Russian History As Therapy For Western Historians Who Just Want To Be Loved

This is Sergey Radchenko’s To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.   

Just weeks following the book’s launch date, Amazon is already trying to clear its stock by offering a discount of 25% to $26. That’s as competitive as the price of an elite brand of door sausage (aka draft stopper).  

According to Michael McFaul, once the Obama Administration’s Russia-hater in chief in Moscow and Washington, the “brilliant writing” is the “go-to source for understanding Soviet behaviour during the Cold War. Fiona Hill, McFaul’s Russia-hating successor during the Trump Administration, claims the book is “magisterial [and] help[s] explain why Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine and confront the West”.

If you want to slam your door on those two, and block the winter winds starting again in the Ukraine, place Radchenko’s blockbuster between your bottom door rail and the sill. In that position, it will also do double-duty as warning from that piece of ancient Russian wisdom – it’s bad luck to shake hands over a threshold.

As Anglo-American histories of Russian thinking go, Radchenko’s is the new one on the edge of an old, familiar black hole.

He begins by announcing that “this book offers a radical new interpretation of the underlying motivations  of Soviet foreign policy “. He follows with his three radical novelties:

• “what the Soviets saw as their ‘legitimate’ interests were often not seen as particularly ‘legitimate’ by anybody else., leading to a kind of ontological insecurity on the Soviet part that was compensated for by hubris and aggression”.
• “At the end of the Second World War Soviet policy makers surveyed the world… No one expected the Americans to stay in Europe”.
• “The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact carved up Eastern Europe and led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War.”

Radchenko’s new facts to substantiate these three claims aren’t new at all so there’s no point in rehashing them – in the maxim familiar in the Baltimore and Washington think tanks,  Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik – that’s Yiddish for don’t keep banging your teapot at me.

Radchenko brings this to conclusion at page 30: “The Cold War was inevitable because Stalin made it so…[his] responsibility [is] best summarized  by Jeffrey Lewis: ‘there were three causes of the Cold War: Stalin, Stalin, and Stalin.”  Lewis is an ex-Pentagon employee and currently a junior academic at a think tank employing American and British retirees from the Pentagon and Ministry of Defense.  It keeps its funding sources secret, but at Lewis’s previous think tank the funders included Bill Gates, George Soros, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.  

Because Stalin is to blame at the beginning of this history, Radchenko comes to his second teapot-banging conclusion at the end of his history, page 603, when — without the benefit of historical archives or interviews with sources — Radchenko says Putin is a repeat of Stalin’s psychopathological craving to be loved by the West, especially by Americans.  In his February 2022 speeches launching the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine, Putin “raved”, according to Radchenko; click to read the speech of February 21, 2022, and the speech of February 24, 2022.  

The war, Radchenko adds now, “was mainly Russia’s failure: it proved unwilling or unable to overcome its toxic resentments and imperialist impulses. But there was another factor in play. Stalin’s belligerent foreign policy, whatever his motivations, helped forge the West on an anti-Soviet basis.  Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets tried hard to undermine Western unity even as they craved Western recognition. They never managed.”

In this history,  Radchenko diagnoses Stalin with a personal case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), who then inflicts his pathology on all the Russians, turning Soviet policy and now Putin’s, into Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). For the outcome, if not the cure, Radchenko goes back to Yiddish: “Perhaps, with the right combination of chutzpah and good luck, Russia could one day recover its illusive greatness and its insatiable, self-destructive ambition to run the world.”

This too has its clinical diagnosis for Radchenko because he’s Russian born and bred himself.  He and his book make a case of repeating catchwords, phrases, and ideas in the hope of being loved for them by authority figures and being rewarded with money in professorships and book advances. This is history as psychotherapy for the historian.

As his fallback when Radchenko’s clinical diagnosis of Stalin fails to explain what Stalin actually did, Radchenko acknowledges that in his explanation of Stalin’s relationship with the Greek Communist Party (KKE) during the civil war in 1946, “there is no easy answer”. In 1949, when Mao Zedong arrived in Moscow to meet Stalin after the Chinese communist victory in the Chinese civil war, Radchenko confesses  “what he [Stalin] really thought [of Mao] is difficult to gauge”. As for the climactic events of 1950, when Kim Il-Sung asked Stalin to support the North Korean invasion of South Korea, starting the Korean War, Radchenko says: “we still do not know what exactly happened to Stalin between October 26 [1950], when he was so sour on an invasion, and the end of January [1951] when he evidently changed his mind.”

There is much more Radchenko doesn’t know which he doesn’t acknowledge. In his analysis of Soviet decision-making leading to the military intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, Radchenko has no knowledge of the secret planning by President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to entrap the Soviets in Kabul; finance and arm the mujahideen to wage attrition war against the Red Army; and block Soviet proposals for a negotiated exit and protract the fighting as long as possible. He is ignorant of the White House-assisted assassination of the US Ambassador in Kabul, Adolph Dubs; and of the US sabotage of the United Nations  withdrawal negotiations chronicled by Washington Post reporter, Selig Harrison, with the UN negotiator on Afghanistan, Diego Cordovez. For more detail and references, read this.

When researching his book, Radchenko was on salary at the Wilson Center in Washington. From his office to the US archives and to the sources on what had really transpired in Afghanistan between 1979 and the withdrawal of 1989, Radchenko had only to walk a few hundred metres down the street. But his feet didn’t budge; his brain paralyzed them.

This pathology of psycho or neuro type leaves an obvious black hole in Radchenko’s history book. The decision-making by Stalin and his successors to serve what they believed to be necessary for Russia’s  security is recorded in the near-total absence of what the US, the UK,  and other NATO allies were doing at the same time to sabotage and destroy that security. The Cold War was war – and there isn’t a case in Radchenko’s history from Libya to Iran, Beijing to Tokyo, Washington and London to Moscow, in which the war-fighting, Russia-hating policies of the West are examined as cause for Russian effect.

Predictably, inevitably, that turns Radchenko’s history into a story of Russian madmen rattling their teapots at benevolent Americans hosting well-intentioned tea parties. Stalin again: “of course, Stalin had legitimate security interests as long as looking after them did not require the imposition of a brutal Stalinist system of control and repression on the unwilling Eastern Europeans. Since Stalin did exactly that, surely [sic] he is chiefly responsible for the confrontation that ensured.”

Fast forward to Radchenko on Mikhail Gorbachev attempting to negotiate an end to the Afghanistan War in 1986:  “Why did it take so long to translate this realization into practice? The answer, ironically, is once again the Soviet image.  Gorbachev was very worried about the kind of message that a defeat in Afghanistan would send to Moscow’s allies around the world.” What Gorbachev shared with all of his predecessors in the Kremlin back to Stalin was that they “craved international recognition of Soviet leadership”.

For his history of Gorbachev’s wanting to be loved by the Americans in the six years, 1985-91, Radchenko presents 49 pages. For his history of Stalin wanting to be loved by the Americans over the eight years, 1945 to 1953, Radchenko has published 125 pages. For Putin, who has been in power as president for 24 years, there are just 4 pages. The documentary evidence on which Radchenko relied for his analysis is very considerable for Stalin – it totals 390 footnotes. These include declassified personal papers of Stalin himself, his communications to and from ministers and other officials, intelligence reports, and memoranda of conversation. For Gorbachev the evidence shrinks to 153 footnotes. For Putin, there are just 6 footnotes – one of them a White House transcript of press conference and five Kremlin transcripts of Putin speeches.

In other words, the longer the time in power of the Russian leader wanting to be loved by the Americans, the less evidence Radchenko provides in his book. This inverse relationship between evidence and findings is evidence itself of Radchenko’s method – this is extrapolation, or to use the psychoclinical term, projection. Radchenko claims to have discovered what he set out to prove – that Russians need love, and Russian leaders need American love most of all.

Does Putin share the same wanting to be loved by Americans? Good question — Radchenko’s answer is yes, but his book ends before he provides the evidence.  

As Sigmund Freud acknowledged, there are bound to be flashes of lucidity from the fellow on the couch. For example, Stalin is the source for this assessment of the political potential of the German left: “Communism suits Germany like a saddle on a cow”.  For another example, “whoever occupies territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to do so. It cannot be otherwise.”

As a guide to the current debate between Putin and the General Staff  over the conditions of military security required for a political settlement of the Ukraine war, is there a better one than that?  Radchenko can’t answer. The mind of the Russian military is closed to him.