A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Now, however, Mao – whose story we shall come to later – intervened and three hundred thousand Chinese ‘volunteers’ poured over the border and shoved the Americans back, into a humiliating retreat. Fighting under the new, unfamiliar flag of the United Nations, US, British and Australian troops eventually repulsed the Maoist forces. Washington could, of course, have used atomic bombs, but chose not to, and suffered a bloody and prolonged period of trench warfare instead.

  Why? It could hardly have been the threat of a swift Soviet reprisal. We know now that Russian pilots were present over the skies of Korea; and the Russians had had a bomb of their own (thanks to their spies in the West) since the previous year, though they were not yet in a position to effectively challenge in a nuclear exchange. It was rather because the US did not want to set a precedent; the bomb was not to be used lightly, or merely to even the score in a conflict that did not touch America’s future. If it were to be used in this way, the Russians would eventually do the same. So the Korean War, bloody enough, ended in a stalemate close to the line where it had begun, and in the establishment of two regimes that would become caricatures of their sponsors – one, dourly and violently Stalinist, the other rampagingly capitalist.

  From now on, the US and the USSR competed in a frantic arms race, involving not just nuclear warheads but submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, satellites, spy planes and hidden silos. But at the same time they searched restlessly around the world for allies to prop up and countries to bring over to their side, fomenting and supporting wars and dictatorships across Africa, Asia and South America. The United States intervened aggressively in Latin and South America, and supported the Shah of Iran and the southern part of former French Indochina, by now called Vietnam, as well as trying – mostly unsuccessfully – to court Arab countries. The USSR concentrated on her European satellites and two increasingly difficult relationships. The more important one was with her impetuous Communist ally, China; and the other was with the most independent-minded Communist country in Europe, Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, which had liberated itself from the Nazis without Soviet help and considered it had no need to kowtow to Moscow.

  Both these countries became part of a wider movement which showed that, despite the appearance of world-threatening, globe-encircling superpower dominance, neither the United States nor the USSR was quite as strong as it looked. Countries whose leaders had sufficient self-confidence could dodge quite successfully between the Bear and the Eagle; and even play them off against each other. In Indonesia in 1955, Yugoslavia and China had been among the countries meeting to form the Non-Aligned Group. There was India too, now a socialist republic but still within the British Commonwealth, determined to have good relations with Russia as well as with the West; and Egypt, whose nationalist leader Nasser would soon humiliate the old imperial powers, France and Britain, but would also spurn US aid in favour of Russian. When France left the military command structure of NATO in 1966, having recognized Maoist China, she too became more like a non-aligned power than a full part of the Western bloc.

  In Africa, a long and often tragic struggle began for the fealty of former colonies. Would these new republics retain fond links with their European colonizers or declare themselves people’s republics and send their brightest and best to study Marxism-Leninism in Moscow?

  Among the anticolonial parties across the continent, Africanists fought Marxists, while Western governments chose to turn a blind eye to one-party despotism, corruption and worse – the local dictator might be a bastard, but he was ‘our’ bastard. This allowed the rule of dictators such as Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire – the former Belgian Congo – Hastings Banda in Malawi and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya. On the Soviet side, the monstrous Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia and the weird, incompetent Marxists of Angola’s MPLA and of Mozambique’s Frelimo were backed by Moscow – without any great enthusiasm, but merely because the Cold War had to be fought everywhere, for every slab of baked soil and every hungry, wary child. In Angola, the United States had backed a rival nationalist guerrilla force, Unita, but as the African observer Richard Dowden mordantly put it, ‘It was hard to see what Angola gave the Soviet Union apart from bad debts and sun in winter for its generals.’41

  The speed of decolonization, which catapulted into power across Africa groups and individuals who had not had the time or support to prepare for it, was also part of the Cold War story. This was not simply about European governments, from Lisbon to Brussels and London to Paris, scuttling because they no longer had the will to hold their old colonies against black liberation movements. It was as much because, focusing on the Communist threat, they had no stomach for wars against Soviet proxies and preferred to cut a deal early on with ‘pro-Western’ new rulers, in the hope that trade would continue, while the politics of the new country took second place.

  The East–West confrontation allowed apartheid South Africa to keep both Britain and the US for a long time as unhappy ‘neutral friends’ because of its vehement anti-Communism. The Cold War permitted Robert Mugabe, the destroyer of Zimbabwe, to be tutored in Marxism even though he first thrust aside his overtly pro-Moscow rival Joshua Nkomo. As we tot up the sad history of misrule, corruption, racism, torture and waste in Africa’s twentieth century, many of the uncountable millions of African lives blighted during this period must also be added to the real cost of the Cold War.

  Both sides, by the mid-1950s, had new leaderships struggling to find ways to cope with the balance of terror. In the US, Harry Truman, a tough-minded President who had nevertheless been heavily influenced by Roosevelt’s idealism, was replaced by Roosevelt’s old military commander, ‘Ike’ Eisenhower. To start with, at least, he held a more aggressive view of the possible use of nuclear weapons. And after Eisenhower, in 1961, would come a young Democrat, John F. Kennedy, who used soaring rhetoric about America’s global destiny as the champion of free people, and who would be pitched almost immediately into confrontation with Moscow.

  Both these leaders faced in Nikita Khrushchev a bullfrog-like new Soviet leader, a genuine worker who had risen under Stalin and who acted with impetuosity (and some personal coarseness). At the beginning of Khrushchev’s rule, the USSR was still behind the West in missiles but was starting to catch up. The launch into space of Russia’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, and its Sputnik earth-orbiter, in 1957, was a terrible shock to Western politicians. Khrushchev believed that Soviet methods in science and economics could lead to the USSR overtaking the United States; meanwhile, he wanted a less terror-drenched atmosphere at home, denouncing the crimes and personality cult of Stalin in a secret speech to the ruling Communist Congress – though it didn’t stay secret for long.

  But anyone who thought a slightly more liberal atmosphere implied any lessening of Moscow’s determination to hang onto its ‘socialist’ satellites was brutally disabused in 1956, when Soviet tanks crushed rebellion, and some twenty thousand people died.

  In 1962, it was Khrushchev and Kennedy who brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before – or, so far, since. The cause was Cuba, whose Marxist revolution under Fidel Castro the Americans had tried, and failed, to overthrow in a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Khrushchev thought that shipping and installing Russian missiles on the island would be a good way to both protect his new Caribbean ally and to threaten America, which also had medium-range missiles aimed at the USSR, mostly in Turkey. This was a very ‘hot’ time in the Cold War; the Russians had tested a bigger bomb, had sent Yuri Gagarin aloft as the first man in space, while their East German allies had sealed off West Berlin with the notorious Wall, designed to stop a flood of emigrants. (The East German state had shrunk by two million citizens.)

  These acts suggested that Communism was better-armed than ever, and more determined. The determination was real enough, but in fact the USSR was still far behind the Americans in missile capability; in Cuba, Khrushchev hoped to bolster Soviet prestige and encourag
e Latin American revolutionaries. Kennedy, too, expected this effect. He warned the Russians that if their supply ships carrying extra rockets to Cuba strayed beyond a certain line, he would attack them. He also insisted that the current sites be demolished. Torpedoing Russian ships would mean full-scale war. After Kennedy’s ultimatum, the world held its breath.

  In the nick of time, Khrushchev backed down and the missile bases were dismantled, which seemed a great victory for the US President. It was – but his opposite number in the Kremlin ended up getting a lot of what he wanted, notably the removal of US missiles in Turkey and the acceptance that Castro’s Marxist regime was there to stay. A ‘hotline’ to connect the US and Soviet leaders was installed. There were still some very dangerous moments to come. They included the outbreak of fighting in 1969 between Chinese and Russian troops on their border, and the bloodiest, most painful US Cold War failure, the war to repel Communism in Vietnam. The conflict spread to Laos and Cambodia too, lasted from 1965 until 1975, and demonstrated conclusively that aerial bombardment cannot destroy guerrilla forces.

  But after the Cuban crisis, both Washington and Moscow accepted that they had to edge back from a situation in which a tiny miscalculation could end human history. The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty was followed by a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, then the first strategic arms-limitation talks, or SALT 1, in 1972, limiting the number of ballistic missiles. Another treaty, banning defence against nuclear missiles, showed that the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’, or MAD – what Oppenheimer had hoped for in his less grim moments – was official policy. The period of agreed coexistence, named ‘détente’, arrived, during which both systems attempted to live with each other, in a divided world. At the time it seemed an endless stasis, the Cold War now, finally, a Frozen Peace; or, to change the metaphor, it was as if two heavy-weight wrestlers had ended in an exhausted clinch, bear-hugging one another, unable either to break free or to topple the opponent.

  Though apparently safer than the earlier phase of aggressive competition, the Frozen Peace proved an illusion too, but more because of what happened inside the two camps than between them. No political systems are really static. Behind the Iron Curtain, though the Soviet system did match – indeed, heavily outspent – NATO in armaments, the Soviet economy was failing to produce the growth in wealth that could have persuaded its people that it was truly a better society, and that the political repression and sheer dreariness of life were worth while. Khrushchev had been blamed, and paid the price, for Cuba as well as for domestic failings, when he was removed from power in 1964; but the new regime of old men, led by Leonid Brezhnev, lolled over a society beginning visibly to stagnate. The crushing of the Czechoslovak uprising of 1968, which had been greeted as the ‘Prague Spring’, showed the world just how popular Communism really was among its own people.

  But it was first in the West that the new mood of mutiny and rebellion against old leaders shook things up. America’s bloody Vietnam War, which required a draft of young men into the army, provoked increasing protests at home. Both the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and the Republican Richard Nixon struggled to figure out how to combine their military strategy with the demands of a younger nation, swollen by the ‘baby boomers’, products of a postwar rise in the birth rate. An historian of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, points out that enrolments in US colleges and universities had risen threefold between 1955 and 1970: ‘What governments had failed to foresee was that more young people plus more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection . . . This was something never before seen: a revolution transcending nationality, directed against establishments whatever their ideology.’42

  Anti-Vietnam protests rocked Berlin, Paris and London, but it was in the United States itself that the political prestige of the Cold Warriors was most badly damaged. At around this time, more damning evidence was coming into the public arena of the covert operations of the CIA, in Guatemala and in Chile, where they helped topple a freely elected leftist government. Its leader, Salvador Allende, along with thousands of others, died, and many were horribly tortured. This seemed entirely counter to the vaunted moral superiority of the democracies. Young radicals adopted as icons and heroes the enemies their leaders were fighting – Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao – and a wave of leftism swept through the campuses. Nowhere did this radicalism break through to change Western leadership – not even in France, where the ‘events’ of 1968 were at their most spectacular. But it showed that ‘détente’ did not mean stability.

  In the end, it would be the Soviet side that collapsed, far more quickly and dramatically than Western analysts had expected. Under Nixon, before his illegal wire-tapping and his lies brought down his presidency, the United States had ended its old enmity with Mao’s China, thus adding to the sense of paranoia and encirclement in Moscow. An ever-older leadership, ever clearer evidence of economic failure and ever more embarrassing evidence of Western plenty stirred discontent. Russian agreement to a world declaration on human rights encouraged dissidents at home, who spread news to the rest of the world about the repression and brutality of the Soviet system; Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writing was particularly influential. In Poland, shipyard workers protested, and the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II, in 1978, was followed by scenes of mass enthusiasm when he visited his homeland, to the horror of its atheist rulers. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan the following year, to protect a client Marxist ruler, it became embroiled in a costly, bloody war. The US responded cleverly by backing Islamist guerrillas; or at least, it seemed clever at the time.

  The fall of the Soviet Union was not brought about by guns, quite; but it was by the cost of guns, or rather missiles. A new US president, the sunny-natured and apparently rather simplistic former actor, Ronald Reagan, ordered the beginning of a system of defence against Russian missiles – his ‘strategic defence initiative’, which because it involved satellite-tracking, and in deference to a popular film, was immediately dubbed ‘Star Wars’. The USSR and NATO had been engaged in a new round of nuclear competition since 1977, when the new Russian SS20 missiles threatened Western Europe and the US had responded by basing their own Pershing and Cruise missiles there. For the Russians, trying to match this proposed new system was economically ruinous – impossible. Reagan’s increasingly contemptuous and hawkish rhetoric about ‘the evil empire’ showed the US had a leader who no longer feared the Russian threat. Many thought this foolish, but it coincided with a series of embarrassingly elderly and short-lived leaders of that empire, first the terminally ill Yuri Andropov from 1982 to early 1984, then Konstantin Chernenko, who seemed barely alive to start with.

  There were dangerous moments to come, as the Soviet system tottered on its feet. But with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev the USSR finally had a leader with the vigour and self-confidence to discuss proper disarmament with Reagan. Their three key summits during 1986–7 prepared for a radically new relationship; even Britain’s super-hawkish prime minister Margaret Thatcher warmed to Gorbachev as ‘a man I can do business with’. Internally, though, Gorbachev seems to have had no master-plan. He knew things had to change and that the Soviet system was doomed, but he somehow hoped that freshly moderate Communists could retain power while these vast territories became more politically open and economically liberal. His policies of openness and rebuilding (glasnost and perestroika) flinched from a real lurch towards market economics and capitalism of the kind the Chinese Communist Party was then embracing. What Gorbachev intended was a move away from global confrontation, perhaps even the end of the Cold War. What he intended for the USSR was less clear.

  The momentous year 1989 provided the answer. Beginning in Hungary, which refused to keep its Iron Curtain with Austria in good repair, the Eastern Europeans simply broke away – and Gorbachev would not act to stop them. Poland, where the independent Solidarity movement led by the former shipyard worker Lech Walesa had led the
way for others, now had elections for the lower house – which saw Solidarity swept to power. East Germans began voting with their wheels, packing their belongings into their boxy little Trabant cars and heading through Hungary to Austria, and freedom. After days of confusion in East Berlin, and no backing for any kind of crackdown coming from Moscow, the Wall itself was opened, and ecstatic Germans began to pour through – and then to dance on it, and then to knock it down. The Bulgarian Communists caved in and announced free elections; in Prague, vast demonstrations broke the Czech Communists’ spirit, and a ‘velvet revolution’ installed the former dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel as president. In Romania, one of the cruellest and most idiosyncratic of the Soviet satellites, things did not end so peacefully. Its dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu ordered troops to shoot on the crowds, but failed to quash the uprising; he and his wife were quickly caught, tried and shot.

  The following year saw the reunification of Germany and the start of the collapse of the USSR itself, as the Baltic republics broke away. Gorbachev was the victim of a coup by outraged hardliners, but they soon found that the collapse he had (by his wise inaction) overseen was impossible to reverse. The army would not support them, and a new leader emerged – the alcoholic showman Boris Yeltsin, who publicly defied the plotters, standing on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building. Yeltsin in effect dissolved the Soviet Union, looking on benignly as vast countries such as the Ukraine announced their independence.