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…
Tag: Soviet Union
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…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 95: Hymans on Potter, et al., Death Dust
The international security studies literature contains many thorough discussions of terrorists’ potential to acquire radiological “dirty bombs,” but it has mostly ignored the potential of states to do likewise.[1] Now, a crack team of nonproliferation experts led by the indefatigable William Potter has filled this gap in the literature with Death Dust, a fascinating comparative…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-29 on Leake, Afghan Crucible
More than three decades after the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, new studies on Moscow’s intervention and its consequences continue to appear. Although the war still receives only a fraction of the attention afforded to the American war in Vietnam, the last few decades have seen important studies on the intervention, the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-4 on Ro’i, The Bleeding Wound
Among the unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions regarding the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan is the extent to which the conflict contributed to the USSR’s dissolution less than three years after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. Proponents of the view that the war had precipitated the Soviet collapse included CIA analysts like Anthony Arnold, who argued…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Zubok Collapse
Vladislav Zubok was a witness to the end of the Soviet Union, and with this impressive book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, he has become one of, if not the, leading historians of its downfall. His distinguished academic career began at Moscow State University and the prestigious Institute for the USA and Canada…