During Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s last years in power, American and British diplomats in Moscow became fans of the travelogue of Marquis Astolphe de Custine, Russia in 1839, that depicted the rulers of Russia as being permanently insecure about their collective identity and therefore permanently poised between a complex of inferiority, a demand for recognition,…
Tag: Soviet Union
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 127: Chinchilla on Casey, Up in Arms
The United States military cooperates extensively with other militaries. Under the administration of President Joe Biden, US troops conducted some form of counterterrorism operations in 78 countries, and were present in ten combat zones to train, advise, and even engage in combat alongside partner forces.[1] Between 1999 and 2016, the United States trained nearly 2.4…
H-Dipo | RJISSF Review Essay 119: Bateman on Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative
[dropcapThe Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as “Star Wars,” remains one of the most controversial aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Frequently misrepresented as a science fiction fantasy focused on space lasers, in reality SDI was a multi-billion-dollar group of research projects into technologies with civilian and defense applications. Technological realities aside, Reagan hoped…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-29 on Budjeryn, Inheriting the Bomb
By discussing the history of the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Mariana Budjeryn’s book offers a significant contribution to the literature on Russia’s war on Ukraine. The author elegantly discusses Russia’s ambition to become the only nuclear successor state to the Soviet Union and how this goal led to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Additionally,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-16 on Walton, Spies
Spies! What a great title! I could feel the ground shift within the first few pages of Calder Walton’s blockbuster accounting of the twentieth century “epic intelligence war between east and west.” Cold War historiography is again on the move and Walton, who is the assistant director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, at…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-15 on Kassenova, Atomic Steppe
An academic book editor once said to me that it usually means no good when a history book becomes timely. While publishers certainly hope that their books are widely read, unfortunately it is often an international crisis that makes the media, and a general audience, turn to history books for advice. In Europe, a new…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary III-2 on Marc Trachtenberg, “Operation Farewell and the Siberian Pipeline Explosion”
It is a treat to read something, anything, that Marc Trachtenberg writes. The reasons go beyond the originality and authority of his substantive contributions to international history and international relations. Trachtenberg focused on European foreign relations before shifting to the United States, and, as is well known, trained in history and a titan in the…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-54 on Inboden, The Peacemaker
William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is an ambitious book that covers the entirety of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Inboden is a distinguished scholar and tireless mentor who served in high-level positions in the Department of State and National Security Council staff, where he observed…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-48 on Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion
This is an extremely important book, which has received much attention—in journals, in speaking invitations for the author, and in the fellowships he has been awarded.[1] Its significance lies in the author’s argument that, unlike almost all previous scholarship on the subject of political succession in authoritarian and Communist regimes, it is not economic/material interests,…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-44 on Iandolo, Arrested Development
Alessandro Iandolo’s Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 was published in 2022, and was awarded the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize for the best first monograph in Russian History as well as the Marshall D. Shulman Prize for the best monograph on the international relations of the USSR, both from the…