What do you consider the most consequential misunderstanding about the Cold War in contemporary public discourse?

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.

‍

Probably the most consequential misunderstanding about the Cold War is that nuclear deterrence—the US and European reliance of the threat of a devastating attack against the USSR with nuclear weapons—“worked” to maintain the peace and ultimately to end the Cold War. 

Why was is it a misunderstanding? Most fundamentally because, as formerly secret archives from the East bloc have revealed, the USSR had no intention either to carry out a nuclear attack or launch an invasion of Europe with conventional armed forces. The Red Army demobilized substantially after World War II and relied on a defensive orientation in the event of an invasion from the West. Only in the 1960s, with the deployment of thousands of so-called tactical nuclear weapons by the United States in Europe, did the strategy switch to an offensive one, focusing on preemptive destruction of nuclear facilities on the territory of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That strategy, misunderstood by NATO and US officials, could have resulted in nuclear devastation of the European continent in the event that the US launched limited nuclear attacks for signaling purposes as NATO planned and strategists such as Thomas Schelling advocated during the Berlin Crisis in 1961. If the crisis had not been defused, and eventually the situation in Europe stabilized by the 1972 German State Treaty (“two states, one nation”) and the 1975 Helsinki Accords, failed nuclear deterrence could have produced nuclear war.

Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.