Going to War for Respect
Sergey Radchenko’s history of the Cold War helps us understand Putin’s Russia.
To Run the World
The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power
by Sergey Radchenko
Cambridge, 768 pp., $27.02
AS RUSSIA WAS MAKING FINAL PREPARATIONS to expand its war of conquest in Ukraine in January 2022, the chief of Germany’s navy sparked controversy by casting doubt on the well-established intelligence about the Kremlin’s hostile intent. In addition to claiming that Kyiv could do nothing to reclaim the territory it had already lost since 2014 to its predatory neighbor, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach opined that Vladimir Putin “deserved respect.”
Schönbach’s civilian bosses swiftly reprimanded and relieved him of his duties. That decision was entirely proper: It’s not the Naval chief’s job to make foreign policy pronouncements. But Schönbach was right about one thing: Moscow’s appetite for respect is a crucial piece to understanding the ghastly war it has launched in Ukraine. More than two years since the full-scale invasion, Russian amour propre is still evident in its exorbitant sacrifices on and off the battlefield.
To anyone with a sense of history, this should come as no surprise. Since time immemorial, great powers have conducted their affairs not primarily by the standard of what was in their “national interest” but on the basis of less tangible objectives. As the historian Donald Kagan elucidated, interest is just one of the motives of foreign policy—along with fear and honor. The drives for tranquility and prestige are distinct from, and often incompatible with, practical interests. Considerations of honor have regularly led nations to engage in adventures that could not be justified by cold calculations of interest; occasionally, it has even led them to put their security at risk.
Russia is no exception. “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” wrote George Kennan in his “Long Telegram” of February 1946. According to Kennan, what had traditionally been a struggle to defend the Russian frontier against nomadic invaders had been transfigured, with the dawn of modernity, into a sense of inferiority to the West. “Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.” The crucial element here was not physical but psychological.
Little has changed on this point since Kennan was writing in the early days of the Cold War. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—an expansion of the “Long Telegram” published in July 1947 under the pseudonym “X”—therefore repays attention today, but wise students will read it in the broad and bright light cast by the exemplary research of historian Sergey Radchenko. In his latest book, To Run the World, Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, offers his own strikingly original analysis on the sources of Soviet conduct that benefits from what the author describes as a “deluge” of Cold War-era documents released over the past decade from Soviet government and Communist Party archives. What Radchenko found in these archives was not just the record of the principles and actions of a defunct empire, but a view of the nature of the interplay between power and beliefs in the international arena.
Hewn from Radchenko’s deep study of the Cold War, To Run the World is a subtle rebuke of the determinist school that imagines history to be a fixed scene where individual actors are mere playthings, victims of circumstance. In these pages, the sweep of history stands revealed as a more intimate drama, with human texture and full of surprises. Like all great works of history, this tome clarifies the contingency of things, the power of choices made by individuals in the past on the present. The breadth of Radchenko’s research is matched only by the lucidity of his prose, which makes To Run the World equally profitable to experts and amateurs.
Radchenko’s analysis of the Cold War transcends the typical bipolarity paradigm in which the United States faced off against the Soviet Union in the twilight struggle. He focuses attention on the role of China, which enriches our understanding not only of the twentieth century, but of our own, as the PRC has supplanted the Soviet Union as the new leading adversary of American power.
Radchenko begins his account with the negotiations among Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1945 to shape the postwar order. At Yalta and later at Potsdam, he stresses, Stalin was seeking not just security but also legitimacy. At the Yalta meeting of the “Big Three,” the Red Tsar secured advantages in the Far East, and at Potsdam, he entrenched Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Owing to concerted British and American pressure, he relented on Iran and Turkey, curtailing the Soviet sphere of influence to northern Iran and establishing military bases in the Black Sea straits. After Truman informed him on the sidelines of the official notifications of the Trinity nuclear test, Stalin determined not to yield to the American nuclear monopoly:
We know that although he repeatedly downplayed the Bomb’s significance—“not atomic bombs, but armies decide the war,” Stalin famously claimed—in reality, he attached great significance to the new weapon, and fully appreciated its power to intimidate. This is a case of paying attention to what Stalin did, not to what he said. Sure enough, on August 20, 1945 . . . Stalin approved the establishment of the Special Committee (headed by Beria) to marshal all state resources to the accomplishment of what soon became known simply as “Project Number One”—the development of the atomic bomb.
Africa was a dark continent for Soviet power in the time of Stalin. This changed under his successor Nikita Khrushchev. Why? Radchenko suggests that decolonization produced opportunities unavailable to Stalin. This does not quite square with the “local difficulties” encountered by British, Dutch, and French imperialism in India, Indonesia, and Indochina. Radchenko is more concerned with ambitions than opportunities. Khrushchev’s objective was to be recognized for his solidarity with the anti-colonial movement. “Such recognition translated into legitimacy,” writes Radchenko. This time the legitimacy came not from the West but from the communist and anti-colonialist camp, in which China played a key role.
Radchenko does not rely solely or even chiefly on Marxist ideology to explain Soviet behavior. According to him, “the sources of Soviet ambitions are not specifically Soviet, but both precede and post-date the Soviet Union, overlapping with the Cold War.” Radchenko claims that it is almost impossible to separate ideology from “the quest for security (in the benign version) or outright imperialism (more commonly accepted).” In other words, this can be a distinction without much difference. The Soviets unwaveringly sought to impose their authority, both as a matter of interest and to advance their ideology—Khrushchev, a “revolutionary romantic,” was “keen on stressing . . . his revolutionary duty to help the “anti-imperialist struggle.” But Soviet ambition can’t be divorced from its sense of pride and honor of being a protagonist (or antagonist) in a volatile world with others vying for mastery, and the sense of self-doubt that ambition fed and fed on: “At some level the Soviets felt very insecure about whether or not they really were America’s equals.”
In Radchenko’s telling, it was the interplay between the Soviet Union’s extravagant ambitions and its quest for legitimacy that explains its pugnacity during the Cold War. “What the Soviets saw as their ‘legitimate’ interests,” he writes, “were often not seen as particularly ‘legitimate’ by anybody else, leading to a kind of ontological insecurity on the Soviet part that was compensated for by hubris and aggression.” Legitimacy from the West “was attainable through recognition either as a partner or as an adversary,” he writes, with communist and anti-imperial forces offering alternative sources of legitimacy.
These contrasting sources of legitimacy bred an irreconcilable tension within the Soviet system. Since respect can only arise by consent, Soviet power struggled to gain or retain much respect. It was more often engaged in repressing civil society behind the Iron Curtain than taking on formidable foreign powers. Early Cold War efforts to burnish the prestige of communism—from the unsuccessful blockade of Berlin to the Czechoslovak coup—alarmed more than they intimidated. Machiavelli famously asserted that it was more important for a prince to be feared than loved, but not even he believed that respect could be dispensed with lightly. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviets cultivated a surfeit of fear without any concomitant gain in respect. Scant rations of love existed for an empire that constructed a “protective barrier” (the propaganda term used for the Berlin Wall by its architects) not to deter external invaders but to control internal dissent. The Soviets could wield power or enjoy popularity among the “captive nations,” but not both. The rigid and sterile nature of the Soviet system dictated that legitimacy in the eyes of others would remain forever out of reach.
The Brezhnev years are of special interest, since it was in the early 1970s that the Soviet Union opted for detente with the West while encountering growing hostility in the East. In 1972, Brezhnev, who often called himself a “European” and harbored shockingly racist views toward “the Orient,” welcomed President Nixon to Moscow and toured the United States a year later. The general secretary even (prematurely) declared the Cold War to be over. As tensions relaxed with the West, relations with the East grew strained. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 alarmed the Chinese, who feared becoming the next target of Soviet power. After border skirmishes broke out along the Sino-Soviet border, it became clear to Mao the real purpose behind improved Soviet-American relations was to free Moscow’s hands for dealing with China.
Radchenko is wary of offering anything other than tentative judgments about the record of Mikhail Gorbachev. At the historical denouement of the Soviet Union, the perception of Gorbachev as a “prophet of a new world order” saddled the last general secretary with impossible expectations. Due to the structural weaknesses of the Soviet system, he could not prevent the transformation of the USSR into America’s partner in nuclear arms control, nor a retreat from what was then called the “Third World.” The end of detente and the revival of ideological competition in the 1980s left a depleted, gasping Soviet state desperate for what the American proponents of detente had pursued: a relaxation of tensions between the superpowers. “The stark reality—that the USSR was not the superpower that it was claiming to be—had finally caught up with policy.” Unable to keep pace, the Soviet drive for openness and reform discredited its ideological enterprise at home and abroad, which eventually led to its demise and the end of the Cold War.
There was nothing inevitable about Russia’s post-Soviet trajectory. After the collapse of Soviet communism, Boris Yeltsin’s and especially Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy was founded on a nervous attempt to restore Russia’s status as a great power, to “raise Russia from its knees.” After early, halting efforts under Yeltsin to forge a partnership with the West, Russia ultimately reached a different vision of its place in the international order. Putin, whose first term of office began in 2000, exhibited a brash desire for Russia to return to its old imperial role in its near abroad. His 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference advocated “a rethinking anew of those very notions that Gorbachev had once held dear: that the Cold War was an aberration, that true greatness was in overcoming confrontation with the West, in building bridges, in seeing a common purpose.” This approach harkened back to Stalin’s preference for hardened spheres of influence around the major powers. The West never granted the “legitimacy” of such Russian interests, which left many Russians feeling not only insulted by but resentful about liberal hegemony.
To Run the World helps explain why Russia’s pursuit of great-power status has been so enduring, long after the demise of the Soviet empire. Rousseau distinguished between two forms of self-love: amour de soi is directed at self-preservation, while the amour propre is concerned with judgments of honor and public esteem. The war in Ukraine involves the latter more than the former. As an objective matter, NATO poses little threat to Russia—with or without Ukraine. By contrast, Kyiv’s growing Western orientation since the breakup of the Soviet Union has posed a direct challenge to Russia’s sense of honor and national greatness.
Too many in the West are uncomfortable making the distinction between honor and interest. There are, to be sure, some threats that involve access to resources or real damage to the territory, economy, or political system of a state. But another class of threats are, to paraphrase the political scientist Alexander Wendt, what we make of them. From Putin’s perspective, the threat from the West springs primarily from the political and military project that continued uninterrupted after the end of the Cold War.
This consolidated military and political hegemony was regarded not as a dire threat to Russian security per se but as an intolerable imposition upon Russian honor. The idea that “the Soviet Union acquired true greatness by waging and winning a war against a mighty enemy . . . proved so resilient that it outlived the Soviet collapse and the death of Marxism-Leninism. The peculiar Soviet ideology was only a means to greatness,” Radchenko writes, “but greatness itself—that was for the ages.” Perhaps that’s what Putin meant when he said that “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”
Schönbach was right that Putin—and Russia—“deserves respect.” But respect doesn’t have to imply deference, to say nothing of submission. Respect for Russia today would begin by acknowledging Putin’s agency. As he forms a key node in the axis of revisionists, it is the kind of respect that would manifest in the continued and increased provision of heavy armaments to Ukraine.
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