On the morning of June 24, 1945, rain was pouring down on Red Square, but tens of thousands of elite Soviet troops hardly noticed it. They stood at attention, ready to march through the square to celebrate their triumph over the Third Reich. At precisely ten o’clock, Marshal Georgy Zhukov emerged from the Kremlin’s gates riding a white stallion and gave the signal for the Parade of Victory to begin. At the peak of the celebration, the medal-bedecked officers hurled two hundred captured German banners onto the pedestal of Lenin’s Mausoleum. The pomp and circumstance of the parade was impressive...

CBS correspondent Richard C. Hottelet sat in the apartment of the former commissar of foreign affairs of the Soviet Union, Maxim Litvinov, in Moscow on June 18, 1946. He could not believe his ears. Back in the safety of his office, the journalist recorded what he had heard from the Old Bolshevik. The Kremlin, Litvinov said, had chosen an outmoded concept of security for the Soviet Union—the more territory you get, the safer you become. This would lead to a confrontation with the Western powers, and the best one could hope for was “a prolonged armed truce.”¹

The Yalta...

Germany’s division was one of the most striking outcomes of the clash between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. But only recently has critical reassessment of Western involvement emerged.¹ And the full extent of Stalin’s role cannot be documented even today. The details of many smaller-scale decisions and their implementation remain clouded: Stalin’s cipher cables and many records of conversations are still classified in the Russian archives. Nevertheless, the available documents reveal that many developments in East Germany had Stalin’s unique imprint and some of them would never have taken place without his explicit authorization. The top Soviet political...

After Stalin’s death, a “new” Soviet foreign policy emerged that sought to reopen the diplomatic space that Moscow had enjoyed before the start of the Cold War. In February 1956, at the Twentieth Party Congress, the Soviet leadership renounced expectations of imminent war. The Stalinist thesis of the inevitability of a period of wars and revolutions gave way to a new thesis: long-term “peaceful coexistence” and nonmilitary competition between the capitalist and Communist systems.

However, détente in East-West relations did not occur. And, in fact, the Cold War got a second wind. Mutual fears and mistrust remained high between the...

On October 4, 1957, a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched a satellite, the orbit of which took it on a path over North America.¹ Sputnik was an innocuous and peaceful satellite, but American analysts also recognized that the same missile could carry a multimegaton nuclear charge. Almost immediately, these same experts warned of a “missile gap” that might eventually give the USSR the ability to destroy American strategic forces in a surprise attack. For Americans, this brought back memories of Pearl Harbor, which increased their sense of sudden loss of security. Across the United States, middle-class families saved money...

As the drama of the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad hardly noticed it. In early November 1962, the members of the intelligentsia, as well as millions of other Soviet readers, were frantically looking for copies of a thick literary journal that had just published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about the fate of a Russian peasant in Stalin’s concentration camp.¹ During the second decade of the Cold War, momentous changes began to take place on the Soviet home front, in society and culture, in public opinion and collective identities.

The...

On May 29, 1972, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev met in the richly adorned and ancient St. Catherine Hall of a historic Kremlin palace to sign an array of bilateral documents, among them the Strategic Arms Limitations Agreement, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and “The Basic Principles of U.S.-Soviet Relations.” This solemn occasion was the peak of Brezhnev’s political career. It was also the highest point of international prestige of the Soviet Union since the beginning of the Cold War.

The origins and meaning of détente have always been subjects of controversy. Beginning in the mid-1970s, neoconservative critics of the Nixon,...

History turned a new page on Christmas Eve of 1979, as columns of Soviet motorized troops crossed the bridges hastily built over the Amu Darya River near the city of Termez and began to pull into the dark gorges between the snowy peaks of Afghanistan. Soviet citizens learned the news from foreign shortwave broadcasts. Around the same time, the elite commando forces “Alfa” and “Berkut” stormed the palace of the general secretary of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, killing him, his family, and his guards. The KGB set up a puppet government headed by Babrak Karmal, an...

The superpower confrontation of the early 1980s had a feeling of déjà vu. The rampant arms race, covert battles between secret services around the world, and fierce psychological warfare gave the situation a resemblance to the last years of Stalin’s rule. The Reagan administration sought to roll back the Soviet empire, just as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had done in the early 1950s. Some in the West forecast a dangerous decade and predicted that “the Soviet Union would risk nuclear war if her leaders believed the integrity of the empire to be at stake.”¹

This chapter focuses on the...

It took three decades to turn the Soviet Union into a superpower, the main challenger of the supremacy of the United States in the world. But it took only three years for the Communist giant to disintegrate. For people who had come of age during the Cold War, the event was sudden and breathtaking. Those inclined to see the Cold War in apocalyptic terms as the struggle between good and evil concluded that it was Ronald Reagan and his administration that overthrew the great Satan of Communism. But most scholars and analysts conclude that the Soviet superpower met its end...

During the forty years that followed World War II, Soviet leaders and elites struggled to preserve and expand the great socialist empire that emerged out of this ordeal. After the historic victory over Nazi Germany, the majority of the Kremlin leaders, party elites, the military, the security police, and members of the military-industrial complex came to identify themselves with the idea of a great power with a central role in the world. The Russo-centric ideas among Russians in the Communist elites and the national feelings of non-Russians (for instance, in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) became integrated into this new collective...