at the end of the third
9. Concluded whether there appears to be a correlation between the score at the end of the first and the score at the end of the third
Raw data
Uh, I had 100+ trials, I put the number into tables, you guys don't need to see this.
Data Analysis
After collecting the data, two scatter plots were created using Microsoft Excel, one of the scores of Team A, the winning team at the end of the first period, and one of the scores of Team B, the losing team at the end of the third period.
[GRAPH] [GRAPH...if you really want to see them, send me an email/leave a comment or something and I can send it over]
To make this graph, I placed the data into Microsoft Excel, used XY (scatter) using the Chart Wizard. I made sure the maximums, minimums and scales were the same for the two graphs so a better comparison could be made between them. I next added a linear trend line. Under the Add Trendline Option, I elected to display the equation on the chart. --> NOTE: I don't think you're supposed to use Microsoft Excel, but I had lost my calculator, I was across the continent, I was really, really desperate
The scatter plot is a graph that shows the correlation between the two variables. The trendline, known as the line of best fit or the least squares regression line, shows the linear equation which best explains the sums up the data’s trend. The formula on the right is the formula of the line of best fit.
As can be observed from these plots, teams who win at the end of the first period have a much larger range of data, with 26 separate points versus 14 separate points on Team B’s graph. Since the scatter plot does not use a thicker dot when numerous teams share one place on the plot, this suggests that teams who lose at the end of the first period tend to have similar scores, as they have twelve fewer points than teams who win.
If a team loses in the first period, this means that its X-range must be smaller than that of the winning team. Since 9/26, or almost 35%, of Team A’s points are on 3 or 4 on the X-axis, it is logical for Team A to have a larger range. However, even disregarding 3 and 4 on the X-axis, Team A’s range is still larger than that of Team B’s. There is a greater spread of data on the Y-axis of Team A, as well.
Note that when Team A scores one goal in the first period, there are instances of them ending the third period with five or six goals. However, when Team B scores one goal in the first period, the most goals they ended up with is only four. This pattern is repeated when the teams score two goals in the first period. With Team A, there are instance(s) when they end up with seven; with team B, the most they have ended up with is six, one less than with Team A. This suggests that having a lead in the first does increase scoring slightly in the later periods.
I then used Pearson’s correlation coefficient. When necessary, I rounded numbers to three significant digits. Again, I used Microsoft Excel to find r, by placing data from Team A into A1 to A110 and B1 to B110. Next, I imputed =CORREL(A1:A110,B1:B110). This gave me r, +0.452. I repeated this process with data from Team B, although I imputed data into C and D columns and imputed =CORREL(C1:C110,D1:D110). The r for Team B was +0.436.
The purpose of r is to find the degree of linearity between the two variables. This allows me to evaluate the strength of the correlation between goals scored in the first period and third period by each time.
The Pearson’s correlation coefficient for Teams A and B suggests a weak positive correlation, with a slightly weaker correlation for Team B. This means that generally, the higher the score in the first period for both teams, the higher the score at the end of the third period. Team A is more likely than Team B to have a higher score in the third period given that it has a higher score in the first. Thus, Team A appears more likely to win because it either widens the difference in goals-scored between it and team B, or scores more goals in response to Team B trying to launch a comeback. However, this connection is quite weak. While this trend exists, it does not often occur. This suggests that if a higher score at the end of the first period does not frequently result in a higher score in the third period, then having a lead in the first period will aid the winning team, but only slightly.
Next, I squared r to find the coefficient of determination, r2.
Team A
r = 0.452
r2 = 0.204
Team B,
r = 0.436
r2 = 0.190
The coefficient of determination allows me to better describe the strength of association. It shows a very weak correlation between goals scored in the first period and the third period with both Team A and Team B. This means that although goals scored in the first period may help both teams, it does not do so significantly. This corroborates with r, which showed a weak link between goals scored in the first and third periods. As discussed with the results of r, this lead helps Team A more than Team B.
My final step was to make a bar graph of when Team A won at the end of the third versus when Team B won at the end of the third.
[GRAPH]
This shows clearly that Team A is more likely than Team B to win at the end of the third period. Team A won 88 times, while Team B won only 22 times, meaning that Team A won 80% of the time. This is quite a significant difference and shows that while the goals scored during the first period may not make a large difference in the goals scored at the end of the third period, a win at the end of the first period usually results in a win at the end of the third.
Discussion and Evaluation of Results
From the data collected for this experiment, as well as analysis of this data, it appears that a team winning at the end of the first period is generally more likely to win at the end of the third period. Note that the bar graph shows that teams who win at the end of the first period go on to win at the end of the third period 80% of the time, which strongly supports this idea. However, goals scored in the first period only slightly affect the score at the end of the third period. This suggests that many games are very close, with one team winning by one or two goals.
This naturally results in something I noticed during the investigation – that a great many ties occurred. It makes sense that with so many close games, many end up going into overtime. This partially explains the application of the shootout in hockey after 2006, which eliminated ties and ensured that one team won every game, which results in a clear outcome for the audience.
Something interesting I noticed in the data was that on the occasions Team B won, they tended to score more goals than needed for them to win. Team B often scored up to four goals during the second and third periods, even if only one was needed to catch up to Team A. Another trend I noticed was that Team A either played defensively and did not score another goal, or they scored up to four or five more goals. Both of these trends are results of individual coaching styles and team motivation. This was not reflected in my scatter plot because as mentioned, my scatter plot did not have a thicker dot for an event happening more frequently. Thus, even if Team A winning by three goals was more common than Team A winning by one, both are represented the same way on the scatter plot. This misrepresentation is one of the fallibilities in my experiment. It could perhaps be remedied by creating another graph which shows how often each score occurred.
I also noticed that it is uncommon for teams to score more than 4 goals in a period. In most games, teams score between 0 to 3 goals per period. Going by this generalization, a team which leads by one or two goals in the first period is not advantaged by much, as Team B should be able to catch up by scoring one or two goals in the second and third periods. However, once a team leads by four or more goals in the first period, it should be harder for Team B to catch up, as it will be forced to score more goals than it usually does.
This generalization is supported by my scatter plot and data. Teams who score three or four goals in the first period can end up with seven or eight goals by the third period, while there are no instances of teams losing in the first period scoring more than six goals. This suggests that more goals are scored overall when a team scores more goals in the first period. My data shows that in almost every instance when a team scores three or four goals in the first period, this team wins the hockey game. Thus, although Team A usually wins, it has a higher chance of doing so when it scores more goals in the first period.
Several factors prevent this study from being perfectly valid. Although I deliberately chose the dates randomly, games are affected by a myriad of factors outside of simply scores. The scheduling can affect the scores as teams playing three games in four nights, or back to back games, are liable to being more fatigued and possibly scoring fewer goals. Scheduling could also affect scores in that during late season games, as some teams who will not make the playoffs stop trying to win, while others who wish to improve their position try harder. It is difficult to judge the former whether they score more or fewer goals in the first, as when they score, they are not as motivated to hold onto their lead, and when they do not score, they are not as motivated to catch up. Meanwhile, the latter are eager to score as much as possible, since sometimes ranking between similar teams is based on goals scored for and against.
I think that this problem could be helped by collecting more data. Although I randomly chose 110 games, it may not be enough to cover all the factors that can affect games throughout two and a half seasons considering 2460 games are played each season. Doubling or even tripling the number of games would better encompass these changes.
The reliability of the analysis stems from the fact that since the data is gathered throughout the regular season, it can be compared accurately, as opposed to data collected during regular season, preseason and the playoffs, when different types of hockey are played. It was also randomly gathered, reducing the chance of a bias resulting in games chosen from one circumstance.
Although goals scored in the first period do not affect goals scored in the third period in a major fashion, my investigation shows a strong correlation between winning in the first period and winning in the third period.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
IB Extended Essay Title Page
Okay, so probably not what you're looking for, but I <3 my title page, so I'm going to include it. The picture is the cover of the book.
IB Extended Essay sample
English A1 EE. Written in thousand-word spurts the night before each draft was due, then hastily polished a couple days before the turnitin.com deadline. The lesson I can give you: go with your gut instinct. The Blind Assassin is one of my supervisor's favourite books - she suggested that I do it. I gave her my proposal after reading 30/600 pages. At first she was really hesitant, but it was actually a really simple topic to do. You know your strengths and weaknesses! Even if the topic is a bit odd, if you think (realistically) you can do it, you probably can.
International Baccalaureate Diploma Program
Extended Essay
English A1
Clothing Imagery in The Blind Assassin
Your Helpful IB Co-Sufferer
Candidate number: ########
Sponsor: Teacher I Never Spoke To
X School
City, Province, Canada
May 2008
Abstract
Margaret Atwood employs clothing imagery in The Blind Assassin to help connect and foreshadow the different stories within the novel and show relationships and traits. What kind of clothing a character wears can show personality, while the value and care he or she places on physical appearances can also reveal disposition. Specific types and items of clothing seem to have a role as well—animal fur conveys dishonesty and reluctance to believe in the truth—while accessories can have symbolic meaning. They can hint at future events and link two apparently dissimilar events to make each more poignant. When one character wears clothing that another character wore previously, this not only joins their experiences in the reader’s mind, it forces him or her to consider any associations. Thus, Atwood compares and contrasts the experiences merely through description of attire. Colour is used as symbolism and to show changes in the role or opinion of characters. Atwood does not simply designate commonly-used meanings to the colours, but places her own spin on it. She also differentiates between different shades and combinations of colours. Clothing imagery is used in The Blind Assassin meaningfully and helps to create a much more textured novel.
Word count: 200 words
Table of Contents:
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………...i
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………...ii
Essay…………………….…………………………………………………………1-13
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….14
Clothing Imagery in The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a mise en abyme — in fact, there are three stories nestled one within the other. In one story, narrator Iris Griffen née Chase recounts her life from childhood to middle age. Interspersed with this are chapters of The Blind Assassin, a roman à clef that Iris wrote but published under her younger sister’s name. And within that fictional story, one of the protagonists, Alex, tells a pulp science-fiction story to the other protagonist. One of the ways Atwood connects the stories within this intricate framework is with clothing imagery. Atwood uses clothing imagery in The Blind Assassin to create character profiles, link characters or events and show character opinion or motivation. For the purpose of this essay, the novel as a whole will be referred to as The Blind Assassin, while narrator Iris Griffen’s story-within-a-story will be called The Blind Assassin (I).
Clothing helps build a portrait of characters, not only what style of clothing the character wears, but the characters’ opinion on clothing. Iris remembers that “although [Miss Violence] herself [is] lumpy and inelegant, she [has] high standards of delicacy” (194). Miss Violence wears a uniform of tattered cashmere cardigans, hinting that she was once wealthy enough to afford them. Though they have frayed and she is no longer as well off, she continues wearing those sweaters, just as she retains her ladylike manners. Her clothes serve as a reminder of better times; Miss Violence wears them while dreaming of those better times.
For Laura, Iris’s younger sister, her opinion of clothing reflects her unusual outlook on life. From a young age, Laura is different from others; after Reenie, the family help, admonishes Laura to bite her tongue and stop asking questions, “Laura couldn’t chew for days” (108). Her skewed sense of ownership accentuates her eccentricity. Laura does not hesitate before rifling through her sister’s closet. Her beliefs help underline how her codes of conduct and moral are out of sync with that of everyone else. There is nothing selfish about her motives – she simply does not differentiate between her clothing and Iris’s. Laura “[lacks] the necessary cruelty….her cruelties [are] accidental” (379). Actions such as taking her sister’s clothing could seem greedy when done by another person, but Laura does so with simple intentions. It lends Laura a certain unpredictability, as the reader is never sure what she will do next. It also makes the reader second guess her purposes, for surely a character cannot act with such guileless intentions.
Iris is much more interested in fashion than her sister. Although her sister certainly seems to enjoy it – “‘Well, you’ll have nice clothes, anyway,’ [Laura says]” (299) as the sole merit of Iris marrying Richard – she does not pore over fashion magazines like Iris does. This should be a hint that The Blind Assassin (I) was written by Iris, not Laura, as clothing is often detailed in that novel. This is something Iris, but not Laura, would pay attention to. Laura is a Good Samaritan who is not thrown out of loop by “bedpans and vomit…nor the swearing and ravings and general carryings-on” (529). It seems unlikely that when faced with people in a similar state of poverty, she would notice that the men do not wear ties, whereas Iris is more decorous and less humanitarian. For her, it would only be another point showing the disparity between her lifestyle and Alex’s. Iris would be aware of it because she is unused to it, and would be uncomfortable, whereas if Laura had written The Blind Assassin (I), the novel would focus more on the plight of the men and less on their appearance.
When Alex begins telling the story of the planet Zycron in The Blind Assassin (I), there are lavish descriptions of clothing. It certainly helps set the scene, but at the same time, it feels as though he is trying to ingratiate himself to Iris. To him, clothing is of no great importance unless it is used to make aliens appear utterly unearthly, and he leans towards fantastical costumes such as “a skin-tight suit the greenish-blue of a gas flame” (351). Alex seems to realize how much Iris cares about clothes though, and tries to make himself part of her world. He begins mentioning what each caste on Zycron wears and tones down the science fiction elements, clothing his characters in silk masks and tunics, instead. As Alex delves farther into the story, the clothing imagery he applied in the beginning almost disappears. He does not need to attract Iris by catering to her whims and although he is not certain that Iris will continue sneaking away to him, he is more confident that she will. He feels more comfortable being himself, whereas when the relationship was just starting, he is careful to build up a strong friendship.
Fitting in with the chameleon theme is Iris’s chiffon cape trimmed with ermine fur, which sums up who she is in both her relationships. The chiffon would be how she is with Richard – weak, light and frail. With Alex, though, she more resembles the ermine – she is braver, more disobedient and coarser. The fur trimming plays on the fact that her relationship with Alex is on the side, not the main one. It is also a luxury that not every cape or relationship has; in Iris’s case, this luxury is that of happiness and love. Although she prefers Alex to Richard, her life is with Richard, whereas she only sees Alex sporadically. Also, the ermine changes fur colour in the winter and summer to better camouflage itself in its environment, which could be compared to Iris’s behaviour and contrasted with Iris’s wardrobe. Although the ermine fur on her cape is white, the scene takes place in April, when the stoat’s white winter coat is blotched with brown as it changes into its summer coat. Iris is wearing the coat of another season, emphasizing how no matter how hard she tries she can never blend in completely. She is in a family with significant political and social stature. Even in her most bedraggled clothes, she cannot appear as destitute as the people she encounters.
The use of animal fur in general suggests falsehood and lies. During Iris’s honeymoon, she meets a number of other affluent couples. In her first experience with one of them, the aging wife wears “white mink, despite the spring weather” (305). Despite getting on the years, she is determined to maintain an impression of sensuality and culture. She wraps herself in this mink coat as though it can cover her with a veneer of beauty and elegance. Iris is exposed to the social appearances she must keep up. There are also instances of animal fur being used not so much as lying but hiding from the truth. After her mother’s death, Laura “[spends] a lot of time inside Mother’s fur coat…Laura would get inside it and try to do up the buttons” (171). Although she is too young to truly understand death and its implications, she tries to escape it by hiding in her mother’s old garments. Only after the jacket is given away does Laura begin questioning what happened to her mother; prior to that, she is satisfied with the knowledge that her mother has joined God. Iris almost mimics the gesture when she “pulls the fur coat over her” (450) after hearing Alex’s story of Paradise. As an idealistic woman, she does not want to think about Paradise being more of a trap than a Haven, as Alex sees it. Her way out, like Laura, is to hide from the truth.
Laura and Iris often wear the same outfit when they go through similar circumstances; linking them through parallels in wardrobe emphasizes the outward similarity, but the dissimilar personal experience of each sister. Laura regularly wears Iris’s hand-me-downs. It is interesting, though, that she happens to wear Iris’s yellow cotton dress when she begins to be molested by Richard – the same thing that Iris wore at the start of her affair with Alex. They are both the beginnings of sexual relations, but under greatly different terms. What is striking is how similar the language is. For Iris it is “a pale yellow dress, cotton” (374); Laura wears “a yellow cotton dress” (491). Superficially it shows how deceiving appearances can be, as both Chases kept secrets from each other and sometimes put up a false front, but it also underlines a theme in The Blind Assassin: the connection between the sisters. Neither knew about the others’ secret life until just before Laura’s suicide, but epochs in their life echo each others’, and it is reflected in clothing.
This situation does not only occur between Iris and Laura. During her honeymoon on the ship Berengeria, Iris notices that “a group of English people in cream-coloured linen [stare at her] … [she feels] rumpled and grubby, and of minor interest” (308). Later, her trysts with Alex bring her in close contact with the poor and downtrodden. On one instance, she wears a cream poplin raincoat. Although on that occasion, there is little description on how people react to her, the cream links her with the English. This time, however, she is on the other side of things: she is the one making others feel unwashed and unimportant.
In Mayfair, a magazine Iris frequently reads, all accounts of important events are followed by lavish description of what the socialites are wearing. In an article about the English Queen’s trip to Canada, a few sentences about the visit will be quickly followed by an equally long description of who wore what – as though the fact that a woman is “fetching in a demure Schiaparelli creation of blistered bisque” (159) is just as important as the arrival of royalty. Mayfair is an excellent example of the upper-class attitude. Events may be important, but so are the people seen attending the events, and appearances are everything. Iris’s stance on this paper is indicative of her growth as a character. As a teenager, she leafed through it and harboured dreams of dressing up in the fine attire of the wealthy. When she achieves this, though, no more mention of her reading Mayfair is made. Once she sees the well-to-do lifestyle, she loses interest because she sees its flaws and triviality. Although the rich appreciate their way of life, they are never satisfied. Their gratification depends on whether they are admired for their attire at the next social gathering. In contrast, characters seem most joyful when they are naked. When the blind assassin and the mute maiden in Alex’s story finally escape the city and are free, they are naked from stripping to dive into the river; and Iris and Alex are naked for much of their private time. It is interesting that when Alex is urged to create a happy story in The Blind Assassin (I), the women in Paradise wear clothing. Cynical Alex does not believe that complete happiness is possible and an early hint of this is when he clothes the women in the story.
Accessories are also important. On some outings with Alex, Iris wears “a straw hat, round like a schoolgirls’” (22). Iris wore a very similar hat on childhood excursions with Laura. The rationale was that a lady never went out without her hat. Even though she has grown up, Iris appears to unconsciously keep that advice – a gesture that Laura would probably abandon, just as she abandons much of what she is told is proper. On the other hand, Iris is more likely to abide by the rules. What is more, on these excursions, Laura and Iris “would peer in through the chain-link fence at the primary school, which was for ordinary children” (192). They do this despite the fact that they have been warned that these trips were dangerous. Iris’s trysts with Alex could be seen as a riskier, adult form of these outings. As children, this is an aimless activity and Iris and Laura are not quite sure whether they wish to join the schoolchildren. As an adult, Iris is more set. Instead of merely peering, she actively carries out an affair. Her visits to Alex are definitely meaningful, showing her maturation despite still being treated by Winifred as a child. Alex is poorer and of a lower social class than Iris, and would be the equivalent of the schoolchildren. Richard calls him “the young thug” (408), and this seems to be the general opinion of him. Certainly he would be seen as far too villainous for Iris to associate with. Though Iris’s affair and her jaunts seem quite incongruous, one cannot help recalling the insouciance of those childhood days, and comparing it to the freedom in Alex and Iris’s relationship. Again, this is the grown-up counterpart, even if Iris wears similar clothing; Alex and Iris are not free to roam wherever they want or do whatever they please, but they can escape from an everyday life neither enjoys. Remembering that Laura followed Iris compounds the feeling that both sisters are involved in Iris’s affair, for until the end of the novel, it is hinted that Laura was the one having the affair.
Gloves are possibly the central accessory in the novel, representing a move towards change. This is rather ironic, as gloves should impede motion. The clearest and most dramatic instance of this is Laura’s suicide. The police know that the death was deliberate because “she had white gloves on. They [see] her turn the wheel” (619). Mentioning gloves often tips the reader off that the character is about to make an important decision. During the picnic which marks the start of Alex and Iris’s affair, Iris “[takes] off her cotton gloves, [wads] them into a ball, her hands nervous” (22). For her, the choice to meet Alex and continue seeing him on a regular basis is one that will change her life; on this occasion, it is not enough to simply wear the gloves on or take them off, but to fiddle with them as well. This also ties in with the theme of gladness when naked, as Iris is taking her gloves off and revealing bare flesh. It can be seen as Iris’s move towards the pursuit of happiness.
Colour is another important tool that Atwood utilizes to reveal personality and characters’ opinions. The colours blue and green are used especially frequently. The Chase family commonly wears blue before Iris’s marriage to Richard Griffen. In one of Iris’s memories about her mother Liliana Chase, she wears a dress of “sky blue, with a broad white collar and white cuffs edged in piquet” (101). This image fits the affluent, fair-minded family. They may be white-collared employers, but they still look out for the blue-collar workers at the factories and both Liliana and Laura have a humanitarian streak that drives them to volunteer amongst the homeless and unfortunate. Laura and Iris wore very proper blue dresses in their childhood. Mr. Chase wished to attire his children in stiff clothing as though it would desexualize them enough to turn them into the boys he wanted. Also, the economy had crashed, and to save money, Mr. Chase spent very little on clothes. At Iris’s wedding, it is Reenie’s turn to wear a blue dress. It reflects their new roles. After Iris’s marriage to a prominent industrialist, Reenie is less important, just as Laura and Iris were less important as children. She is also much less wealthy than they have become. When Laura and Iris meet Alex Thomas, he sports “a blue shirt, a little frayed around the edges” (221). Iris is initially wary of him; though she sees him as a nice enough young man, he is a young man who is definitely beneath her station. However, when they begin their affair in The Blind Assassin (I), Iris “looks at his rolled-up shirt sleeve, white or a pale blue” (12). She is not sure whether the shirt is white or blue because the fact that he is a worker no longer matters to her. To her, they are now equals. When Laura meets up with her sister for the first time after running away, she is “neatly, even austerely dressed, in a dull-blue shirtwaist dress” (607), marking a return to the sombre garb she wore as a youth. It is no surprise that she initially hid at their childhood home. After she leaves the house, Laura spends her time doing “this and that…I made myself useful” (608). In the time that she ran away, she lived amongst the middle class, blue collar people she had always craved to be a member of. It can be seen in her clothing just how much she was absorbed into society by the fact that her shirtdress was plain blue, without the white collar or lace of her childhood dresses. For the first time, she has become the normal person she has always wanted to be.
Winifred, Richard’s sister, wears green so often it seems to be her signature colour, and when anyone else wears green it feels tied to her. Considering her forceful and calculating personality, it feels as though she is in fact assimilating others to her. After marrying Richard, Iris rarely wears blue, but she wears much more green. Winifred organizes Iris’s wardrobe and picks out her clothes – just like she arranges the rest of Iris’s life. The meek Iris accepts this, but an interesting twist is that to an extent Iris enjoys it and uses it to her advantage. She likes having a fashionable wardrobe. It appears as though she agrees to submit on more unimportant issues as clothes as cover for her greater insubordination of carrying an affair with Alex. This is illustrated when she dresses for the Xanadu banquet. “The pleasure-dome was where I really lived now” (425), she thinks as she puts on her green veil, and at the time the reader thinks that she is referring to her opulent life with Richard, but she is actually referring to her visits with Alex. Veils symbolize concealment and deception and by donning a green one, Iris shows how she pretends to be obedient so she can continue to sneak away to continue her affair. It is significant that Winifred’s colour is green as opposed to another colour. Green is traditionally linked with envy and Winifred is certainly envious of those higher up in society than her. She is also envious of those with respect, which she, as someone with new money, does not gain. Green could also symbolize the serpent. Winifred is deceitful when it suits her purpose and can also be quite spiteful, taking away Iris’s granddaughter, Sabrina, because she knows how much Iris values the child. Lastly, green is the colour of money – appropriate, considering how much Winifred enjoys wealth and how eager she is for more of it.
There appears to be a distinction between different shades of green, though. Winifred prefers shades that are “not a pastel green but a vibrant green, almost flagrant” (290). Both her shoes and her purses tend to be “reptilian” (636), again emphasizing that Winifred is like a serpent. This reinforces her image as a strong woman who cannot be ignored, who clothes herself in such bright colours to capture attention. The colour is also once described as “poisonous” (290), once more accentuating Winifred’s malice. In contrast, even though Laura and Iris start wearing green after Iris’s marriage, they often wear paler shades. Although they must act according to Winifred’s wishes, they are not as pernicious as she is. At Iris’s reception, Laura wears “leaf-green velveteen with watermelon satin accents” (160). The green Laura wears could have numerous implications. The mention of nature could refer to Winifred’s opinion of the Chase sisters – useful as decorative foliage. Iris is only important for her role as a wife and political supporter of Richard. The green could also be a nod to the Garden of Eden. Outwardly, Laura is like the serpent, angry and determined to ruin affairs. This is ironic, because the serpent is infamous for tricking Eve, and no matter rebellious or ungrateful Laura appears, she is always truthful. At the same time, Laura is the forbidden fruit. Green is commonly linked with youth and Richard has a yen for young women, even the legally under-aged Laura. The green Winifred wears could also be tied up with youth, as Winifred seeks the beauty of youth, and as she ages, clings determinedly to the youthful styles and cosmetics of her heyday.
During her dalliances with Alex, Iris usually wears white, the colour of innocence and purity. Compared to Alex, who is running away from the law and is prone to crasser language such as “cunt on stilts” (348), she certainly seems both innocent and pure. However, Iris never wears pristine white – the white may be patterned, or off-white. No matter how wholesome she seems, she is not wholly pure, as evidenced by the fact that she is carrying an affair with Alex. It is especially tragic that Laura wears white gloves when she kills herself. Throughout the novel, Laura is portrayed as innocent. Even at the moment of her suicide, a far from innocent moment, she retains her purity in the form of her white gloves.
Black is the colour of the young, contemporary people. Any youths the elderly Iris encounters on her walks is inevitably cloaked in black. It is a unique use of colour, as black often has negative connotations, yet the youths are never shown as antagonistic nor melancholy. On the contrary, black seems to symbolize the mystery of youth, an enigma that adolescents have but Iris cannot penetrate. However, black along another colour always seems implies something else. This sends an interesting message – as though stating that youths are still trusting enough to be easily written over. Certainly Reenie’s plain cousin is too old for her black dress to symbolize youth as Winifred’s elegant black dress does. That black is overridden by other wardrobe features – in her case, her sagging brown stockings, a mismatching, unpolished item of clothing that contributes to an impression of age and shabbiness.
Most significant is the combination of silver and black, which signifies strong feelings of gratitude, awe and exceptionality. When Iris hands out the Laura Chase Commemorative Prize, the prize winner stands out. Although she is in a sea of youth, her black dress is shot with silver and “the light streaming out from her was so dazzling [Iris has] to shut her eyes” (51). The language seems to suggest that the prize winner is a star. As she hands out the prize, Iris thinks that “perhaps Sabrina looks like that now…I might not even recognize her” (50-51). The elderly Iris’s sole wish is to reunite with her granddaughter, and by mentioning her at that moment, she not only shows her desire to see Sabrina, she reveals her secret dream of identifying Sabrina. Though Iris has not seen her granddaughter since Sabrina was an infant, she hopes that like the prize winner, Sabrina will show her uniqueness through figurative silver threading even if she is robed in youthful black. She believes that Sabrina is as special and as much of a star as the prize winner.
The Blind Assassin is an elaborate work that benefits from being anchored by various literary elements. It can be seen that clothing is mentioned with definite purpose and that its imagery helps foreshadow and deepen the novel. Certainly, it adds another layer to an already richly-textured novel and helps create the poignancy and complexity that earned this novel the Booker Prize.
Word count: 3965
International Baccalaureate Diploma Program
Extended Essay
English A1
Clothing Imagery in The Blind Assassin
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Abstract
Margaret Atwood employs clothing imagery in The Blind Assassin to help connect and foreshadow the different stories within the novel and show relationships and traits. What kind of clothing a character wears can show personality, while the value and care he or she places on physical appearances can also reveal disposition. Specific types and items of clothing seem to have a role as well—animal fur conveys dishonesty and reluctance to believe in the truth—while accessories can have symbolic meaning. They can hint at future events and link two apparently dissimilar events to make each more poignant. When one character wears clothing that another character wore previously, this not only joins their experiences in the reader’s mind, it forces him or her to consider any associations. Thus, Atwood compares and contrasts the experiences merely through description of attire. Colour is used as symbolism and to show changes in the role or opinion of characters. Atwood does not simply designate commonly-used meanings to the colours, but places her own spin on it. She also differentiates between different shades and combinations of colours. Clothing imagery is used in The Blind Assassin meaningfully and helps to create a much more textured novel.
Word count: 200 words
Table of Contents:
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………...i
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………...ii
Essay…………………….…………………………………………………………1-13
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….14
Clothing Imagery in The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a mise en abyme — in fact, there are three stories nestled one within the other. In one story, narrator Iris Griffen née Chase recounts her life from childhood to middle age. Interspersed with this are chapters of The Blind Assassin, a roman à clef that Iris wrote but published under her younger sister’s name. And within that fictional story, one of the protagonists, Alex, tells a pulp science-fiction story to the other protagonist. One of the ways Atwood connects the stories within this intricate framework is with clothing imagery. Atwood uses clothing imagery in The Blind Assassin to create character profiles, link characters or events and show character opinion or motivation. For the purpose of this essay, the novel as a whole will be referred to as The Blind Assassin, while narrator Iris Griffen’s story-within-a-story will be called The Blind Assassin (I).
Clothing helps build a portrait of characters, not only what style of clothing the character wears, but the characters’ opinion on clothing. Iris remembers that “although [Miss Violence] herself [is] lumpy and inelegant, she [has] high standards of delicacy” (194). Miss Violence wears a uniform of tattered cashmere cardigans, hinting that she was once wealthy enough to afford them. Though they have frayed and she is no longer as well off, she continues wearing those sweaters, just as she retains her ladylike manners. Her clothes serve as a reminder of better times; Miss Violence wears them while dreaming of those better times.
For Laura, Iris’s younger sister, her opinion of clothing reflects her unusual outlook on life. From a young age, Laura is different from others; after Reenie, the family help, admonishes Laura to bite her tongue and stop asking questions, “Laura couldn’t chew for days” (108). Her skewed sense of ownership accentuates her eccentricity. Laura does not hesitate before rifling through her sister’s closet. Her beliefs help underline how her codes of conduct and moral are out of sync with that of everyone else. There is nothing selfish about her motives – she simply does not differentiate between her clothing and Iris’s. Laura “[lacks] the necessary cruelty….her cruelties [are] accidental” (379). Actions such as taking her sister’s clothing could seem greedy when done by another person, but Laura does so with simple intentions. It lends Laura a certain unpredictability, as the reader is never sure what she will do next. It also makes the reader second guess her purposes, for surely a character cannot act with such guileless intentions.
Iris is much more interested in fashion than her sister. Although her sister certainly seems to enjoy it – “‘Well, you’ll have nice clothes, anyway,’ [Laura says]” (299) as the sole merit of Iris marrying Richard – she does not pore over fashion magazines like Iris does. This should be a hint that The Blind Assassin (I) was written by Iris, not Laura, as clothing is often detailed in that novel. This is something Iris, but not Laura, would pay attention to. Laura is a Good Samaritan who is not thrown out of loop by “bedpans and vomit…nor the swearing and ravings and general carryings-on” (529). It seems unlikely that when faced with people in a similar state of poverty, she would notice that the men do not wear ties, whereas Iris is more decorous and less humanitarian. For her, it would only be another point showing the disparity between her lifestyle and Alex’s. Iris would be aware of it because she is unused to it, and would be uncomfortable, whereas if Laura had written The Blind Assassin (I), the novel would focus more on the plight of the men and less on their appearance.
When Alex begins telling the story of the planet Zycron in The Blind Assassin (I), there are lavish descriptions of clothing. It certainly helps set the scene, but at the same time, it feels as though he is trying to ingratiate himself to Iris. To him, clothing is of no great importance unless it is used to make aliens appear utterly unearthly, and he leans towards fantastical costumes such as “a skin-tight suit the greenish-blue of a gas flame” (351). Alex seems to realize how much Iris cares about clothes though, and tries to make himself part of her world. He begins mentioning what each caste on Zycron wears and tones down the science fiction elements, clothing his characters in silk masks and tunics, instead. As Alex delves farther into the story, the clothing imagery he applied in the beginning almost disappears. He does not need to attract Iris by catering to her whims and although he is not certain that Iris will continue sneaking away to him, he is more confident that she will. He feels more comfortable being himself, whereas when the relationship was just starting, he is careful to build up a strong friendship.
Fitting in with the chameleon theme is Iris’s chiffon cape trimmed with ermine fur, which sums up who she is in both her relationships. The chiffon would be how she is with Richard – weak, light and frail. With Alex, though, she more resembles the ermine – she is braver, more disobedient and coarser. The fur trimming plays on the fact that her relationship with Alex is on the side, not the main one. It is also a luxury that not every cape or relationship has; in Iris’s case, this luxury is that of happiness and love. Although she prefers Alex to Richard, her life is with Richard, whereas she only sees Alex sporadically. Also, the ermine changes fur colour in the winter and summer to better camouflage itself in its environment, which could be compared to Iris’s behaviour and contrasted with Iris’s wardrobe. Although the ermine fur on her cape is white, the scene takes place in April, when the stoat’s white winter coat is blotched with brown as it changes into its summer coat. Iris is wearing the coat of another season, emphasizing how no matter how hard she tries she can never blend in completely. She is in a family with significant political and social stature. Even in her most bedraggled clothes, she cannot appear as destitute as the people she encounters.
The use of animal fur in general suggests falsehood and lies. During Iris’s honeymoon, she meets a number of other affluent couples. In her first experience with one of them, the aging wife wears “white mink, despite the spring weather” (305). Despite getting on the years, she is determined to maintain an impression of sensuality and culture. She wraps herself in this mink coat as though it can cover her with a veneer of beauty and elegance. Iris is exposed to the social appearances she must keep up. There are also instances of animal fur being used not so much as lying but hiding from the truth. After her mother’s death, Laura “[spends] a lot of time inside Mother’s fur coat…Laura would get inside it and try to do up the buttons” (171). Although she is too young to truly understand death and its implications, she tries to escape it by hiding in her mother’s old garments. Only after the jacket is given away does Laura begin questioning what happened to her mother; prior to that, she is satisfied with the knowledge that her mother has joined God. Iris almost mimics the gesture when she “pulls the fur coat over her” (450) after hearing Alex’s story of Paradise. As an idealistic woman, she does not want to think about Paradise being more of a trap than a Haven, as Alex sees it. Her way out, like Laura, is to hide from the truth.
Laura and Iris often wear the same outfit when they go through similar circumstances; linking them through parallels in wardrobe emphasizes the outward similarity, but the dissimilar personal experience of each sister. Laura regularly wears Iris’s hand-me-downs. It is interesting, though, that she happens to wear Iris’s yellow cotton dress when she begins to be molested by Richard – the same thing that Iris wore at the start of her affair with Alex. They are both the beginnings of sexual relations, but under greatly different terms. What is striking is how similar the language is. For Iris it is “a pale yellow dress, cotton” (374); Laura wears “a yellow cotton dress” (491). Superficially it shows how deceiving appearances can be, as both Chases kept secrets from each other and sometimes put up a false front, but it also underlines a theme in The Blind Assassin: the connection between the sisters. Neither knew about the others’ secret life until just before Laura’s suicide, but epochs in their life echo each others’, and it is reflected in clothing.
This situation does not only occur between Iris and Laura. During her honeymoon on the ship Berengeria, Iris notices that “a group of English people in cream-coloured linen [stare at her] … [she feels] rumpled and grubby, and of minor interest” (308). Later, her trysts with Alex bring her in close contact with the poor and downtrodden. On one instance, she wears a cream poplin raincoat. Although on that occasion, there is little description on how people react to her, the cream links her with the English. This time, however, she is on the other side of things: she is the one making others feel unwashed and unimportant.
In Mayfair, a magazine Iris frequently reads, all accounts of important events are followed by lavish description of what the socialites are wearing. In an article about the English Queen’s trip to Canada, a few sentences about the visit will be quickly followed by an equally long description of who wore what – as though the fact that a woman is “fetching in a demure Schiaparelli creation of blistered bisque” (159) is just as important as the arrival of royalty. Mayfair is an excellent example of the upper-class attitude. Events may be important, but so are the people seen attending the events, and appearances are everything. Iris’s stance on this paper is indicative of her growth as a character. As a teenager, she leafed through it and harboured dreams of dressing up in the fine attire of the wealthy. When she achieves this, though, no more mention of her reading Mayfair is made. Once she sees the well-to-do lifestyle, she loses interest because she sees its flaws and triviality. Although the rich appreciate their way of life, they are never satisfied. Their gratification depends on whether they are admired for their attire at the next social gathering. In contrast, characters seem most joyful when they are naked. When the blind assassin and the mute maiden in Alex’s story finally escape the city and are free, they are naked from stripping to dive into the river; and Iris and Alex are naked for much of their private time. It is interesting that when Alex is urged to create a happy story in The Blind Assassin (I), the women in Paradise wear clothing. Cynical Alex does not believe that complete happiness is possible and an early hint of this is when he clothes the women in the story.
Accessories are also important. On some outings with Alex, Iris wears “a straw hat, round like a schoolgirls’” (22). Iris wore a very similar hat on childhood excursions with Laura. The rationale was that a lady never went out without her hat. Even though she has grown up, Iris appears to unconsciously keep that advice – a gesture that Laura would probably abandon, just as she abandons much of what she is told is proper. On the other hand, Iris is more likely to abide by the rules. What is more, on these excursions, Laura and Iris “would peer in through the chain-link fence at the primary school, which was for ordinary children” (192). They do this despite the fact that they have been warned that these trips were dangerous. Iris’s trysts with Alex could be seen as a riskier, adult form of these outings. As children, this is an aimless activity and Iris and Laura are not quite sure whether they wish to join the schoolchildren. As an adult, Iris is more set. Instead of merely peering, she actively carries out an affair. Her visits to Alex are definitely meaningful, showing her maturation despite still being treated by Winifred as a child. Alex is poorer and of a lower social class than Iris, and would be the equivalent of the schoolchildren. Richard calls him “the young thug” (408), and this seems to be the general opinion of him. Certainly he would be seen as far too villainous for Iris to associate with. Though Iris’s affair and her jaunts seem quite incongruous, one cannot help recalling the insouciance of those childhood days, and comparing it to the freedom in Alex and Iris’s relationship. Again, this is the grown-up counterpart, even if Iris wears similar clothing; Alex and Iris are not free to roam wherever they want or do whatever they please, but they can escape from an everyday life neither enjoys. Remembering that Laura followed Iris compounds the feeling that both sisters are involved in Iris’s affair, for until the end of the novel, it is hinted that Laura was the one having the affair.
Gloves are possibly the central accessory in the novel, representing a move towards change. This is rather ironic, as gloves should impede motion. The clearest and most dramatic instance of this is Laura’s suicide. The police know that the death was deliberate because “she had white gloves on. They [see] her turn the wheel” (619). Mentioning gloves often tips the reader off that the character is about to make an important decision. During the picnic which marks the start of Alex and Iris’s affair, Iris “[takes] off her cotton gloves, [wads] them into a ball, her hands nervous” (22). For her, the choice to meet Alex and continue seeing him on a regular basis is one that will change her life; on this occasion, it is not enough to simply wear the gloves on or take them off, but to fiddle with them as well. This also ties in with the theme of gladness when naked, as Iris is taking her gloves off and revealing bare flesh. It can be seen as Iris’s move towards the pursuit of happiness.
Colour is another important tool that Atwood utilizes to reveal personality and characters’ opinions. The colours blue and green are used especially frequently. The Chase family commonly wears blue before Iris’s marriage to Richard Griffen. In one of Iris’s memories about her mother Liliana Chase, she wears a dress of “sky blue, with a broad white collar and white cuffs edged in piquet” (101). This image fits the affluent, fair-minded family. They may be white-collared employers, but they still look out for the blue-collar workers at the factories and both Liliana and Laura have a humanitarian streak that drives them to volunteer amongst the homeless and unfortunate. Laura and Iris wore very proper blue dresses in their childhood. Mr. Chase wished to attire his children in stiff clothing as though it would desexualize them enough to turn them into the boys he wanted. Also, the economy had crashed, and to save money, Mr. Chase spent very little on clothes. At Iris’s wedding, it is Reenie’s turn to wear a blue dress. It reflects their new roles. After Iris’s marriage to a prominent industrialist, Reenie is less important, just as Laura and Iris were less important as children. She is also much less wealthy than they have become. When Laura and Iris meet Alex Thomas, he sports “a blue shirt, a little frayed around the edges” (221). Iris is initially wary of him; though she sees him as a nice enough young man, he is a young man who is definitely beneath her station. However, when they begin their affair in The Blind Assassin (I), Iris “looks at his rolled-up shirt sleeve, white or a pale blue” (12). She is not sure whether the shirt is white or blue because the fact that he is a worker no longer matters to her. To her, they are now equals. When Laura meets up with her sister for the first time after running away, she is “neatly, even austerely dressed, in a dull-blue shirtwaist dress” (607), marking a return to the sombre garb she wore as a youth. It is no surprise that she initially hid at their childhood home. After she leaves the house, Laura spends her time doing “this and that…I made myself useful” (608). In the time that she ran away, she lived amongst the middle class, blue collar people she had always craved to be a member of. It can be seen in her clothing just how much she was absorbed into society by the fact that her shirtdress was plain blue, without the white collar or lace of her childhood dresses. For the first time, she has become the normal person she has always wanted to be.
Winifred, Richard’s sister, wears green so often it seems to be her signature colour, and when anyone else wears green it feels tied to her. Considering her forceful and calculating personality, it feels as though she is in fact assimilating others to her. After marrying Richard, Iris rarely wears blue, but she wears much more green. Winifred organizes Iris’s wardrobe and picks out her clothes – just like she arranges the rest of Iris’s life. The meek Iris accepts this, but an interesting twist is that to an extent Iris enjoys it and uses it to her advantage. She likes having a fashionable wardrobe. It appears as though she agrees to submit on more unimportant issues as clothes as cover for her greater insubordination of carrying an affair with Alex. This is illustrated when she dresses for the Xanadu banquet. “The pleasure-dome was where I really lived now” (425), she thinks as she puts on her green veil, and at the time the reader thinks that she is referring to her opulent life with Richard, but she is actually referring to her visits with Alex. Veils symbolize concealment and deception and by donning a green one, Iris shows how she pretends to be obedient so she can continue to sneak away to continue her affair. It is significant that Winifred’s colour is green as opposed to another colour. Green is traditionally linked with envy and Winifred is certainly envious of those higher up in society than her. She is also envious of those with respect, which she, as someone with new money, does not gain. Green could also symbolize the serpent. Winifred is deceitful when it suits her purpose and can also be quite spiteful, taking away Iris’s granddaughter, Sabrina, because she knows how much Iris values the child. Lastly, green is the colour of money – appropriate, considering how much Winifred enjoys wealth and how eager she is for more of it.
There appears to be a distinction between different shades of green, though. Winifred prefers shades that are “not a pastel green but a vibrant green, almost flagrant” (290). Both her shoes and her purses tend to be “reptilian” (636), again emphasizing that Winifred is like a serpent. This reinforces her image as a strong woman who cannot be ignored, who clothes herself in such bright colours to capture attention. The colour is also once described as “poisonous” (290), once more accentuating Winifred’s malice. In contrast, even though Laura and Iris start wearing green after Iris’s marriage, they often wear paler shades. Although they must act according to Winifred’s wishes, they are not as pernicious as she is. At Iris’s reception, Laura wears “leaf-green velveteen with watermelon satin accents” (160). The green Laura wears could have numerous implications. The mention of nature could refer to Winifred’s opinion of the Chase sisters – useful as decorative foliage. Iris is only important for her role as a wife and political supporter of Richard. The green could also be a nod to the Garden of Eden. Outwardly, Laura is like the serpent, angry and determined to ruin affairs. This is ironic, because the serpent is infamous for tricking Eve, and no matter rebellious or ungrateful Laura appears, she is always truthful. At the same time, Laura is the forbidden fruit. Green is commonly linked with youth and Richard has a yen for young women, even the legally under-aged Laura. The green Winifred wears could also be tied up with youth, as Winifred seeks the beauty of youth, and as she ages, clings determinedly to the youthful styles and cosmetics of her heyday.
During her dalliances with Alex, Iris usually wears white, the colour of innocence and purity. Compared to Alex, who is running away from the law and is prone to crasser language such as “cunt on stilts” (348), she certainly seems both innocent and pure. However, Iris never wears pristine white – the white may be patterned, or off-white. No matter how wholesome she seems, she is not wholly pure, as evidenced by the fact that she is carrying an affair with Alex. It is especially tragic that Laura wears white gloves when she kills herself. Throughout the novel, Laura is portrayed as innocent. Even at the moment of her suicide, a far from innocent moment, she retains her purity in the form of her white gloves.
Black is the colour of the young, contemporary people. Any youths the elderly Iris encounters on her walks is inevitably cloaked in black. It is a unique use of colour, as black often has negative connotations, yet the youths are never shown as antagonistic nor melancholy. On the contrary, black seems to symbolize the mystery of youth, an enigma that adolescents have but Iris cannot penetrate. However, black along another colour always seems implies something else. This sends an interesting message – as though stating that youths are still trusting enough to be easily written over. Certainly Reenie’s plain cousin is too old for her black dress to symbolize youth as Winifred’s elegant black dress does. That black is overridden by other wardrobe features – in her case, her sagging brown stockings, a mismatching, unpolished item of clothing that contributes to an impression of age and shabbiness.
Most significant is the combination of silver and black, which signifies strong feelings of gratitude, awe and exceptionality. When Iris hands out the Laura Chase Commemorative Prize, the prize winner stands out. Although she is in a sea of youth, her black dress is shot with silver and “the light streaming out from her was so dazzling [Iris has] to shut her eyes” (51). The language seems to suggest that the prize winner is a star. As she hands out the prize, Iris thinks that “perhaps Sabrina looks like that now…I might not even recognize her” (50-51). The elderly Iris’s sole wish is to reunite with her granddaughter, and by mentioning her at that moment, she not only shows her desire to see Sabrina, she reveals her secret dream of identifying Sabrina. Though Iris has not seen her granddaughter since Sabrina was an infant, she hopes that like the prize winner, Sabrina will show her uniqueness through figurative silver threading even if she is robed in youthful black. She believes that Sabrina is as special and as much of a star as the prize winner.
The Blind Assassin is an elaborate work that benefits from being anchored by various literary elements. It can be seen that clothing is mentioned with definite purpose and that its imagery helps foreshadow and deepen the novel. Certainly, it adds another layer to an already richly-textured novel and helps create the poignancy and complexity that earned this novel the Booker Prize.
Word count: 3965
IB History reading - Cold War: Postwar International System
The Long Peace
Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System
by John Lewis Gaddis
Stability and the Future
History, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying it would surely know, has a habit of making bad prophets out of both those who make and those who chronicle it. It tends to take expectations and turn them upside down; it is not at all tolerant of those who would seek too self-confidently to anticipate its future course. One should be exceedingly wary, therefore, of predicting how long the current era of Soviet-American stability will last.
Certainly it is easy to conceive of things that might in one way or another undermine it: domestic developments in either country could affect foreign policy in unpredictable ways; the actions of third parties could embroil the superpowers in conflict with each other against their will; opportunities for miscalculation and accident are always present; incompetent leadership is always a risk. All that one can-or should-say is that the relationship has survived these kinds of disruptions in the past: if history made bad prophets out of the war-makers of 1914 and 1939-41, or the peacemakers of 1919, all of whom approached their tasks with a degree of optimism that seems to us foolish in retrospect, then so too has it made bad prophets out of the peacemakers of 1945, who had so little optimism about the future.
Whether the Soviet-American relationship could survive something more serious is another matter entirely. We know the answer when it comes to nuclear war; recent scientific findings have only confirmed visions of catastrophe we have lived with for decades. But what about a substantial decline in the overall influence of either great power that did not immediately result in war? Here, it seems to me, is a more probable-if less often discussed danger. For if history demonstrates anything at all, it is that the condition of being a great power is a transitory one: sooner or later, the effects of exhaustion, overextension, and lack of imagination take their toll among nations, just as surely as does old age itself among individuals. Nor is it often that history arranges for great powers to decline simultaneously and symmetrically. Past experience also suggests that the point at which a great power perceives its decline to be beginning is a perilous one: behavior can become erratic, even desperate, well before physical strength itself has dissipated.
The Soviet-American relationship has yet to face this test, although there is no reason to think it will escape it indefinitely. When that time comes, the preservation of stability may require something new in international relations: the realization that great nations can have a stake, not just in the survival, but also the success and prosperity of their rivals. International systems, like tangos, require at least two reasonably active and healthy participants; it is always wise, before allowing the dance to end, to consider with what, or with whom, one will replace it.
The Cold War, with all of its rivalries, anxieties, and unquestionable dangers, has produced the longest period of stability in relations among the great powers that the world has known in this century; it now compares favorably as well with some of the longest periods of great power stability in all of modern history. We may argue among ourselves as to whether or not we can legitimately call this "peace": it is not, I daresay, what most of us have in mind when we use that term. But I am not at all certain that the contemporaries of Metternich or Bismarck would have regarded their eras as "peaceful" either, even though historians looking back on those eras today clearly do.
Who is to say, therefore, how the historians of the year 2086 -- if there are any left by then-will look back on us? Is it not at least plausible that they will see our era, not as "the Cold War" at all, but rather, like those ages of Metternich and Bismarck, as a rare and fondly remembered "Long Peace?" Wishful thinking? Speculation through a rose-tinted word processor? Perhaps. But would it not behoove us to give at least as much attention to the question of how this might happen-to the elements in the contemporary international system that might make it happen-as we do to the fear that it may not?
Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System
by John Lewis Gaddis
Stability and the Future
History, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying it would surely know, has a habit of making bad prophets out of both those who make and those who chronicle it. It tends to take expectations and turn them upside down; it is not at all tolerant of those who would seek too self-confidently to anticipate its future course. One should be exceedingly wary, therefore, of predicting how long the current era of Soviet-American stability will last.
Certainly it is easy to conceive of things that might in one way or another undermine it: domestic developments in either country could affect foreign policy in unpredictable ways; the actions of third parties could embroil the superpowers in conflict with each other against their will; opportunities for miscalculation and accident are always present; incompetent leadership is always a risk. All that one can-or should-say is that the relationship has survived these kinds of disruptions in the past: if history made bad prophets out of the war-makers of 1914 and 1939-41, or the peacemakers of 1919, all of whom approached their tasks with a degree of optimism that seems to us foolish in retrospect, then so too has it made bad prophets out of the peacemakers of 1945, who had so little optimism about the future.
Whether the Soviet-American relationship could survive something more serious is another matter entirely. We know the answer when it comes to nuclear war; recent scientific findings have only confirmed visions of catastrophe we have lived with for decades. But what about a substantial decline in the overall influence of either great power that did not immediately result in war? Here, it seems to me, is a more probable-if less often discussed danger. For if history demonstrates anything at all, it is that the condition of being a great power is a transitory one: sooner or later, the effects of exhaustion, overextension, and lack of imagination take their toll among nations, just as surely as does old age itself among individuals. Nor is it often that history arranges for great powers to decline simultaneously and symmetrically. Past experience also suggests that the point at which a great power perceives its decline to be beginning is a perilous one: behavior can become erratic, even desperate, well before physical strength itself has dissipated.
The Soviet-American relationship has yet to face this test, although there is no reason to think it will escape it indefinitely. When that time comes, the preservation of stability may require something new in international relations: the realization that great nations can have a stake, not just in the survival, but also the success and prosperity of their rivals. International systems, like tangos, require at least two reasonably active and healthy participants; it is always wise, before allowing the dance to end, to consider with what, or with whom, one will replace it.
The Cold War, with all of its rivalries, anxieties, and unquestionable dangers, has produced the longest period of stability in relations among the great powers that the world has known in this century; it now compares favorably as well with some of the longest periods of great power stability in all of modern history. We may argue among ourselves as to whether or not we can legitimately call this "peace": it is not, I daresay, what most of us have in mind when we use that term. But I am not at all certain that the contemporaries of Metternich or Bismarck would have regarded their eras as "peaceful" either, even though historians looking back on those eras today clearly do.
Who is to say, therefore, how the historians of the year 2086 -- if there are any left by then-will look back on us? Is it not at least plausible that they will see our era, not as "the Cold War" at all, but rather, like those ages of Metternich and Bismarck, as a rare and fondly remembered "Long Peace?" Wishful thinking? Speculation through a rose-tinted word processor? Perhaps. But would it not behoove us to give at least as much attention to the question of how this might happen-to the elements in the contemporary international system that might make it happen-as we do to the fear that it may not?
IB History notes: Ending of the Cold War
Taken from: International Relations; Politics and Economics in the 21st Century by William Nester, 2001.
Why Did the Cold War End?
Starting with the Berlin Wall's fall in 1989, George Kennan's predictions proved correct. From 1989 through 1992, the two Germanys were reunited, Eastern Europe was liberated, the Soviet Union broke up, and communist dictatorships were overthrown almost everywhere.
For 72 years (1917-1991), the Soviet Union's system remained intact. For at least 47 years (1947-1991), the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a cold war. Then in 1991, the communist system collapsed. Why?
There are two long-term reasons and one short-term reason. George Kennan had been right all along. America's containment policies eventually helped topple the Soviet empire and communism. Containment and communism's fatal flaws were the two long-term reasons for the cold war's end. Gorbachev was the short-term catalyst.
THE FAILURE OF COMMUNISM
The most important long-term reason was communism's inability to achieve anything other than a totalitarian system that supported repression, exploitation, and often murder or imprisonment of the people by a tiny well-organized elite that enjoyed what little wealth and privilege the system produced. At worst, as in the Soviet Union, China, and Kampuchea, to name a few, communism resulted in genocide. State ownership and planning of the entire economy failed, often tragically, to achieve sustained economic development. The massive industrialization efforts of communist states contributed little to development or wealth. Central planning failed to create dynamic, profitable industries, infrastructure, or agriculture. Instead, what happened in every communist country was a tremendous misallocation or waste of human, natural, technology, and financial resources. Soviet statistics about becoming the world's largest producers of steel, for example, were often grossly inflated and actual production often grossly misallocated. Russia actually produces less grain today than before the revolution. Virtually none of the former Soviet Union's industries are competitive with foreign industries. By emphasizing the distribution rather than the creation of income and wealth, the communists have merely succeeded in making more people poor. Although the communist systems did achieve significant gains in literacy, health care, and safety, these gains could not balance the system's economic failings. Meanwhile the democratic industrial nations forged further ahead economically.
Although communism's collapse was inevitable, the rulers remained largely blind to their system's vast inadequacies. At the 1962 Communist Party congress, Khrushchev confidently predicted that the Soviet Union would economically surpass the United States by 1970 and achieve full-fledged communism (elimination of private property and equal distribution of goods) by 1980! Khrushchev had this in mind when he arrogantly declared at the United Nations in 1962 that he would "bury the United States."
Communism's collapse was accelerated by America's containment policy. If Soviet-backed communist parties had taken power in the industrial powerhouses of western Europe and Japan, communism's demise would have been delayed immeasurably as those geo-economically strategic regions became communist, rather than liberal democratic, showcases.
GORBACHEV'S REFORMS
The short-term reason for the democratic revolutions that swept eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. He understood that central planning had failed to achieve prosperity or equality. By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union could no longer afford to maintain its eastern European empire, its military buildup, and operate a centrally planned economy. Gorbachev chose to give up the empire and military buildup, in a desperate attempt to concentrate all resources to reform and revive the Soviet economy. In February 1986, Gorbachev denounced the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justified a Soviet invasion of any communist country that was threatened by a democratic revolution. Instead, Gorbachev called for radical reforms in the Soviet Union, which would be achieved by glasnost or open information and discussion, perestroika or institutional restructuring, and democracy. Political prisoners were released, Jews and others were allowed freely to emigrate, labor unions were given the right to bargain and strike, religions were allowed freely to worship, and the mass media was allowed to investigate and publish freely. In March 1989, Gorbachev allowed competitive elections for the national People's Congress, and many reformist communists won seats from hard-line communists. In March 1990, Gorbachev announced that the Communist party would no longer monopolize political power. In 1990, Russia held democratic elections for the first time in 1,000 years of history. The people elected representatives to the Russian parliament, which in turn elected Boris Yeltsin as president.
THE COLLAPSE OF EMPIRE
Although Gorbachev intended to reform the Soviet Union and Communist party, the political changes that he enacted proved so revolutionary that they eventually destroyed both the Soviet empire and communism. Ironically, the domino effect of revolution that American policymakers feared so much throughout the cold war occurred only in Eastern Europe. The democratic revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990 were largely the result of peaceful mass demonstrations that convinced the communists to allow free elections. Only Romania experienced a violent revolution, in which the communist dictator Ceausescu and other members of his government were executed. Elections brought democratic parties to power in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and reformist communist governments to power in Romania and Bulgaria. Gorbachev's policy of allowing each eastern European country, and eventually each of the 15 Soviet republics, to choose its own system, even if it meant the end of communism, was popularly known as the "my way" doctrine.
The only significant resistance to the democratic revolution was in the Soviet Union itself. On August 19, 1991, the day before Soviet President Gorbachev would have signed a treaty allowing the Soviet republics to become independent, hard-line communists attempted to overthrow him. For three days between August 19 and August 21, the conspirators held Gorbachev hostage at his Crimean home and attempted to besiege Russian President Yeltsin with his supporters inside the Russian parliament. Over 50,000 Russians rallied around the Russian parliament building, putting their bodies in front of the Soviet tanks and troops loyal to the communists. As increased numbers of Russian troops defected to Yeltsin, the coup leaders gave up and released Gorbachev, who returned to Moscow. The coup leaders were arrested and tried for treason.
The failed coup accelerated the destruction of communism and the Soviet empire. During the coup, Latvia and Ukraine declared their independence, and statues of Lenin were toppled in Estonia and Lithuania. On August 24, Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist party and recommended that its central committee be disbanded. On August 29, Yeltsin and Gorbachev appeared before the Russia parliament. Over Gorbachev's protests, Yeltsin dramatically issued a decree abolishing the Communist party across Russia. On September 2, the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies approved a plan to reduce the Kremlin's authority and allow a looser federation of the Soviet republics. On September 6, the Soviet Union recognized the independence of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. On October 18, Gorbachev and presidents of eight other Soviet republics agreed to join an economic union; the Ukraine joined on November 4. On December 4, 1991, Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus declared the Soviet Union dead but agreed to form a commonwealth. Communism and the Soviet empire had all but vanished.
How did the Bush White House respond to all this? Ironically, throughout the course of these revolutionary events of August and September 1991, President George Bush's response was either passive or actually seemed to favor retaining the communist and Soviet status quo and avoided any support of Yeltsin. In September, Bush flew to Kiev to stand beside Gorbachev and actually implored the Ukrainians not to break away from the Soviet Union. Yeltsin proved of sterner stuff; he shoveled communism's remnants into the gutter of history.
CONTAINMENT AND THE REAGAN MILITARY BUILDUP
During the Republican national convention in August 1992, speaker after speaker claimed that the Reagan and Bush military buildup had won the cold war. These claims were continued throughout the 1992 elections and have been echoed ever since. Did Reagan and Bush really win the cold war?
The founder of the containment policy, George Kennan, dismissed the Republican victory claims as "ridiculous" and went on to argue that "Nobody, no country, no party, no person, 'won' the cold war. It was a long and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions and strength of the other party."'8 Kennan, of course, had predicted in the late 1940s that the collapse of the Soviet empire and communism was inevitable, given the historic tendency of all empires eventually to collapse and the inability of communism to satisfy even the most basic needs of the people. Containment was a bipartisan policy that was started by a democratic president and continued by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
There is no evidence that the Reagan military buildup contributed to, let alone caused, the Soviet economy's collapse. Moscow did not significantly increase military spending to keep up with that of the Reagan administration. The Soviet economy would have collapsed regardless of American policy. Soviet Marshall Nikolai Ogarkov admitted in 1983 that the cold war had essentially ended with the West's victory. Ogarkov argued that "we will never be able to catch up . . . in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."'9 In other words, communism failed.
The Reagan buildup may have actually propped up rather than undermined the Soviet empire.'o After Gorbachev took power in 1985, Kremlin hard-liners pointed to the Reagan buildup and argued that reforms were dangerous and should not be attempted. Gorbachev complains that Reagan's policies ironically prevented him from implementing his reforms sooner and more comprehensively. Reagan led the United States into an arms race against itself. By tripling America's national debt during the 1980s, the Reagan administration undermined American rather than Soviet power.
The Reagan and Bush policies reflected the flaws of the global containment strategy. As Kennan pointed out, the extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles. . . consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union. The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the breaking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s."
The Post-Cold-War Relationship
- Although the cold war is over, many problems remain, including the reduction of nuclear and conventional forces and political and economic development in Russia and the other former communist countries. The collapse of the Soviet empire and communism has allowed the United States and its allies an enormous peace dividend. Some of the savings have been invested in Russia and the other newly independent states to help them reconstruct their economies. Whereas the eastern European economies have managed to transform themselves from communism into managed market economies, Russia's economy continues to teeter on the brink of collapse. In 1998, President Yeltsin admitted that Russia could not meet payments on its immense debts to international financiers and Western governments. President Clinton helped engineer a $25 billion bailout of the Russian economy that combined government and IMF loans. But will the Russians invest those funds any less recklessly than previous infusions from the West?
Why has Russia failed to transform its economy? In contrast to the revolutionary impact of Gorbachev's political reforms, his economic reforms failed to revive the fossilized Soviet economy. He allowed for some limited privatization, less controls on foreign investment, and leasing of land to farmers. But all this was too little, too late. After Russia seceded from the Soviet Union, Yeltsin dismantled central planning, privatized many industries, and allowed entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. The result has been the worst excesses of capitalism, with ever worsening corruption, organized crime, unemployment, inflation, poverty for most, and vast riches for the elite.
More than any other reason, the legacy of communism explains Russia's failure to transform its economy. With communism's collapse, many former Soviet citizens are experiencing a deep ideological void. Throughout their lives, Soviets were socialized to believe in communism as a religion that contained eternal truths and Marx and Lenin as gods. Now those gods and that religion have been all but destroyed. A fierce nationalism has filled the void for many former Soviets. One of communism's worst legacies is the destruction of entrepreneurial instincts in people. The saying "The state pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work" was mostly true. Communism was synonymous with shoddy workmanship.
Why Did the Cold War End?
Starting with the Berlin Wall's fall in 1989, George Kennan's predictions proved correct. From 1989 through 1992, the two Germanys were reunited, Eastern Europe was liberated, the Soviet Union broke up, and communist dictatorships were overthrown almost everywhere.
For 72 years (1917-1991), the Soviet Union's system remained intact. For at least 47 years (1947-1991), the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a cold war. Then in 1991, the communist system collapsed. Why?
There are two long-term reasons and one short-term reason. George Kennan had been right all along. America's containment policies eventually helped topple the Soviet empire and communism. Containment and communism's fatal flaws were the two long-term reasons for the cold war's end. Gorbachev was the short-term catalyst.
THE FAILURE OF COMMUNISM
The most important long-term reason was communism's inability to achieve anything other than a totalitarian system that supported repression, exploitation, and often murder or imprisonment of the people by a tiny well-organized elite that enjoyed what little wealth and privilege the system produced. At worst, as in the Soviet Union, China, and Kampuchea, to name a few, communism resulted in genocide. State ownership and planning of the entire economy failed, often tragically, to achieve sustained economic development. The massive industrialization efforts of communist states contributed little to development or wealth. Central planning failed to create dynamic, profitable industries, infrastructure, or agriculture. Instead, what happened in every communist country was a tremendous misallocation or waste of human, natural, technology, and financial resources. Soviet statistics about becoming the world's largest producers of steel, for example, were often grossly inflated and actual production often grossly misallocated. Russia actually produces less grain today than before the revolution. Virtually none of the former Soviet Union's industries are competitive with foreign industries. By emphasizing the distribution rather than the creation of income and wealth, the communists have merely succeeded in making more people poor. Although the communist systems did achieve significant gains in literacy, health care, and safety, these gains could not balance the system's economic failings. Meanwhile the democratic industrial nations forged further ahead economically.
Although communism's collapse was inevitable, the rulers remained largely blind to their system's vast inadequacies. At the 1962 Communist Party congress, Khrushchev confidently predicted that the Soviet Union would economically surpass the United States by 1970 and achieve full-fledged communism (elimination of private property and equal distribution of goods) by 1980! Khrushchev had this in mind when he arrogantly declared at the United Nations in 1962 that he would "bury the United States."
Communism's collapse was accelerated by America's containment policy. If Soviet-backed communist parties had taken power in the industrial powerhouses of western Europe and Japan, communism's demise would have been delayed immeasurably as those geo-economically strategic regions became communist, rather than liberal democratic, showcases.
GORBACHEV'S REFORMS
The short-term reason for the democratic revolutions that swept eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. He understood that central planning had failed to achieve prosperity or equality. By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union could no longer afford to maintain its eastern European empire, its military buildup, and operate a centrally planned economy. Gorbachev chose to give up the empire and military buildup, in a desperate attempt to concentrate all resources to reform and revive the Soviet economy. In February 1986, Gorbachev denounced the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justified a Soviet invasion of any communist country that was threatened by a democratic revolution. Instead, Gorbachev called for radical reforms in the Soviet Union, which would be achieved by glasnost or open information and discussion, perestroika or institutional restructuring, and democracy. Political prisoners were released, Jews and others were allowed freely to emigrate, labor unions were given the right to bargain and strike, religions were allowed freely to worship, and the mass media was allowed to investigate and publish freely. In March 1989, Gorbachev allowed competitive elections for the national People's Congress, and many reformist communists won seats from hard-line communists. In March 1990, Gorbachev announced that the Communist party would no longer monopolize political power. In 1990, Russia held democratic elections for the first time in 1,000 years of history. The people elected representatives to the Russian parliament, which in turn elected Boris Yeltsin as president.
THE COLLAPSE OF EMPIRE
Although Gorbachev intended to reform the Soviet Union and Communist party, the political changes that he enacted proved so revolutionary that they eventually destroyed both the Soviet empire and communism. Ironically, the domino effect of revolution that American policymakers feared so much throughout the cold war occurred only in Eastern Europe. The democratic revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990 were largely the result of peaceful mass demonstrations that convinced the communists to allow free elections. Only Romania experienced a violent revolution, in which the communist dictator Ceausescu and other members of his government were executed. Elections brought democratic parties to power in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and reformist communist governments to power in Romania and Bulgaria. Gorbachev's policy of allowing each eastern European country, and eventually each of the 15 Soviet republics, to choose its own system, even if it meant the end of communism, was popularly known as the "my way" doctrine.
The only significant resistance to the democratic revolution was in the Soviet Union itself. On August 19, 1991, the day before Soviet President Gorbachev would have signed a treaty allowing the Soviet republics to become independent, hard-line communists attempted to overthrow him. For three days between August 19 and August 21, the conspirators held Gorbachev hostage at his Crimean home and attempted to besiege Russian President Yeltsin with his supporters inside the Russian parliament. Over 50,000 Russians rallied around the Russian parliament building, putting their bodies in front of the Soviet tanks and troops loyal to the communists. As increased numbers of Russian troops defected to Yeltsin, the coup leaders gave up and released Gorbachev, who returned to Moscow. The coup leaders were arrested and tried for treason.
The failed coup accelerated the destruction of communism and the Soviet empire. During the coup, Latvia and Ukraine declared their independence, and statues of Lenin were toppled in Estonia and Lithuania. On August 24, Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist party and recommended that its central committee be disbanded. On August 29, Yeltsin and Gorbachev appeared before the Russia parliament. Over Gorbachev's protests, Yeltsin dramatically issued a decree abolishing the Communist party across Russia. On September 2, the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies approved a plan to reduce the Kremlin's authority and allow a looser federation of the Soviet republics. On September 6, the Soviet Union recognized the independence of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. On October 18, Gorbachev and presidents of eight other Soviet republics agreed to join an economic union; the Ukraine joined on November 4. On December 4, 1991, Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus declared the Soviet Union dead but agreed to form a commonwealth. Communism and the Soviet empire had all but vanished.
How did the Bush White House respond to all this? Ironically, throughout the course of these revolutionary events of August and September 1991, President George Bush's response was either passive or actually seemed to favor retaining the communist and Soviet status quo and avoided any support of Yeltsin. In September, Bush flew to Kiev to stand beside Gorbachev and actually implored the Ukrainians not to break away from the Soviet Union. Yeltsin proved of sterner stuff; he shoveled communism's remnants into the gutter of history.
CONTAINMENT AND THE REAGAN MILITARY BUILDUP
During the Republican national convention in August 1992, speaker after speaker claimed that the Reagan and Bush military buildup had won the cold war. These claims were continued throughout the 1992 elections and have been echoed ever since. Did Reagan and Bush really win the cold war?
The founder of the containment policy, George Kennan, dismissed the Republican victory claims as "ridiculous" and went on to argue that "Nobody, no country, no party, no person, 'won' the cold war. It was a long and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions and strength of the other party."'8 Kennan, of course, had predicted in the late 1940s that the collapse of the Soviet empire and communism was inevitable, given the historic tendency of all empires eventually to collapse and the inability of communism to satisfy even the most basic needs of the people. Containment was a bipartisan policy that was started by a democratic president and continued by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
There is no evidence that the Reagan military buildup contributed to, let alone caused, the Soviet economy's collapse. Moscow did not significantly increase military spending to keep up with that of the Reagan administration. The Soviet economy would have collapsed regardless of American policy. Soviet Marshall Nikolai Ogarkov admitted in 1983 that the cold war had essentially ended with the West's victory. Ogarkov argued that "we will never be able to catch up . . . in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution."'9 In other words, communism failed.
The Reagan buildup may have actually propped up rather than undermined the Soviet empire.'o After Gorbachev took power in 1985, Kremlin hard-liners pointed to the Reagan buildup and argued that reforms were dangerous and should not be attempted. Gorbachev complains that Reagan's policies ironically prevented him from implementing his reforms sooner and more comprehensively. Reagan led the United States into an arms race against itself. By tripling America's national debt during the 1980s, the Reagan administration undermined American rather than Soviet power.
The Reagan and Bush policies reflected the flaws of the global containment strategy. As Kennan pointed out, the extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles. . . consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union. The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the breaking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s."
The Post-Cold-War Relationship
- Although the cold war is over, many problems remain, including the reduction of nuclear and conventional forces and political and economic development in Russia and the other former communist countries. The collapse of the Soviet empire and communism has allowed the United States and its allies an enormous peace dividend. Some of the savings have been invested in Russia and the other newly independent states to help them reconstruct their economies. Whereas the eastern European economies have managed to transform themselves from communism into managed market economies, Russia's economy continues to teeter on the brink of collapse. In 1998, President Yeltsin admitted that Russia could not meet payments on its immense debts to international financiers and Western governments. President Clinton helped engineer a $25 billion bailout of the Russian economy that combined government and IMF loans. But will the Russians invest those funds any less recklessly than previous infusions from the West?
Why has Russia failed to transform its economy? In contrast to the revolutionary impact of Gorbachev's political reforms, his economic reforms failed to revive the fossilized Soviet economy. He allowed for some limited privatization, less controls on foreign investment, and leasing of land to farmers. But all this was too little, too late. After Russia seceded from the Soviet Union, Yeltsin dismantled central planning, privatized many industries, and allowed entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. The result has been the worst excesses of capitalism, with ever worsening corruption, organized crime, unemployment, inflation, poverty for most, and vast riches for the elite.
More than any other reason, the legacy of communism explains Russia's failure to transform its economy. With communism's collapse, many former Soviet citizens are experiencing a deep ideological void. Throughout their lives, Soviets were socialized to believe in communism as a religion that contained eternal truths and Marx and Lenin as gods. Now those gods and that religion have been all but destroyed. A fierce nationalism has filled the void for many former Soviets. One of communism's worst legacies is the destruction of entrepreneurial instincts in people. The saying "The state pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work" was mostly true. Communism was synonymous with shoddy workmanship.
IB History Cold War Chronology
March 4, 1933 – April 12, 1945 = Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)
April 12, 1945 – 1953 = Truman
1953 - 1961 = Eisenhower
1961 – November 22 - 1963 = JFK
November 22, 1963 – 1969 = Lyndon B. Johnson
1969 – August 1975 = Nixon
August 9, 1974 –1977 = Gerald Ford
1977 – 1981 = Jimmy Carter
1981 – 1989 = Ronald Reagan
1989 – 1993 =George Bush
1945 = Yalta Conference makes post-war settlements
= World War II ends
= Potsdam Conference held
= United Nations opens
= Nuclear weapons invented
1946 = Soviets establish Soviet-style governments in occupied states of Eastern Europe
= Churchill delivers “Iron Curtain’ speech
= Nuremberg Trials held
1947 = Greek civil war (-‘49)
= Truman calls for aid to Greece and Turkey (Truman Doctrine)
= U.S. proposes Marshall Plan
= U.S., Britain, and France join German occupation zones
= India, Pakistan independent
1948 = Communist coup in Czechoslovakia
= Soviets begin Berlin blockade and airlift
= Yugoslavia leaves Soviet bloc
1949 = Berlin Blockade ended
= German Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic (West and East Germany established
= NATO created
= USSR explodes atomic bomb
= Communists win civil war in China, government of Chiang moved to Taiwan
= Council of Europe formed
1950 = North Korea invades South Korea: UN (U.S.-led) aids South Korea
= Soviets aid North Korea
= China enters war as North Korean ally
= Height of McCarthyism in the U.S. (-‘54)
1953 = Armistice ends Korean War
= Death of Stalin
= Uprising in East Berlin crushed by Soviet troops
1954 = Communist-led Vet Minh defeat French in Indochina
= Geneva Accords on Indochina SEATO created
= Republic of Egypt established
1955 = West Germany joins NATO
= Warsaw Pact created. Baghdad Pact (CENTO) created
1956 = Uprising in Poland
= Suez War in Middle East: Hungarian revolt crushed by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion
= Khrushchev becomes Premier in USSR, denounces Stalin before 20th Party Congress
1957 = Sputnik launched by USSR
= U.S. sends first aid to South Vietnam (-‘75)
1958 = Eisenhower Doctrine - U.S. will act to prevent growth of pro-Soviet power in. the Middle East
= Explorer launched by U.S.
= European Atomic Energy Community (EU RATOM) formed
1959 = Castro comes to power in Cuba
1960 = U-2 incident
= Beginning of Sino-Soviet split
1961 = USSR orbits first human
= Bay of Pigs invasion fails to oust Castro
= Berlin Wall erected
= U.S. increases aid to South Vietnam
1962 = Cuban Missile Crisis
1963 = Washington-Moscow Hot Line established
= Test Ban Treaty signed
= Kennedy travels to Berlin; USSR and China break relations
1964 = Khrushchev ousted
= Leonid Brezhnev becomes Soviet leader
= Gulf of Tonkin Incident begins escalation of Vietnam War
1965 = U.S. begins ground troop commitment in. Vietnam
= Anti Vietnam War protests begin
1966 = Outer space made neutral by UN treaty
= EEC, ECSC, and EURATOM joined in European Community (EC)
1967 = North Korea seizes U.S. ship, “Pueblo”
= Tet Offensive in Vietnam, beginning of U.S. withdrawal
= Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion crushes reforms in Czechoslovakia: “Brezhnev Doctrine”: USSR will use force to stop the fall of a socialist government
1969 = Brandt opens relations between West and East Germany
= U.S. lands on moon
= SALT conferences begin
1972 = Détente: Nixon visits China and re-opens relations, visits USSR
1973 = Cease-fire agreement in Vietnam
= Britain admitted to EEC
1975 = Vietnam War ends
= Ford: Helsinki Accords recognize spheres of influence but permit some anti-Communist representation
= Laos and Cambodia taken over by communist governments
1976 = Death of Mao
1977 = Carter administration refuses to back anti-Communist dictators violating human rights
= Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty signed
1979 = Carter Doctrine: U.S. will act to protect U.S. interests and allies in Persian Gulf
= SALT I signed but not ratified
= USSR invades Afghanistan
= U.S. cancels grain and technology sales to Soviet Union
= Camp David Accords signed by Egypt, Israel, and U.S.
= Revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Marxist Sandanistas win power in Nicaragua
= Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia
= U.S. hostages seized in Iran (-‘81)
1980 = Solidarity labor union founded in Poland by Lech Walesa
= U.S. boycotts Moscow Olympics
1981 = Martial law imposed in Poland
= U.S. orders sanctions against Polish hard-line communist government in retaliation for anti-Solidarity actions
= U.S. lifts embargo on oil sales to USSR after Walesa released from jail
1982 = Death of Brezhnev in USSR, succeeded by Yuri Andropov
= Marshal law ended in Poland, Solidarity union dissolved
1983 = U.S. troops sent to Lebanon, 241 die in terrorist bomb attack
= U.S. forces invade Grenada overthrowing Marxist regime
1984 = USSR boycotts Los Angeles Olympics
= Death of Andropov in USSR, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko
= U.S. troops leave Lebanon
= Reagan visits China
1985 = Death of Chernenko in USSR, Gorbachev becomes-Soviet Premier
= Gorbachev begins glasnost and perestroika reforms
= Poland, Hungary follow Gorbachev's lead, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Bulgaria hold hard line
= Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting
1986 = U.S.-U.S.S.R. reach tentative accord on medium-range missiles
1987 = Reagan and Gorbachev sign arms reduction agreement
1988 = Soviet Communist Party conference declares sharing of power in USSR legalizing other political parties; Gorbachev abrogates Brezhnev Doctrine: USSR will no longer use force to stop fall of socialist nation
1989 = Soviet troops begin withdrawal from Hungary
= Solidarity recognized as legal in Poland and wins elections
= Hungary and Czechoslovakia open borders
= East Germany removes travel restrictions
= Berlin wall comes down
= Revolutions topple Communist regimes in Eastern Europe
1990 = Germany reunifies
= Lech Walesa elected President of Poland
= USSR support defense of Kuwait by UN
1991 = Warsaw Pact disbanded
= Yugoslavian federation disintegrates with fighting in Croatia and Slovenia
= Boris Yeltsin elected President of Russian Soviet Social Republic
= Coup by Communist Party hard-liners fails
= Soviet Union dissolves as nationalist republics declare independence and Communist Party disintegrates
= Gorbachev resigns as head of Communist Party
= Yeltsin becomes President of Russia
1994 = Poland and Hungary apply for membership in European Union
= Last Russian and Western Allied troops leave Berlin
April 12, 1945 – 1953 = Truman
1953 - 1961 = Eisenhower
1961 – November 22 - 1963 = JFK
November 22, 1963 – 1969 = Lyndon B. Johnson
1969 – August 1975 = Nixon
August 9, 1974 –1977 = Gerald Ford
1977 – 1981 = Jimmy Carter
1981 – 1989 = Ronald Reagan
1989 – 1993 =George Bush
1945 = Yalta Conference makes post-war settlements
= World War II ends
= Potsdam Conference held
= United Nations opens
= Nuclear weapons invented
1946 = Soviets establish Soviet-style governments in occupied states of Eastern Europe
= Churchill delivers “Iron Curtain’ speech
= Nuremberg Trials held
1947 = Greek civil war (-‘49)
= Truman calls for aid to Greece and Turkey (Truman Doctrine)
= U.S. proposes Marshall Plan
= U.S., Britain, and France join German occupation zones
= India, Pakistan independent
1948 = Communist coup in Czechoslovakia
= Soviets begin Berlin blockade and airlift
= Yugoslavia leaves Soviet bloc
1949 = Berlin Blockade ended
= German Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic (West and East Germany established
= NATO created
= USSR explodes atomic bomb
= Communists win civil war in China, government of Chiang moved to Taiwan
= Council of Europe formed
1950 = North Korea invades South Korea: UN (U.S.-led) aids South Korea
= Soviets aid North Korea
= China enters war as North Korean ally
= Height of McCarthyism in the U.S. (-‘54)
1953 = Armistice ends Korean War
= Death of Stalin
= Uprising in East Berlin crushed by Soviet troops
1954 = Communist-led Vet Minh defeat French in Indochina
= Geneva Accords on Indochina SEATO created
= Republic of Egypt established
1955 = West Germany joins NATO
= Warsaw Pact created. Baghdad Pact (CENTO) created
1956 = Uprising in Poland
= Suez War in Middle East: Hungarian revolt crushed by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion
= Khrushchev becomes Premier in USSR, denounces Stalin before 20th Party Congress
1957 = Sputnik launched by USSR
= U.S. sends first aid to South Vietnam (-‘75)
1958 = Eisenhower Doctrine - U.S. will act to prevent growth of pro-Soviet power in. the Middle East
= Explorer launched by U.S.
= European Atomic Energy Community (EU RATOM) formed
1959 = Castro comes to power in Cuba
1960 = U-2 incident
= Beginning of Sino-Soviet split
1961 = USSR orbits first human
= Bay of Pigs invasion fails to oust Castro
= Berlin Wall erected
= U.S. increases aid to South Vietnam
1962 = Cuban Missile Crisis
1963 = Washington-Moscow Hot Line established
= Test Ban Treaty signed
= Kennedy travels to Berlin; USSR and China break relations
1964 = Khrushchev ousted
= Leonid Brezhnev becomes Soviet leader
= Gulf of Tonkin Incident begins escalation of Vietnam War
1965 = U.S. begins ground troop commitment in. Vietnam
= Anti Vietnam War protests begin
1966 = Outer space made neutral by UN treaty
= EEC, ECSC, and EURATOM joined in European Community (EC)
1967 = North Korea seizes U.S. ship, “Pueblo”
= Tet Offensive in Vietnam, beginning of U.S. withdrawal
= Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion crushes reforms in Czechoslovakia: “Brezhnev Doctrine”: USSR will use force to stop the fall of a socialist government
1969 = Brandt opens relations between West and East Germany
= U.S. lands on moon
= SALT conferences begin
1972 = Détente: Nixon visits China and re-opens relations, visits USSR
1973 = Cease-fire agreement in Vietnam
= Britain admitted to EEC
1975 = Vietnam War ends
= Ford: Helsinki Accords recognize spheres of influence but permit some anti-Communist representation
= Laos and Cambodia taken over by communist governments
1976 = Death of Mao
1977 = Carter administration refuses to back anti-Communist dictators violating human rights
= Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty signed
1979 = Carter Doctrine: U.S. will act to protect U.S. interests and allies in Persian Gulf
= SALT I signed but not ratified
= USSR invades Afghanistan
= U.S. cancels grain and technology sales to Soviet Union
= Camp David Accords signed by Egypt, Israel, and U.S.
= Revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Marxist Sandanistas win power in Nicaragua
= Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia
= U.S. hostages seized in Iran (-‘81)
1980 = Solidarity labor union founded in Poland by Lech Walesa
= U.S. boycotts Moscow Olympics
1981 = Martial law imposed in Poland
= U.S. orders sanctions against Polish hard-line communist government in retaliation for anti-Solidarity actions
= U.S. lifts embargo on oil sales to USSR after Walesa released from jail
1982 = Death of Brezhnev in USSR, succeeded by Yuri Andropov
= Marshal law ended in Poland, Solidarity union dissolved
1983 = U.S. troops sent to Lebanon, 241 die in terrorist bomb attack
= U.S. forces invade Grenada overthrowing Marxist regime
1984 = USSR boycotts Los Angeles Olympics
= Death of Andropov in USSR, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko
= U.S. troops leave Lebanon
= Reagan visits China
1985 = Death of Chernenko in USSR, Gorbachev becomes-Soviet Premier
= Gorbachev begins glasnost and perestroika reforms
= Poland, Hungary follow Gorbachev's lead, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Bulgaria hold hard line
= Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting
1986 = U.S.-U.S.S.R. reach tentative accord on medium-range missiles
1987 = Reagan and Gorbachev sign arms reduction agreement
1988 = Soviet Communist Party conference declares sharing of power in USSR legalizing other political parties; Gorbachev abrogates Brezhnev Doctrine: USSR will no longer use force to stop fall of socialist nation
1989 = Soviet troops begin withdrawal from Hungary
= Solidarity recognized as legal in Poland and wins elections
= Hungary and Czechoslovakia open borders
= East Germany removes travel restrictions
= Berlin wall comes down
= Revolutions topple Communist regimes in Eastern Europe
1990 = Germany reunifies
= Lech Walesa elected President of Poland
= USSR support defense of Kuwait by UN
1991 = Warsaw Pact disbanded
= Yugoslavian federation disintegrates with fighting in Croatia and Slovenia
= Boris Yeltsin elected President of Russian Soviet Social Republic
= Coup by Communist Party hard-liners fails
= Soviet Union dissolves as nationalist republics declare independence and Communist Party disintegrates
= Gorbachev resigns as head of Communist Party
= Yeltsin becomes President of Russia
1994 = Poland and Hungary apply for membership in European Union
= Last Russian and Western Allied troops leave Berlin
IB History: Cold War reading
Here are some notes/readings/etc. that I wish I found earlier.
The Tragedy of Cold War History by John Lewis Gaddis
Part I
It has been well over three decades, now, since William Appleman Williams first called for "a searching review of the way America has defined its own problems and objectives, and its relationship with the rest of the world." In one of the most influential books ever written about the history of United States foreign relations, Williams rejected the celebratory tone that had characterized the work of an earlier generation of American diplomatic historians, insisting that the record of this nation's foreign policy had been a "tragedy" because of the gap we had allowed to develop between our aspirations and accomplishments in world affairs. We had preached self-determination but objected when others sought to practice it; we had proclaimed the virtues of economic freedom even as we sought to impose economic control. The result, Williams concluded, was that "America's humanitarian urge to assist other people is undercut--even subverted-by the way it goes about helping them."
The classical definition of "tragedy" is greatness brought low through some fundamental flaw in one's own character. When one considers the difficulties the United States created for itself in the world through its own hubris and arrogance during the 1960's and early 1970's, it is hardly surprising that Williams's tragic view of American diplomatic history seemed, to a great many people at the time, to make sense. To a good many people even today, it still does.
Therein, however, lies a danger. Any view held by a considerable number of people risks becoming an orthodoxy, and the members of our profession are no more exempt than others from that tendency. I only met Bill Williams once, but I gather that he was, if anything, a profoundly unorthodox character. I suspect that the last thing he would have wanted would be to see his own ideas--or anybody else's, for that matter-become conventional wisdom. As he himself put it in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, "history is a way of learning, of getting closer to the truth. It is only by abandoning the clichés that we can even define the tragedy."
What I would like to do here is to question some clichés and then try to redefine a tragedy. For if we mean what we say when we enjoin one another-in a way that has become, in itself, almost an orthodoxy-to transform diplomatic history into a truly international history, then surely Williams's tragic view of the American experience in world affairs is a good place to start. How well does it hold up when placed within an international context? How does an interpretation that has influenced the writing of so much Cold War history look today, now that the Cold War is over? And how might we apply Williams's habit of asking creatively irritating questions as we seek to understand the post-Cold War world?
The end of the Cold War has obliged most of us, after all, to jettison quite a number of clichés, orthodoxies, and long-cherished pearls of conventional wisdom: in this sense, we are all well on the way to becoming post-Cold War revisionists. It is all the more important, then, that we take another look into what Williams called the "mirror" of history, "in which, if we are honest enough, we can see ourselves as we are as well as the way we would like to be."
Part II
Let us begin with an issue our students are already beginning to raise with us, which is what the Cold War was all about in the first place. Given what we now know about the internal fragility of the Soviet Union; given what has long been clear about the economic absurdity of Marxism- Leninism; given the persuasive evidence that an international Communist "monolith" never really existed; given all of these things, exactly what was the threat to American interests anyway? Whatever could have justified the massive expenditures on armaments, the violations of human rights abroad and civil liberties at home, the neglect of domestic priorities, the threats to blow up the world-whatever could have excused all the deplorable things the United States did during the Cold War if no genuine threat ever existed? Does not this record only confirm what Williams suspected: that the American system has a built-in propensity to fight cold wars, and that if the Soviet Union had not provided the necessary adversary, someone else would have?
Few historians would deny, today, that the United States did expect to dominate the international scene after World War II, and that it did so well before the Soviet Union emerged as a clear and present antagonist. Woodrow Wilson years earlier had provided the rationale, with his call for a collective security organization to keep the peace, and for self-determination and open markets as a way of simultaneously removing the causes of war. It took the fall of France and the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor to bring Wilson's ideas into the policy arena, to be sure, but the country's leadership, if not yet the country as a whole, was thoroughly committed to them long before World War II ended.
This vision of the future assumed a strong military role for the United States: Americans would hardly have been prepared, even under the best of circumstances, to turn the entire task of peacekeeping over to the United Nations, however enthusiastically they endorsed that organization. And there is no question but that careful calculations of material advantage lay behind all of this. After all, no one had ever combined the fact of self-interest with the appearance of disinterest more skillfully than Woodrow Wilson, and that aspect of his legacy was still very much around as influential Americans, inside and outside the government, set out to design the postwar world.
But let us be fair to those designers: they also assumed that the Great Powers would act in concert rather than in competition with one another. That presupposition had been the basis for Franklin D. Roosevelt's early and somewhat crude concept of the "four policemen," and it carried over into the more sophisticated planning for the United Nations and the organization of the postwar international economy that went on during the last two years of World War II. It is certainly true that the United States expected to lead the new world order; it alone was in a position to set the rules and to provide the resources without which that system could hardly function. But the system was to have been based, we need to remember, upon the principle of what we would today call common security. It was to have operated, at least insofar as the Great Powers were concerned, within a framework of consent, not coercion; and most Americans expected, perhaps naively, that this relatively open and relaxed form of hegemony could be made to coincide with their own security interests.
Let us recall, as well, that the United States plan for the postwar world was never fully put into effect. Part of the reason was its failure to take into account the extent of wartime devastation in Europe, and the consequent improbability that a return to open markets alone could solve that problem. But the main difficulty lay more in the realm of geopolitics than economics: it was that Washington's conception of common security ran up against another one, emanating from Moscow, that was of a profoundly different character.
There was nothing relaxed, or open, or "consensual" about Josef Stalin's vision of an acceptable international order; and the more we reconsider Soviet history now that the Soviet Union itself has become history, the harder it becomes to separate any aspect of it from the baleful and lingering influence of this remarkable but sinister figure. One need hardly accept a "great man" theory of history to recognize that in the most authoritarian government the world has ever seen, the authoritarian who ran it did make a difference.
Stalin was, above all else, a Great Russian nationalist, a characteristic very much amplified by his non-Russian origins. His ambitions followed those of the old princes of Muscovy, with their determination to "gather in" and to dominate the lands that surrounded them. That Stalin cloaked this goal within an ideology of proletarian internationalism ought not to conceal its real origins and character: Stalin's most influential role models, as his most perceptive biographer, Robert Tucker, has now made clear, were not Lenin, or even Marx, but Peter the Great and ultimately Ivan the Terrible. His rule replicated the pattern of earlier tsarist autocracies identified by the great pre-revolutionary Russian historian, V. O. Kliuchevskii: "Exhausting the resources of the country, they only bolstered the power of the state without elevating the self-confidence of the people. . . . The state swelled up; the people grew lean."
Now, if the Soviet Union had occupied, let us say, the position of Uruguay in the post-World War II international system, this kind of autocracy certainly would have oppressed those who had to live under it, but it would hardly have caused a Cold War. If the Soviet Union had been the superpower that it actually was, but with a system of checks and balances that could have constrained Stalin's authoritarian tendencies, a Cold War might have happened, but it would probably not have been as dangerous or as protracted a conflict. If the Soviet Union had been a superpower and an authoritarian state, but if someone other than Stalin had been running it-a Bukharin, for example, or perhaps even a Trotsky-then its government could have been in the hands of a Kremlin leader who, although by no means a democrat, would at least have known the outside world, and might have found it easier than Stalin did to deal with on a basis of wary cooperation instead of absolute distrust.
But none of these counterfactuals became fact. Stalin was Stalin, and the people of the Soviet Union, together with the rest of the world, were stuck with him at the end of World War II. That was a tragedy, if not in a classical sense, then in an all too modern one. Let me try to illustrate why with a series of vignettes based on some of the new information we have about the great autocrat's life:
Stalin, we are told, once kept a parrot in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The Soviet leader had the habit of pacing up and down in his rooms for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding about God knows what, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot, having observed this many times, tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. Stalin immediately responded by reaching into the cage and crushing the parrot's head with his pipe, instantly killing it. Stalin once was on vacation in the Crimea, and was kept awake during the night by a barking dog. "Shoot it," he told his guards. "But Josef Vissarionovich," they reported the next morning, "the dog is a seeing-eye dog, and it belongs to a blind peasant." "Shoot the dog," Stalin commanded, "and send the peasant to the Gulag. "
Stalin once had a wife-actually his second wife-who had an independent mind, and who was becoming concerned about the repressiveness of his policies. After she argued with him about this one night, either he shot and killed her, or she shot and killed herself.
Stalin once had a rival, whose name was Trotsky. Stalin not only outmaneuvered him, exiled him, and eventually had him killed; he also killed everyone he could who had ever been associated with Trotsky or any other potential rival, as well as hundreds of thousands of other people who had never had anything at all to do with Trotsky or with anyone else who could conceivably have challenged Stalin's rule. Some three million Soviet citizens died, it is estimated, as a result of these purges.
Stalin once had an idea: that in order to finance the industrialization that Marxist theory said had to take place before there could be a Marxist state, the Soviet government had to ensure a reliable supply of grain for export by forcibly collectivizing agriculture. The best estimate is that over fourteen million Soviet citizens died from the famine, exiles, and executions that resulted.
Stalin once presided over the fighting of a great war, in which at least another twenty-six million Soviet citizens were killed.26 When it was over, he congratulated himself not only on a great victory, but on the impressive territorial gains victory had brought. Wars, he told his foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, were a progressive force in history: "The First World War ripped one country out of the grips of capitalist slavery. The Second created a socialist system. The Third will finish off imperialism forever."
My purpose, in reciting this litany, is to make the point that the United States and its allies, at the end of World War II, were not dealing with a normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill, statesmanlike head of government. They confronted instead a psychologically disturbed but fully functional and highly intelligent dictator28 who had projected his own personality not only onto those around him but onto an entire nation and had thereby, with catastrophic results, remade it in his image. And he had completed that task, I might add, long before the Cold War policies of the United States could possibly have given him an excuse to do so. The twentieth century has been full of tragedies, but what Stalin did to the Soviet Union and, let us not forget, to its neighbors as well, must surely rank as among the greatest of them.
Part III
One might justifiably ask at this point, though: so what? Were not Stalin's sins fully apparent decades ago; and indeed did they not figure prominently in the earliest "orthodox" accounts of Cold War origins? Is not raising this issue now a matter of beating a horse that has not only long been dead, but is mummified, possibly even petrified? There are several reasons why I think this is not the case, why the nature of Stalinism is an issue to which American diplomatic historians will need to return.
First, archives are important, even if all they do is to confirm old arguments. The new Soviet sources, however, may well do more than that: the evidence we are getting suggests strongly that conditions inside the U.S.S.R., not just under Stalin but also under Lenin and several of Stalin's successors, were worse than most outside experts on that country had ever suspected. Whether one is talking about the death toll from collectivization, or from the purges, or from the war; whether one considers the brutality with which the survivors were treated; whether one evaluates the economic and ecological damage inflicted on the territories in which they lived; whether one looks at what the Soviet system meant for other countries that got sucked into the Soviet sphere of influence-whatever dimensions of Soviet history one looks at, what is emerging from the archives are horror stories more horrifying than most of the images put forward, without the benefit of archives, by the Soviet Union's most strident critics while the Cold War was still going on. That seems to me, in itself, to be significant.
But there is a second reason why I think a reconsideration of Stalinism is in order, and it has to do with the way American diplomatic historians have for too long thought about the Cold War. Reflecting one of the most curious intellectual habits to grow out of that conflict, we have tended to divide the world, rather like ancient Gaul, into three parts. We have preoccupied ourselves primarily, as one might have expected, with the "first" world, where most of the archives have long been open. We have frequently challenged each other, quite correctly in my view, to extend our horizons to include the "third" world, and to give full attention to the often intrusive impact the United States has had on the regions that made it up. It is very odd, though, that with all of our emphasis on "border crossings" and on the need for a genuinely international perspective, American diplomatic historians have made so little effort to understand what was really happening in-and what the impact of American policies was on-the "second" world.
This omission resulted in part, of course, from inaccessibility. It was difficult to find out much because governments in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and other Marxist states kept so much so carefully hidden. Part of the problem also had to do, I suspect, with the lingering effects of McCarthyism on our profession. The ideological excesses of the late 1940's and the early 1950's so traumatized American academics that for decades afterward we avoided looking seriously at the possibility that communism might indeed have influenced the behavior of communist states. Because some charges of Soviet espionage were exaggerated, we assumed too easily that all of them had been, that the spies were simply figments of right-wing imaginations. Because we regarded gestures like Congressional "captive nations" resolutions as a form of pandering to ethnic constituencies, we tended to lose sight of the fact that there really were "captive nations." And perhaps we also worried that if we talked too explicitly about these kinds of things, we would wind up sounding too much like John Foster Dulles, or, for a more recent generation, Ronald Reagan.
There was another problem as well, though, that got in the way of an accurate assessment of what was happening in the "second" world. It had to do with an unfortunate tendency, imported from international relations theory, to lock ourselves into a view of the world that accorded equal legitimacy, and therefore more or less equal respectability, to each of the major states within it, while ignoring the circumstances that had brought them into existence and the means by which they remained in power. Because all nations seek power and influence, or so "realist" theory tells US, we fell into the habit of assuming that they did so for equally valid reasons; that in turn led to a kind of "moral equivalency" doctrine in which the behavior of autocracies was thought to be little different from that of democracies.
This was not, to be sure, a universal tendency. Many members of our profession have long argued that certain "third world" autocracies held power illegitimately, and have vigorously condemned American foreign policy for putting up with them. But not everyone who took this view was willing to grant equal attention to what those few citizens of the "second" world who were free to speak had been telling us all along during the Cold War, which was that communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union really was, and had always been, at least as illegitimate and repressive a system. Now that they are free to speak-and to act-the people of the former Soviet Union appear to have associated themselves more closely with President Reagan's famous indictment of that state as an "evil empire" than with our own more balanced academic assessments. The archives, as noted earlier, are providing documentary evidence for such an interpretation. And yet, these developments have not yet visibly altered our field's actual preoccupation with the "first" world, our periodic exhortations to give greater emphasis to the "third" world, and our corresponding neglect of the "second" world, which badly needs the Historiographical equivalent of an affirmative action policy.
A truly international approach to diplomatic history, I should think, would be one fully prepared to look into the "mirror" that Williams wrote about to see whether we have given adequate attention to a tragedy that has had the most profound consequences-extending over more than seven decades-for the largest nation on the face of the earth, and for most of the other nations that surrounded it.
Part IV
What would that mean, though, for the writing of American diplomatic history? The most persistent issue historians of the Cold War's origins have had to wrestle with is a variation on what we would today call the "Rodney King" question: "Couldn't we all have gotten along if we had really tried?" We answered that question long ago with respect to another great twentieth-century dictator, Adolf Hitler: few of us have any difficulty whatever with the proposition that Nazi Germany really did represent absolute evil, and that there was never any possibility that, if only we had tried, we could have "gotten along" with so odious a regime.
Nevertheless, many American diplomatic historians have made, and still make, the argument that the United States should have undertaken a greater effort than it did at the beginning of the Cold War to "get along" with the Soviet Union. We have tended to reject the notion, popular early in the late 1940's and early 1950's, that Stalin was another Hitler, that what we were witnessing in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe was not communism at all, but rather "Red Fascism." It is quite true, of course, that the Soviet autocrat did differ from his German counter part in several important ways, not the least of which was that Stalin was more cautious than Hitler and would back down if confronted with the fact or at least the plausible prospect of resistance. Nor did Stalin ever seek the systematic extermination of an entire people: the Holocaust was, and remains, unique.
But as both Robert Tucker and Alan Bullock have recently made clear, the similarities between Stalin and Hitler far outweigh the differences. These were both remarkably single-minded men, driven to dominate all those around them. They combined narcissism with paranoia in a way that equipped them superbly for the task of obtaining, and holding onto, power. They persisted even in the most unpromising of circumstances; and although capable of tactical retreats, they were not to be swayed from their ultimate objectives. They were extraordinarily crafty, prepared to take miles when inches were given them. And, most important, they both had visions of security for themselves that meant complete insecurity for everyone else: we have long known that Hitler killed millions in pursuit of his vision, but we now know that Stalin killed many more. It is really quite difficult, after reading careful studies like those of Tucker, Bullock, and also the Russian historian Dimitri Volkogonov, to see how there could have been any long-term basis for coexistence-for "getting along"-with either of these fundamentally evil dictators. One was dealing here with states that had been reshaped to reflect individuals; but these individuals, in turn, were incapable of functioning within the framework of mutual cooperation, indeed mutual coexistence, that any political system has to have if it is to ensure the survival of all of the parts that make it up.
The tragedy of Cold War History, then, is that although fascism was defeated in World War II, authoritarianism-as it had been nurtured and sustained by Marxism-Leninism-was not. That form of government was at the apex of its influence during the last half of the 1940s, even as the Soviet Union itself lay physically devastated: material conditions alone do not explain everything that happens in the world. As a result, Stalin was able to create or inspire imitators whose influence extended well past his own demise in 1953.
Stalin's clones appeared first in Eastern Europe, where he installed regimes that were so scrupulous in following his example that they conducted their own set of purge trials during the late 1940's, a decade after the "Leader of Progressive Mankind" had shown the way. His influence was still present in that part of the world four decades later, as the careers of Erich Honecker, Nicolai Ceausescu, and their counterparts abundantly illustrate. Stalin certainly provided a model for the third great autocrat of the twentieth century, Mao Zedong, who it now appears had no interest in any form of cooperation with the United States when he took power in China in 1949. Despite his differences with Stalin's successors, Mao was still emulating Stalin himself when he launched the ill-conceived "Great Leap Forward" in 1957, a program of crash industrialization that is now believed to have cost the lives of between twenty and forty-six million Chinese, a civilian death toll that may be higher than what Stalin and Hitler together managed to achieve.46 And then there were all the little Stalin's and Mao's who appeared elsewhere in the world during the Cold War: Kim II-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Haile Mengistu, Babrak Karmal, and many others, each of whom, like their teachers, promised liberation for their people but delivered repression.
Now, tyrants-even well-intentioned tyrants-are nothing new in history. Certainly the United States associated itself with its own share of repressive dictators throughout the Cold War, and had been doing so long before that conflict began. But there was something special about the Marxist-Leninist authoritarians, and it is going to be important for post-Cold War historians to understand what it was. They were all, like Hitler, murderous idealists, driven to apply all of the energies they and the countries they ruled could command in an effort to implement a set of concepts that were ill conceived, half-baked, and ultimately unworkable. They believed that, by sheer force of will, all obstacles could be overcome, and they were willing to pay whatever price was necessary in terms of lives to overcome them. There was little sense among them of the need to balance ends and means; rather, in such systems, as George Orwell noted long ago, ends justified means, which meant that means corrupted ends. These were not hard-nosed realists but rather brutal romantics; that does not justify us, though, in romanticizing any of them.\
Part V
But just what was it about the twentieth century that allowed such romantics to gain such power during its first eight decades, and then so abruptly, at the end of the ninth, to lose it? After all, the great authoritarians were not alien visitors: they obviously sprang from circumstances not of their own making, and they rose to preeminence by taking advantage-with astonishing skill and persistence-of the circumstances that surrounded them. History, for a long time, was on their side; and then it ceased to be. We need to understand why.
One way we might find out would be to follow another piece of advice from William Appleman Williams, which is that we rediscover Karl Marx. It was Marx, more than anyone else, who alerted us to the fact that there are long-term, "sub-structural" forces in history, and that they do shape modes of economic production, forms of political organization, and even social consciousness. To use a metaphor from much more recent discoveries in the geological sciences, Marx exposed the underlying "tectonic" processes that drive history forward, in much the same way that comparable processes push the continents around on the face of the earth. These forces by no means determine the actions of individuals, but they do establish the environment within which they function. "Men make their own history," Marx emphasized in his famous 1852 essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past."
We have neglected Marx's approach to history, I believe, for several reasons. First, we too easily confused Marxism with Marxism-Leninism, which was as thorough a perversion of Marx's own thinking as one can imagine. Second, Marx's incompetence as an economist, which was considerable, obscured his strengths as a historian. Third, Marx himself weakened his historical analysis, though, by falling victim to what we now recognize as the Fukuyama fallacy: this is the curious tendency of those who think that they have identified the ultimate "engine" of history to assume that history will stop with them. Marx insisted that the progression from feudalism through capitalism to socialism and communism was irreversible, but that it would then for some reason end at that point.
What really appears to have happened is that one set of tectonic forces-industrialization, the emergence of class-consciousness, and the alienation that flowed from it-undermined liberal democratic bourgeois market capitalism late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, thus paving the way for fascism, communism, and the authoritarianism that accompanied them. But during the second half of the twentieth century these tectonic forces evolved into something else-post-industrialization, the emergence of communications consciousness, and the alienation that flowed from it-which then undermined the foundations of authoritarianism and brought us around to our next historically determined phase, which turned out to be liberal, democratic, bourgeois market capitalism all over again. Marx, it seems, had mixed up linear with cyclical processes in history, and that was a substantial error indeed. But it does not invalidate his larger insight into the existence of tectonic forces and the role they play in human affairs. That insight might well serve as a starting point for a reconsideration, not just of the Cold War, but of the twentieth century as a whole.
The great authoritarians of this century arose, from this perspective, because they turned historical tectonics to their own advantage: they were able to align their own actions with deep sub-structural forces, and thus convey an appearance of inevitability-of having history on their side-in most of what they did. Nothing more quickly demoralizes one's opposition, after all, than the impression that history itself has turned against it. With the passage of time, though, the historical tectonics shifted, the authoritarians' successors were unable to adapt, and they themselves became demoralized, with the result that their regimes collapsed very much as the dinosaurs did once the environment within which they had flourished no longer existed. One might even conclude from this that the Cold War's outcome was predetermined all along, and that the real tragedy of Cold War history was all the wasted effort the opponents of authoritarianism put into trying to bring about what was going to happen anyway.
It is most unlikely, though, that Marx would have taken this position, because despite all of his emphasis on underlying historical forces, he was no historical determinist. The authoritarians arose, he might well have argued, because a few key individuals made their own history by exploiting the circumstances that confronted them, circumstances that, at the time, presented them with immense possibilities. It was the intersection of action with environment that produced results, not action alone or environment alone. But once one admits that possibility, one also has to allow that the resistance to authoritarianism may have made a difference. It would make no sense to claim that dictators can exploit tectonic forces, but that their opponents can never do so. So let us consider the resistance to authoritarianism, and that gets us back to the actions the United States-and its allies-have taken in the affairs of this century.
If, as seems likely, the twentieth century is remembered as one whose history was very largely shaped by the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes, then historians will have no choice but to debate the role the United States played in resisting them. They may conclude that that role was an active one: that the Americans themselves harnessed tectonic forces even more successfully than the authoritarians did, and that after a protracted struggle the Wilsonian vision prevailed over those of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and their respective imitators for that reason. Or historians may see the American contribution as a more passive one: that it was one of holding the line, of providing evidence that authoritarianism need not be the only path to the future, until such time as the underlying tectonic forces shifted, thus undermining authoritarianism's foundations and bringing about the events we have recently witnessed. Or historians may take the position that the truth lay somewhere in between.
But whatever the direction these lines of interpretation eventually take, the role of the United States in resisting authoritarianism will be at the center of them. It would seem most appropriate, therefore, for historians of American foreign relations to be at the center of that debate. I see little evidence that that is happening, though, and I wonder if this is not because we have allowed Williams's "tragic" view of American diplomacy to obscure our vision. We have turned a set of criticisms that might have been appropriate for particular policies at a particular time and place into something approaching a universal frame of reference. We have transformed what was, in its day, a profoundly unorthodox criticism of conventional wisdom into an orthodoxy that has now become conventional wisdom. Like most orthodoxies, it does not wear particularly well; it distorts our understanding of our place in the world, and also of ourselves.
How often do we ask the question: "tragedy" as compared to what? Gaps exist, after all, between the aspirations and the accomplishments of all states, just as they do in the lives of all individuals; if they alone are to be our criteria for defining "tragedy," then that is a characteristic inseparable from human existence, which rather weakens its analytical usefulness. If one defines "tragedy" according to the extent of the gap between aspirations and accomplishments, it becomes a more fruitful concept. But if one then compares gaps in terms of their extent, setting the American "tragedy" against those of other Great Powers in the twentieth century, ours appears more to fade out than to stand out. Perhaps that is why the United States is still the country of choice for those who seek to leave their own countries in the hope of finding better lives. The truly oppressed normally flee away from their oppressor, not toward it. If we are to take the voices of the oppressed seriously in doing history, we will need to listen to everything they are telling us, not just those parts of it that fit our preconceptions.
That raises an additional reason, though, for rediscovering Karl Marx. One of his most powerful insights was that even the most successful and beneficial institutions carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. We have seen the authoritarians destroy themselves-with an arguable amount of help from us and from our friends-in a way that might not have surprised Marx and would surely have gratified him, given the extent to which his own philosophy had as its objective the liberation, not the enslavement, of the individual. But the passage of time respects no state and no system, and from a Marxian perspective it is not too difficult to see where the internal contradictions in our own system-the "fault lines" along which tectonic forces intersect, if you will-may lie.
Go back to Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points speech anticipates, better than any other document I know, what is likely to be the central dilemma of the post-Cold War world. For is not the logic of open markets really economic integration, and is not the logic of self-determination really political fragmentation? And is this not a contradiction of such depth and such significance that Marx himself would have found it memorable? Can we really expect to abandon control of our economic lives-as market theory suggests we must-and at the same time take control of our political lives-as democratic theory suggests we should? Did Marx not teach us that economics and politics cannot be separated when it comes to human lives, however easily we may separate these categories in our minds? The fault line separating the forces of integration and fragmentation, not just in our own society but through much of the rest of the world as well, may turn out to be at least as long, as deep, and as dangerous as the one between democratic and authoritarian government that preoccupied us through so much of the twentieth century. These considerations too, it seems to me, ought to fall within the scope of a truly international approach to American diplomatic history.
Americans are no more likely to be exempted from tragic processes in history than anyone else is; but American diplomatic historians have treated these processes in a shallow, shortsighted, and curiously antiseptic way. We need to regain a clearer sense of what real tragedy, in this less than perfect world, is all about. That means placing our concept of tragedy within an international context. It means comparing the American "tragedy" with the others that surrounded it. It means using history as a genuine way of learning, not simply as a convenient platform from which we hold forth, either in self-condemnation or self-congratulation. It means, in the most fundamental sense, meeting our obligations as historians, which involve being honest not only about ourselves but about the environment in which we have had to live. And it means according equal respect, as I fear we have not yet done, to all of the survivors, and to all of the dead.
The Tragedy of Cold War History by John Lewis Gaddis
Part I
It has been well over three decades, now, since William Appleman Williams first called for "a searching review of the way America has defined its own problems and objectives, and its relationship with the rest of the world." In one of the most influential books ever written about the history of United States foreign relations, Williams rejected the celebratory tone that had characterized the work of an earlier generation of American diplomatic historians, insisting that the record of this nation's foreign policy had been a "tragedy" because of the gap we had allowed to develop between our aspirations and accomplishments in world affairs. We had preached self-determination but objected when others sought to practice it; we had proclaimed the virtues of economic freedom even as we sought to impose economic control. The result, Williams concluded, was that "America's humanitarian urge to assist other people is undercut--even subverted-by the way it goes about helping them."
The classical definition of "tragedy" is greatness brought low through some fundamental flaw in one's own character. When one considers the difficulties the United States created for itself in the world through its own hubris and arrogance during the 1960's and early 1970's, it is hardly surprising that Williams's tragic view of American diplomatic history seemed, to a great many people at the time, to make sense. To a good many people even today, it still does.
Therein, however, lies a danger. Any view held by a considerable number of people risks becoming an orthodoxy, and the members of our profession are no more exempt than others from that tendency. I only met Bill Williams once, but I gather that he was, if anything, a profoundly unorthodox character. I suspect that the last thing he would have wanted would be to see his own ideas--or anybody else's, for that matter-become conventional wisdom. As he himself put it in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, "history is a way of learning, of getting closer to the truth. It is only by abandoning the clichés that we can even define the tragedy."
What I would like to do here is to question some clichés and then try to redefine a tragedy. For if we mean what we say when we enjoin one another-in a way that has become, in itself, almost an orthodoxy-to transform diplomatic history into a truly international history, then surely Williams's tragic view of the American experience in world affairs is a good place to start. How well does it hold up when placed within an international context? How does an interpretation that has influenced the writing of so much Cold War history look today, now that the Cold War is over? And how might we apply Williams's habit of asking creatively irritating questions as we seek to understand the post-Cold War world?
The end of the Cold War has obliged most of us, after all, to jettison quite a number of clichés, orthodoxies, and long-cherished pearls of conventional wisdom: in this sense, we are all well on the way to becoming post-Cold War revisionists. It is all the more important, then, that we take another look into what Williams called the "mirror" of history, "in which, if we are honest enough, we can see ourselves as we are as well as the way we would like to be."
Part II
Let us begin with an issue our students are already beginning to raise with us, which is what the Cold War was all about in the first place. Given what we now know about the internal fragility of the Soviet Union; given what has long been clear about the economic absurdity of Marxism- Leninism; given the persuasive evidence that an international Communist "monolith" never really existed; given all of these things, exactly what was the threat to American interests anyway? Whatever could have justified the massive expenditures on armaments, the violations of human rights abroad and civil liberties at home, the neglect of domestic priorities, the threats to blow up the world-whatever could have excused all the deplorable things the United States did during the Cold War if no genuine threat ever existed? Does not this record only confirm what Williams suspected: that the American system has a built-in propensity to fight cold wars, and that if the Soviet Union had not provided the necessary adversary, someone else would have?
Few historians would deny, today, that the United States did expect to dominate the international scene after World War II, and that it did so well before the Soviet Union emerged as a clear and present antagonist. Woodrow Wilson years earlier had provided the rationale, with his call for a collective security organization to keep the peace, and for self-determination and open markets as a way of simultaneously removing the causes of war. It took the fall of France and the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor to bring Wilson's ideas into the policy arena, to be sure, but the country's leadership, if not yet the country as a whole, was thoroughly committed to them long before World War II ended.
This vision of the future assumed a strong military role for the United States: Americans would hardly have been prepared, even under the best of circumstances, to turn the entire task of peacekeeping over to the United Nations, however enthusiastically they endorsed that organization. And there is no question but that careful calculations of material advantage lay behind all of this. After all, no one had ever combined the fact of self-interest with the appearance of disinterest more skillfully than Woodrow Wilson, and that aspect of his legacy was still very much around as influential Americans, inside and outside the government, set out to design the postwar world.
But let us be fair to those designers: they also assumed that the Great Powers would act in concert rather than in competition with one another. That presupposition had been the basis for Franklin D. Roosevelt's early and somewhat crude concept of the "four policemen," and it carried over into the more sophisticated planning for the United Nations and the organization of the postwar international economy that went on during the last two years of World War II. It is certainly true that the United States expected to lead the new world order; it alone was in a position to set the rules and to provide the resources without which that system could hardly function. But the system was to have been based, we need to remember, upon the principle of what we would today call common security. It was to have operated, at least insofar as the Great Powers were concerned, within a framework of consent, not coercion; and most Americans expected, perhaps naively, that this relatively open and relaxed form of hegemony could be made to coincide with their own security interests.
Let us recall, as well, that the United States plan for the postwar world was never fully put into effect. Part of the reason was its failure to take into account the extent of wartime devastation in Europe, and the consequent improbability that a return to open markets alone could solve that problem. But the main difficulty lay more in the realm of geopolitics than economics: it was that Washington's conception of common security ran up against another one, emanating from Moscow, that was of a profoundly different character.
There was nothing relaxed, or open, or "consensual" about Josef Stalin's vision of an acceptable international order; and the more we reconsider Soviet history now that the Soviet Union itself has become history, the harder it becomes to separate any aspect of it from the baleful and lingering influence of this remarkable but sinister figure. One need hardly accept a "great man" theory of history to recognize that in the most authoritarian government the world has ever seen, the authoritarian who ran it did make a difference.
Stalin was, above all else, a Great Russian nationalist, a characteristic very much amplified by his non-Russian origins. His ambitions followed those of the old princes of Muscovy, with their determination to "gather in" and to dominate the lands that surrounded them. That Stalin cloaked this goal within an ideology of proletarian internationalism ought not to conceal its real origins and character: Stalin's most influential role models, as his most perceptive biographer, Robert Tucker, has now made clear, were not Lenin, or even Marx, but Peter the Great and ultimately Ivan the Terrible. His rule replicated the pattern of earlier tsarist autocracies identified by the great pre-revolutionary Russian historian, V. O. Kliuchevskii: "Exhausting the resources of the country, they only bolstered the power of the state without elevating the self-confidence of the people. . . . The state swelled up; the people grew lean."
Now, if the Soviet Union had occupied, let us say, the position of Uruguay in the post-World War II international system, this kind of autocracy certainly would have oppressed those who had to live under it, but it would hardly have caused a Cold War. If the Soviet Union had been the superpower that it actually was, but with a system of checks and balances that could have constrained Stalin's authoritarian tendencies, a Cold War might have happened, but it would probably not have been as dangerous or as protracted a conflict. If the Soviet Union had been a superpower and an authoritarian state, but if someone other than Stalin had been running it-a Bukharin, for example, or perhaps even a Trotsky-then its government could have been in the hands of a Kremlin leader who, although by no means a democrat, would at least have known the outside world, and might have found it easier than Stalin did to deal with on a basis of wary cooperation instead of absolute distrust.
But none of these counterfactuals became fact. Stalin was Stalin, and the people of the Soviet Union, together with the rest of the world, were stuck with him at the end of World War II. That was a tragedy, if not in a classical sense, then in an all too modern one. Let me try to illustrate why with a series of vignettes based on some of the new information we have about the great autocrat's life:
Stalin, we are told, once kept a parrot in a cage in his Kremlin apartment. The Soviet leader had the habit of pacing up and down in his rooms for long periods of time, smoking his pipe, brooding about God knows what, and occasionally spitting on the floor. One day the parrot, having observed this many times, tried to mimic Stalin's spitting. Stalin immediately responded by reaching into the cage and crushing the parrot's head with his pipe, instantly killing it. Stalin once was on vacation in the Crimea, and was kept awake during the night by a barking dog. "Shoot it," he told his guards. "But Josef Vissarionovich," they reported the next morning, "the dog is a seeing-eye dog, and it belongs to a blind peasant." "Shoot the dog," Stalin commanded, "and send the peasant to the Gulag. "
Stalin once had a wife-actually his second wife-who had an independent mind, and who was becoming concerned about the repressiveness of his policies. After she argued with him about this one night, either he shot and killed her, or she shot and killed herself.
Stalin once had a rival, whose name was Trotsky. Stalin not only outmaneuvered him, exiled him, and eventually had him killed; he also killed everyone he could who had ever been associated with Trotsky or any other potential rival, as well as hundreds of thousands of other people who had never had anything at all to do with Trotsky or with anyone else who could conceivably have challenged Stalin's rule. Some three million Soviet citizens died, it is estimated, as a result of these purges.
Stalin once had an idea: that in order to finance the industrialization that Marxist theory said had to take place before there could be a Marxist state, the Soviet government had to ensure a reliable supply of grain for export by forcibly collectivizing agriculture. The best estimate is that over fourteen million Soviet citizens died from the famine, exiles, and executions that resulted.
Stalin once presided over the fighting of a great war, in which at least another twenty-six million Soviet citizens were killed.26 When it was over, he congratulated himself not only on a great victory, but on the impressive territorial gains victory had brought. Wars, he told his foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, were a progressive force in history: "The First World War ripped one country out of the grips of capitalist slavery. The Second created a socialist system. The Third will finish off imperialism forever."
My purpose, in reciting this litany, is to make the point that the United States and its allies, at the end of World War II, were not dealing with a normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill, statesmanlike head of government. They confronted instead a psychologically disturbed but fully functional and highly intelligent dictator28 who had projected his own personality not only onto those around him but onto an entire nation and had thereby, with catastrophic results, remade it in his image. And he had completed that task, I might add, long before the Cold War policies of the United States could possibly have given him an excuse to do so. The twentieth century has been full of tragedies, but what Stalin did to the Soviet Union and, let us not forget, to its neighbors as well, must surely rank as among the greatest of them.
Part III
One might justifiably ask at this point, though: so what? Were not Stalin's sins fully apparent decades ago; and indeed did they not figure prominently in the earliest "orthodox" accounts of Cold War origins? Is not raising this issue now a matter of beating a horse that has not only long been dead, but is mummified, possibly even petrified? There are several reasons why I think this is not the case, why the nature of Stalinism is an issue to which American diplomatic historians will need to return.
First, archives are important, even if all they do is to confirm old arguments. The new Soviet sources, however, may well do more than that: the evidence we are getting suggests strongly that conditions inside the U.S.S.R., not just under Stalin but also under Lenin and several of Stalin's successors, were worse than most outside experts on that country had ever suspected. Whether one is talking about the death toll from collectivization, or from the purges, or from the war; whether one considers the brutality with which the survivors were treated; whether one evaluates the economic and ecological damage inflicted on the territories in which they lived; whether one looks at what the Soviet system meant for other countries that got sucked into the Soviet sphere of influence-whatever dimensions of Soviet history one looks at, what is emerging from the archives are horror stories more horrifying than most of the images put forward, without the benefit of archives, by the Soviet Union's most strident critics while the Cold War was still going on. That seems to me, in itself, to be significant.
But there is a second reason why I think a reconsideration of Stalinism is in order, and it has to do with the way American diplomatic historians have for too long thought about the Cold War. Reflecting one of the most curious intellectual habits to grow out of that conflict, we have tended to divide the world, rather like ancient Gaul, into three parts. We have preoccupied ourselves primarily, as one might have expected, with the "first" world, where most of the archives have long been open. We have frequently challenged each other, quite correctly in my view, to extend our horizons to include the "third" world, and to give full attention to the often intrusive impact the United States has had on the regions that made it up. It is very odd, though, that with all of our emphasis on "border crossings" and on the need for a genuinely international perspective, American diplomatic historians have made so little effort to understand what was really happening in-and what the impact of American policies was on-the "second" world.
This omission resulted in part, of course, from inaccessibility. It was difficult to find out much because governments in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and other Marxist states kept so much so carefully hidden. Part of the problem also had to do, I suspect, with the lingering effects of McCarthyism on our profession. The ideological excesses of the late 1940's and the early 1950's so traumatized American academics that for decades afterward we avoided looking seriously at the possibility that communism might indeed have influenced the behavior of communist states. Because some charges of Soviet espionage were exaggerated, we assumed too easily that all of them had been, that the spies were simply figments of right-wing imaginations. Because we regarded gestures like Congressional "captive nations" resolutions as a form of pandering to ethnic constituencies, we tended to lose sight of the fact that there really were "captive nations." And perhaps we also worried that if we talked too explicitly about these kinds of things, we would wind up sounding too much like John Foster Dulles, or, for a more recent generation, Ronald Reagan.
There was another problem as well, though, that got in the way of an accurate assessment of what was happening in the "second" world. It had to do with an unfortunate tendency, imported from international relations theory, to lock ourselves into a view of the world that accorded equal legitimacy, and therefore more or less equal respectability, to each of the major states within it, while ignoring the circumstances that had brought them into existence and the means by which they remained in power. Because all nations seek power and influence, or so "realist" theory tells US, we fell into the habit of assuming that they did so for equally valid reasons; that in turn led to a kind of "moral equivalency" doctrine in which the behavior of autocracies was thought to be little different from that of democracies.
This was not, to be sure, a universal tendency. Many members of our profession have long argued that certain "third world" autocracies held power illegitimately, and have vigorously condemned American foreign policy for putting up with them. But not everyone who took this view was willing to grant equal attention to what those few citizens of the "second" world who were free to speak had been telling us all along during the Cold War, which was that communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union really was, and had always been, at least as illegitimate and repressive a system. Now that they are free to speak-and to act-the people of the former Soviet Union appear to have associated themselves more closely with President Reagan's famous indictment of that state as an "evil empire" than with our own more balanced academic assessments. The archives, as noted earlier, are providing documentary evidence for such an interpretation. And yet, these developments have not yet visibly altered our field's actual preoccupation with the "first" world, our periodic exhortations to give greater emphasis to the "third" world, and our corresponding neglect of the "second" world, which badly needs the Historiographical equivalent of an affirmative action policy.
A truly international approach to diplomatic history, I should think, would be one fully prepared to look into the "mirror" that Williams wrote about to see whether we have given adequate attention to a tragedy that has had the most profound consequences-extending over more than seven decades-for the largest nation on the face of the earth, and for most of the other nations that surrounded it.
Part IV
What would that mean, though, for the writing of American diplomatic history? The most persistent issue historians of the Cold War's origins have had to wrestle with is a variation on what we would today call the "Rodney King" question: "Couldn't we all have gotten along if we had really tried?" We answered that question long ago with respect to another great twentieth-century dictator, Adolf Hitler: few of us have any difficulty whatever with the proposition that Nazi Germany really did represent absolute evil, and that there was never any possibility that, if only we had tried, we could have "gotten along" with so odious a regime.
Nevertheless, many American diplomatic historians have made, and still make, the argument that the United States should have undertaken a greater effort than it did at the beginning of the Cold War to "get along" with the Soviet Union. We have tended to reject the notion, popular early in the late 1940's and early 1950's, that Stalin was another Hitler, that what we were witnessing in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe was not communism at all, but rather "Red Fascism." It is quite true, of course, that the Soviet autocrat did differ from his German counter part in several important ways, not the least of which was that Stalin was more cautious than Hitler and would back down if confronted with the fact or at least the plausible prospect of resistance. Nor did Stalin ever seek the systematic extermination of an entire people: the Holocaust was, and remains, unique.
But as both Robert Tucker and Alan Bullock have recently made clear, the similarities between Stalin and Hitler far outweigh the differences. These were both remarkably single-minded men, driven to dominate all those around them. They combined narcissism with paranoia in a way that equipped them superbly for the task of obtaining, and holding onto, power. They persisted even in the most unpromising of circumstances; and although capable of tactical retreats, they were not to be swayed from their ultimate objectives. They were extraordinarily crafty, prepared to take miles when inches were given them. And, most important, they both had visions of security for themselves that meant complete insecurity for everyone else: we have long known that Hitler killed millions in pursuit of his vision, but we now know that Stalin killed many more. It is really quite difficult, after reading careful studies like those of Tucker, Bullock, and also the Russian historian Dimitri Volkogonov, to see how there could have been any long-term basis for coexistence-for "getting along"-with either of these fundamentally evil dictators. One was dealing here with states that had been reshaped to reflect individuals; but these individuals, in turn, were incapable of functioning within the framework of mutual cooperation, indeed mutual coexistence, that any political system has to have if it is to ensure the survival of all of the parts that make it up.
The tragedy of Cold War History, then, is that although fascism was defeated in World War II, authoritarianism-as it had been nurtured and sustained by Marxism-Leninism-was not. That form of government was at the apex of its influence during the last half of the 1940s, even as the Soviet Union itself lay physically devastated: material conditions alone do not explain everything that happens in the world. As a result, Stalin was able to create or inspire imitators whose influence extended well past his own demise in 1953.
Stalin's clones appeared first in Eastern Europe, where he installed regimes that were so scrupulous in following his example that they conducted their own set of purge trials during the late 1940's, a decade after the "Leader of Progressive Mankind" had shown the way. His influence was still present in that part of the world four decades later, as the careers of Erich Honecker, Nicolai Ceausescu, and their counterparts abundantly illustrate. Stalin certainly provided a model for the third great autocrat of the twentieth century, Mao Zedong, who it now appears had no interest in any form of cooperation with the United States when he took power in China in 1949. Despite his differences with Stalin's successors, Mao was still emulating Stalin himself when he launched the ill-conceived "Great Leap Forward" in 1957, a program of crash industrialization that is now believed to have cost the lives of between twenty and forty-six million Chinese, a civilian death toll that may be higher than what Stalin and Hitler together managed to achieve.46 And then there were all the little Stalin's and Mao's who appeared elsewhere in the world during the Cold War: Kim II-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Haile Mengistu, Babrak Karmal, and many others, each of whom, like their teachers, promised liberation for their people but delivered repression.
Now, tyrants-even well-intentioned tyrants-are nothing new in history. Certainly the United States associated itself with its own share of repressive dictators throughout the Cold War, and had been doing so long before that conflict began. But there was something special about the Marxist-Leninist authoritarians, and it is going to be important for post-Cold War historians to understand what it was. They were all, like Hitler, murderous idealists, driven to apply all of the energies they and the countries they ruled could command in an effort to implement a set of concepts that were ill conceived, half-baked, and ultimately unworkable. They believed that, by sheer force of will, all obstacles could be overcome, and they were willing to pay whatever price was necessary in terms of lives to overcome them. There was little sense among them of the need to balance ends and means; rather, in such systems, as George Orwell noted long ago, ends justified means, which meant that means corrupted ends. These were not hard-nosed realists but rather brutal romantics; that does not justify us, though, in romanticizing any of them.\
Part V
But just what was it about the twentieth century that allowed such romantics to gain such power during its first eight decades, and then so abruptly, at the end of the ninth, to lose it? After all, the great authoritarians were not alien visitors: they obviously sprang from circumstances not of their own making, and they rose to preeminence by taking advantage-with astonishing skill and persistence-of the circumstances that surrounded them. History, for a long time, was on their side; and then it ceased to be. We need to understand why.
One way we might find out would be to follow another piece of advice from William Appleman Williams, which is that we rediscover Karl Marx. It was Marx, more than anyone else, who alerted us to the fact that there are long-term, "sub-structural" forces in history, and that they do shape modes of economic production, forms of political organization, and even social consciousness. To use a metaphor from much more recent discoveries in the geological sciences, Marx exposed the underlying "tectonic" processes that drive history forward, in much the same way that comparable processes push the continents around on the face of the earth. These forces by no means determine the actions of individuals, but they do establish the environment within which they function. "Men make their own history," Marx emphasized in his famous 1852 essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past."
We have neglected Marx's approach to history, I believe, for several reasons. First, we too easily confused Marxism with Marxism-Leninism, which was as thorough a perversion of Marx's own thinking as one can imagine. Second, Marx's incompetence as an economist, which was considerable, obscured his strengths as a historian. Third, Marx himself weakened his historical analysis, though, by falling victim to what we now recognize as the Fukuyama fallacy: this is the curious tendency of those who think that they have identified the ultimate "engine" of history to assume that history will stop with them. Marx insisted that the progression from feudalism through capitalism to socialism and communism was irreversible, but that it would then for some reason end at that point.
What really appears to have happened is that one set of tectonic forces-industrialization, the emergence of class-consciousness, and the alienation that flowed from it-undermined liberal democratic bourgeois market capitalism late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, thus paving the way for fascism, communism, and the authoritarianism that accompanied them. But during the second half of the twentieth century these tectonic forces evolved into something else-post-industrialization, the emergence of communications consciousness, and the alienation that flowed from it-which then undermined the foundations of authoritarianism and brought us around to our next historically determined phase, which turned out to be liberal, democratic, bourgeois market capitalism all over again. Marx, it seems, had mixed up linear with cyclical processes in history, and that was a substantial error indeed. But it does not invalidate his larger insight into the existence of tectonic forces and the role they play in human affairs. That insight might well serve as a starting point for a reconsideration, not just of the Cold War, but of the twentieth century as a whole.
The great authoritarians of this century arose, from this perspective, because they turned historical tectonics to their own advantage: they were able to align their own actions with deep sub-structural forces, and thus convey an appearance of inevitability-of having history on their side-in most of what they did. Nothing more quickly demoralizes one's opposition, after all, than the impression that history itself has turned against it. With the passage of time, though, the historical tectonics shifted, the authoritarians' successors were unable to adapt, and they themselves became demoralized, with the result that their regimes collapsed very much as the dinosaurs did once the environment within which they had flourished no longer existed. One might even conclude from this that the Cold War's outcome was predetermined all along, and that the real tragedy of Cold War history was all the wasted effort the opponents of authoritarianism put into trying to bring about what was going to happen anyway.
It is most unlikely, though, that Marx would have taken this position, because despite all of his emphasis on underlying historical forces, he was no historical determinist. The authoritarians arose, he might well have argued, because a few key individuals made their own history by exploiting the circumstances that confronted them, circumstances that, at the time, presented them with immense possibilities. It was the intersection of action with environment that produced results, not action alone or environment alone. But once one admits that possibility, one also has to allow that the resistance to authoritarianism may have made a difference. It would make no sense to claim that dictators can exploit tectonic forces, but that their opponents can never do so. So let us consider the resistance to authoritarianism, and that gets us back to the actions the United States-and its allies-have taken in the affairs of this century.
If, as seems likely, the twentieth century is remembered as one whose history was very largely shaped by the rise and fall of authoritarian regimes, then historians will have no choice but to debate the role the United States played in resisting them. They may conclude that that role was an active one: that the Americans themselves harnessed tectonic forces even more successfully than the authoritarians did, and that after a protracted struggle the Wilsonian vision prevailed over those of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and their respective imitators for that reason. Or historians may see the American contribution as a more passive one: that it was one of holding the line, of providing evidence that authoritarianism need not be the only path to the future, until such time as the underlying tectonic forces shifted, thus undermining authoritarianism's foundations and bringing about the events we have recently witnessed. Or historians may take the position that the truth lay somewhere in between.
But whatever the direction these lines of interpretation eventually take, the role of the United States in resisting authoritarianism will be at the center of them. It would seem most appropriate, therefore, for historians of American foreign relations to be at the center of that debate. I see little evidence that that is happening, though, and I wonder if this is not because we have allowed Williams's "tragic" view of American diplomacy to obscure our vision. We have turned a set of criticisms that might have been appropriate for particular policies at a particular time and place into something approaching a universal frame of reference. We have transformed what was, in its day, a profoundly unorthodox criticism of conventional wisdom into an orthodoxy that has now become conventional wisdom. Like most orthodoxies, it does not wear particularly well; it distorts our understanding of our place in the world, and also of ourselves.
How often do we ask the question: "tragedy" as compared to what? Gaps exist, after all, between the aspirations and the accomplishments of all states, just as they do in the lives of all individuals; if they alone are to be our criteria for defining "tragedy," then that is a characteristic inseparable from human existence, which rather weakens its analytical usefulness. If one defines "tragedy" according to the extent of the gap between aspirations and accomplishments, it becomes a more fruitful concept. But if one then compares gaps in terms of their extent, setting the American "tragedy" against those of other Great Powers in the twentieth century, ours appears more to fade out than to stand out. Perhaps that is why the United States is still the country of choice for those who seek to leave their own countries in the hope of finding better lives. The truly oppressed normally flee away from their oppressor, not toward it. If we are to take the voices of the oppressed seriously in doing history, we will need to listen to everything they are telling us, not just those parts of it that fit our preconceptions.
That raises an additional reason, though, for rediscovering Karl Marx. One of his most powerful insights was that even the most successful and beneficial institutions carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. We have seen the authoritarians destroy themselves-with an arguable amount of help from us and from our friends-in a way that might not have surprised Marx and would surely have gratified him, given the extent to which his own philosophy had as its objective the liberation, not the enslavement, of the individual. But the passage of time respects no state and no system, and from a Marxian perspective it is not too difficult to see where the internal contradictions in our own system-the "fault lines" along which tectonic forces intersect, if you will-may lie.
Go back to Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points speech anticipates, better than any other document I know, what is likely to be the central dilemma of the post-Cold War world. For is not the logic of open markets really economic integration, and is not the logic of self-determination really political fragmentation? And is this not a contradiction of such depth and such significance that Marx himself would have found it memorable? Can we really expect to abandon control of our economic lives-as market theory suggests we must-and at the same time take control of our political lives-as democratic theory suggests we should? Did Marx not teach us that economics and politics cannot be separated when it comes to human lives, however easily we may separate these categories in our minds? The fault line separating the forces of integration and fragmentation, not just in our own society but through much of the rest of the world as well, may turn out to be at least as long, as deep, and as dangerous as the one between democratic and authoritarian government that preoccupied us through so much of the twentieth century. These considerations too, it seems to me, ought to fall within the scope of a truly international approach to American diplomatic history.
Americans are no more likely to be exempted from tragic processes in history than anyone else is; but American diplomatic historians have treated these processes in a shallow, shortsighted, and curiously antiseptic way. We need to regain a clearer sense of what real tragedy, in this less than perfect world, is all about. That means placing our concept of tragedy within an international context. It means comparing the American "tragedy" with the others that surrounded it. It means using history as a genuine way of learning, not simply as a convenient platform from which we hold forth, either in self-condemnation or self-congratulation. It means, in the most fundamental sense, meeting our obligations as historians, which involve being honest not only about ourselves but about the environment in which we have had to live. And it means according equal respect, as I fear we have not yet done, to all of the survivors, and to all of the dead.
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