The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

The most consequential misunderstanding about the Cold War in contemporary public discourse arises from viewing it through an essentialist lens — the assumption that it was a contest between two fixed systems whose behaviour was predetermined by their inherent natures, shaped by history, culture, structure, and ideology. In this view, Russia today is the predictable continuation of these timeless instincts towards expansionism and autocracy.

Richard Pipes, the eminent Cold-War-era scholar of Russian history, best encapsulates this essentialist position: Russia, "for reasons rooted in either her social structure or her culture, or both, is committed to authoritarian government." His broader argument, developed over decades of Cold War, was that Russia’s cultural and political inheritance produced a nearly continuous legacy of autocracy and imperialism from 15^th-century Muscovy to the 20^th-century USSR to the 21^st-century Russia of Vladimir Putin.

The essentialist case has empirical logic, and an honest rebuttal cannot deny it. With the important exception of the Gorbachev era, Russia has pursued expansionism across five centuries. Its authoritarian governance and attempts to subordinate its neighbours have reinforced each other. Pipes is describing patterns that exist.

What Pipes and contemporary essentialists — whether their subject is the USSR or post-Soviet Russia — get wrong is the assumption that patterns equal essence: that "this is how Russia has been" means "this is how Russia can only be." That move requires showing the pattern is integral to Russian nature rather than the recurring product of multiple identifiable, and therefore malleable, circumstances. By treating Russian behaviour as the result of some fixed essence, the essentialist forecloses a more pluralist analytical approach that could more fully explain that behaviour: the complex interactions of leadership, insecurity, external pressures, domestic politics, ideas and ideology, culture, history, and contingency that Zubok and others have shown actually drive Soviet and Russian policy in one direction or another. Ideology, for instance, was real but more often instrumental than primary across most of the Cold War until the late 1980s — a driver among drivers, not an essence. The Cold War itself discredits the essentialist approach.

Khrushchev's coexistence rhetoric, Brezhnev's personal investment in détente and the Helsinki process, Andropov's tentative reformism, and finally Gorbachev's renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, acceptance of German reunification within NATO, and acceptance of the USSR's dissolution rather than use force to preserve it — none of this can be fully or adequately understood if Soviet behaviour is seen as essentially, ideologically, or structurally driven, rather than as a more complex array of everchanging factors, including evolving leadership, malleable national interests, and shifting external forces.

This is not to suggest that the Cold War was avoidable; once Stalin moved to subordinate Central and Eastern Europe under communist rule by 1948, US-Soviet confrontation was sealed. But the degree, duration, and drivers of that confrontation were not predetermined by any inherited, ideological, or structural forces.

This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

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