Soviet-born historian Sergey Radchenko’s To Run the World is a book about the perils of ambition. Derived from the Latin word for the “striving after” or the “desire for” advancement, the term also meant “ostentation” and “pomp” to the ancients. In modern English it can also have the negative connotation of an “excessive or immoderate desire” for advancement or honour. It can be a kind of disease, an affliction that actual achievement can never cure. Every goal reached prompts planning for the next. The ultimate objective, presumably, is adoration: from those the ambitious perceive as their peers, their betters and their underlings and, in the final analysis, from “History.”
The word амбиция entered the Russian language during the time of the terribly ambitious Peter the Great and has a similar semantic field to its English cousin. While it can refer to self-realisation in a field of excellence (“healthy ambition,” as a self-betterment website for Russian professionals puts it) it is more often used in a negative sense: “ambitious people are those who are arrogant, self-confident and used to stepping on others.”
Like Peter the “Great,” whose empire they inherited, the Bolsheviks were ambitious people who didn’t mind stepping on others. Their original immodest goal was world revolution and communism, a state of global happiness in which each gave according to ability and received according to need, where exploitation and inequality, housework and taxes, money and war were overcome and everyone could reach their full potential. Ambition, brutality, repression, terror and war were all legitimate, even necessary tools for achieving this goal. Ambitious ends justified the most terrible means.
By the time Joseph Stalin’s labour-camp socialism had won the second world war in Europe alongside the declining British imperialists and the relentlessly rising US capitalists, the ambition had transmogrified into the desire for an empire. Soviet leaders now wanted to be recognised by other imperialists as equals while continuing to be adored by the anti-imperialists of the world as the leaders of the global liberation struggle. To Run the World tells the story of how this paradoxical striving for greatness played itself out between the end of the second world war and the end of the empire in 1991.
Radchenko is refreshingly clear about the fact that the Soviet Union was an empire, notwithstanding its anti-imperialist self-fashioning. During the war years, he writes, Stalin — like Winston Churchill — “freely engaged” in a “brutal, cynical imperialism.” After the war, Stalin even wanted a colony in Africa to demonstrate that the Soviets were the better imperialists. As Soviet foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov explained to his US counterpart, the Soviet Union intended to “try its hand at colonial administration.”
This failed quest for Libya was, in Radchenko’s words, “a manifestation of imperialism in an imperial age.” It explicitly referred back to Tsarist Russia’s unfulfilled hopes in the Scramble for Africa, and thus put the Soviet Union in a historical line with the old empire. Nothing came of this strange project but it showed that the communists in the Kremlin, having acquired an empire, thought and acted like imperialists.
This, of course, was one of Mao Zedong’s gripes with the treatment he received from “big brother”: that “the Soviet Union took advantage of China by imposing quasi-imperialist terms on a junior partner.” Radchenko agrees with Mao about “Soviet imperialism in China,” pointing out, for example, that the 1945 Sino–Soviet treaty of Alliance had “a blatantly colonial character,” infringing China’s sovereignty in ways it had gotten used to under other imperialist powers.
Only under Nikita Khrushchev did the Soviets give up their “quasi-imperialist assets.” But this bought Mao’s goodwill only for so long; soon enough the chairman would “bitterly criticise Khrushchev for pursuing colonial policies in an anticolonial guise.” In a moment of self-knowledge, the latter was incensed: “What, do you take us for red imperialists?”
Leonid Brezhnev, who thought of himself as “a European,” later became more accepting of this new role: “‘Imperialism, imperialism,’ he grumbled privately. ‘The times have changed! Imperialism looks differently depending on who leads it.’” Fittingly, the ageing imperialist in the Kremlin was also openly racist about the Chinese, who he thought might overrun, first the Soviet Union, then the rest of Europe: “Chinggis Khan’s hordes did not stop with the Russian lands,” he warned darkly, “they reached Western Europe” as well.
Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University, demolishes the notion that we have to choose between ideology as the be all and end all of Soviet foreign policy and the equally simplistic idea that the men in the Kremlin were coldly calculating realists, a species of robo-Bismarck. It’s possible to burn with the desire for world revolution sometime in the distant future, after the final battle with the capitalists, while making pragmatic choices in a world where capitalism is very much alive and armed to the teeth.
Its recovery of reasonable middle ground in often-polarised scholarly discussions is one of the many virtues of this book. Without diving into the weeds of scholasticism, Radchenko outlines the major interpretive lines historians have taken on the most prominent moments in the cold war: the breakdown of the wartime alliance with Britain and the United States, Stalin’s decision to Stalinise Eastern Europe, the Berlin blockade of 1948–49, the Korean war of 1950–51, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Berlin crisis of 1958–61, the Cuban missile crisis and the Sino–Soviet split of 1962, the military intervention ending the Prague Spring in 1968, the détente between the superpowers of the late 1960s and 1970s, the ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan from 1979, Gorbachev’s successful bid to end the cold war in the 1980s, and the final breakdown of the empire in 1989–91. All of these, and more, are narrated in a sure-footed, synthetic account, which, despite being over 600 pages long, never bores the reader.
But Radchenko goes well beyond such synthesis by insisting that, after inheriting much of the real estate of the tsars, the Bolsheviks felt they deserved the same status as their class-alien predecessors. Once they became one of the two nuclear juggernauts that could annihilate all life on earth (except maybe rats, cockroaches and scorpions), they started to feel that they had a right to run the place, either by themselves or, more realistically, in concert with the United States. As Brezhnev cheerfully told US national security advisor Henry Kissinger in 1973: “Look, you will be our partners, you and we are going to run the world.”
Annoyingly, the Chinese communists didn’t agree with this vision. They, too, were ambitious and soon felt that they were the better communists and the better anti-imperialists than the collectively ageing men in the Kremlin. Radchenko made his name as a historian of Sino-Soviet relations and it is one of the great merits of his history of the Soviet cold war that it gives China a key role. The history he tells is not of a confrontation between capitalism here and state socialism there, but a three-way contest for world domination, a Chinese–Soviet–US triangle that maintained a dynamic field of power.
This triangle defined the possibilities for other, lesser actors in this drama. The middling and smaller powers’ crafty exploitation of the great three’s ambitions to get what they wanted for themselves — economic aid, weapons, assistance in stepping on others — is a consistent sub-theme of the narrative.
What tempered the Soviet leaders’ ambition, however, was the fear of war, particularly nuclear war. Radchenko starts his book with three vignettes from the wartime lives of Nikita, Lyonya and Misha, later known as First Secretary Khrushchev, and General Secretaries Brezhnev and Gorbachev. The experience of the second world war deeply formed their personalities and the horrors they remembered made them hesitate to burn up the world in their quest for their own, and their country’s, glory. All three were “deeply traumatised by the Second World War years before they took the reins of power.”
Post-Soviet Russia, Radchenko argues in a chilling passage, inherited the ambition of the old Soviet Union (and the resentment that comes with its having been thwarted) but the men in charge today are not chastened by the intimate knowledge of what war actually means.
What are the implications of this history for dealing with the new crop of ambitious people in the Kremlin? In his final two pages, Radchenko leaves no doubt that he sides with those who see the war against Ukraine as Russia’s fault. It was caused by the “unsatiable, self-destructive ambition to run the world” that the post-Soviet elites had inherited from their Soviet predecessors.
But that diagnosis still does not tell us what to do. Advocates of a world carved up into “great power” zones of influence might read Radchenko’s account as an argument for their view that Russia should be left alone in its “backyard” so that the United States can focus on confronting China. “The Russians,” they might argue, have long wanted recognition as a great power, so why not give them that status, so they are appeased?
Ukrainians and others interested in democracy in Europe might instead see his book as yet another proof for the necessity of a policy of neo-containment: given that Russia’s elites continue to feel they deserve great-power status, and given the limitless nature of ambition, they will continue to be a threat to their neighbours. Hence: Ukraine into NATO and a hard line against the current regime in the Kremlin.
Both would be right: Radchenko’s book delivers a diagnosis of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian malaise but not a blueprint for policy. The same is true for a major Foreign Affairs article he co-authored on the diplomatic history of Russia’s war against Ukraine: it stresses complexity and contingency in the breakdown of early attempts to reach a settlement at the negotiation table.
Such, of course, is the nature of history. It eludes simple “lessons” and instead gives us a better understanding of the complexities of the present. Radchenko’s book is a great contribution to this quest. Written with panache, based on prodigious research, insightful throughout and often funny, it will be the standard history of the Soviet cold war for the foreseeable future. •
To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power
By Sergey Radchenko | Cambridge University Press | $57.99 | 768 pages
