Cold War Historiography

My name is Andrew Preston.

I teach at Cambridge University,

and this is a lecture on the origins of the Cold War 1945 to 1950.

I think it's helpful if we consider the origin of the Cold

War first to think about the Cold War as a whole,

this global conflict that lasted from 1945 46 47 up until 1989 90 91.

And I like to think of the Cold War as a play in four acts,

the first act of the origin of the Cold War,

which is what I'm going to be discussing in more detail in this lecture.

Right now.

The second act is a period of detente or a

relaxation of tensions in the 19 sixties and 19 seventies.

The third act is what historians call the second Cold War.

The re escalation of tensions from 1979 to 1984 and then the

fourth act is the unexpected peaceful ending of the Cold War.

From 1984 to 1989 90 91

in order to understand

the course that the rest of the Cold War took,

we have to understand the origins of the Cold War,

we have to grapple with how and why the Cold War began.

If we want to understand how the Cold War as a whole unfolded and what made it tick,

what were its internal dynamics?

And at the heart of that, what makes the Cold War a Cold War

are tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Cold War would, of course, become globalised,

and it would involve countries from Vietnam to the Caribbean, from South America,

all through Africa and Asia.

It truly was,

As the historian O'Donnell West had famously called it a global Cold War.

But the Cold War began as a rivalry between

the Soviets and the Americans after World War Two,

and then it quickly developed.

By the time we get to 1950 into this existential struggle for the fate of the world,

and in order to understand the Cold War,

we really do need to grapple with its origins.

One thing to remember about the Cold War as we think about the Cold War as a

whole is that not everything that happened in

these four decades was because of the Cold War

the Cold War can't explain everything. It doesn't explain decolonisation.

It doesn't explain the Arab Israeli conflict.

It doesn't explain European integration or the I T revolution

that begins in the 19 sixties and 19 seventies.

The human rights revolution or globalisation.

The Cold War didn't cause any of those things,

although the Cold War dramatically affected all of those things,

just as all of those things

affected the Cold War

as well.

So I say that because as we look at the origins of the

Cold War and as we go and explore the rest of the Cold War

in further lectures,

it's important to remember that the Cold

War wasn't everything and especially this Soviet

American rivalry that's at the heart of the Cold War doesn't explain everything.

But it does explain a lot

if we look at the initial interpretations of the

Cold War of the origins of the Cold War,

the historiography, in other words,

what historians have argued about the Cold War and how historians

have argued with each other about why the Cold War began.

If we look at this early historiography,

what we see at the at the heart of historical

explanations for the Cold War is essentially a blame game.

Um, who was to blame for the Cold War?

Who was responsible was that the Americans was that the Soviets?

The initial historian biography that emerged in the 19 forties and fifties,

which was dominated by historians in the United States,

argued that the United States was passive and reactive,

and it was simply reacting to Soviet aggression.

The second wave of his story, Ah Graffiti,

which began in the 19 fifties but really took shape in the 19 sixties

that emerged out of the new left in the United States and Britain,

Um, and also in France and West Germany and

unfolded in the shadow of Vietnam, argued, by contrast,

that the Cold War was an American project that if anyone

was to blame for the outbreak of the Cold War,

it was the United States that it was all about American imperialism

or neocolonialism or capitalist expansionism or whatever you want to call it.

In the 19 eighties, there emerged a school of thought known as post revisionism,

which kind of blended the early Orthodox school of

the 19 forties and fifties with the revisionist school,

the new left revisionist school of the 19 sixties and seventies,

and historians such as John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn Leffler argued

that there's a little bit of truth to both sides.

But really, what the post revisionists did was explore the structural

explanations for the origins of the Cold War, and that's really

where I'm going to fall down

as well. That's really the kind of argument that I'm going to be making

through this lecture.

Cold War historiography was changed dramatically with the end of the

Cold War itself in the 19 nineties and early two thousands

as archives

in

the former communist world opened up as archives in Moscow in Beijing

and Hanoi and Havana and elsewhere began to be accessible to historians.

And so we could take that archival material from

the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China

and elsewhere and integrated with the archival evidence that

we already had from archives in the United States,

the United Kingdom, France, um, uh, and elsewhere.

And this so called new Cold War history didn't really change the

blame game So much is at a lot of nuance and detail

and richness to Cold War historian graffiti.

Now I myself want to sort of move away from a blame game,

even though I think certain people at certain

times bear some responsibility for what happened.

That's what explaining history is all about.

But really,

what I'd like to do is explore the structural

reasons for the Cold War while also paying attention

to the personalities

as we examine the origins of the Cold War.