Download Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. New York

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Reviews of Books
emphasizes the post-Stalin Soviet leaders’ preoccupation with sorting out their own power positions and
dealing with the serious repercussions of Stalin’s domestic Cold War of purges, xenophobic isolationism,
and antisemitism (pp. 50–61). On the critical issue of
whether or not Moscow would have accepted a united,
neutral Germany, Zubok depicts Soviet diplomatic demarches from the Kremlin in 1953–1955 as maneuvers
to hinder U.S. plans to integrate West Germany into
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) rather
than as a meaningful attempt to negotiate a compromise.
Leffler illuminates well the multiple pressures and
spreading global competition that worked against a
lasting détente. In his review of Khrushchev and
Kennedy’s negotiations of a limited nuclear test ban,
Leffler emphasizes that the constraints on both sides
were very substantial (pp. 187–201). Zubok offers a
more critical perspective on Khrushchev than Timothy
Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko in their recent study,
Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American
Adversary (2006). Zubok rejects their thesis that
Khrushchev had a grand strategy for détente. Instead,
he suggests that Khrushchev’s reliance on “nuclear
brinkmanship was exceptionally crude and aggressive,
reckless and ideology-driven” and that he “relied more
on his instincts than on strategic calculations” as “his
ideological beliefs, coupled with his emotional vacillations between insecurity and overconfidence, made him
a failure as a negotiator (pp. 153, 338). There was little
room for more than limited agreements, as Khrushchev
stepped up competition in the Middle East, Africa, and
Cuba, and Washington more than matched the Kremlin
in these areas and the conflict in Vietnam escalated.
Leffler and Zubok highlight the efforts of Carter and
Brezhnev to continue détente after 1976, even though
it had been fatally weakened by actions and inactions on
both sides, as well as by the decline of Brezhnev’s health
after 1972 and his gradual loss of control of Soviet policy and initiatives. Nevertheless, Leffler points out
Carter’s persistent effort to keep détente alive with
Brezhnev, and Zubok emphasizes Brezhnev’s efforts to
maintain détente in order to avoid the risks of war that
Khrushchev had encouraged. In relying extensively on
memoirs by and interviews with Brezhnev’s advisers,
Zubok minimizes the overall destructive impact of the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 on both détente and on the Soviet Union’s relationship with Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the Kremlin’s offensive in
Africa was at least as unsuccessful in exporting its
model of socialist modernization as the United States
was in exporting democratic capitalism, a point that is
convincingly demonstrated in Odd Arne Westad’s The
Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the
Making of Our Times (2005).
In their assessments of Reagan and Gorbachev and
the end of the Cold War, Leffler and Zubok reaffirm
their central consensus on the nature of the conflict,
why it lasted as long as it did, and why it ended the way
it did. Both authors give significant credit to Reagan,
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but not to his revitalized containment strategy. Instead,
they emphasize the importance of Reagan’s willingness
to negotiate with Soviet leaders, especially Gorbachev,
and to reassure him that the U.S. did not threaten Soviet security and was prepared to negotiate on most
arms control issues (Leffler, pp. 449– 450, 462– 466;
Zubok, pp. 285–289, 343). Leffler and Zubok also assign to Gorbachev primary credit for making the most
significant changes concerning Soviet ideological preconceptions, views of international relations, and policy
orientation toward external involvements from Central
America to Afghanistan. In effect, Gorbachev abandoned the “struggle for the soul of mankind” that the
authors emphasize as the core of the Cold War conflict.
Leffler and Zubok give different emphases to the final stage of the conflict, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the Soviet Union itself. Gorbachev is Leffler’s
favorite Soviet leader, and he approves of Gorbachev’s
unwillingness to defend communist regimes in Eastern
Europe, including East Germany. Zubok, however,
criticizes Gorbachev for replacing the revolutionaryimperial paradigm with “new thinking,” a radical transformation of Soviet ideology and political and economic systems, which included opening the country to
the West and the world. Zubok would have preferred
a cautious, gradualist approach based on a systematic
strategy that insisted on negotiations and concessions
from the West for major Soviet actions, such as agreeing to the unification of Germany within NATO. In
short, Zubok endorses Stalin and Brezhnev as superior
strategists and negotiators over Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
THOMAS R. MADDUX
California State University,
Northridge
PATRICK WRIGHT. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War.
New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pp. xvi, 488.
$34.95.
It is rare to find a historian willing to explore, in any
systematic way, the relationship between politics and
language. After all, the popularity of political history
owes much to the easy complicity with which we accept
the conventional modes of human communication,
leaving terminological issues to the philosophers, or to
occasional scolds like George Orwell. But Orwell is
long gone and the philosophers today seem rather disinterested. Individual words often carry a lot of dangerous freight. Mischievous hybrids (“Islamo-fascism”
would surely be one current example) flourish provocatively in the media. And academic as well as public
discourse is littered with emotion-laden images and
truth-obscuring metaphors.
All credit then to Patrick Wright for inquiring into
the origins of the “iron curtain,” a ubiquitous metaphor
of the Cold War era. The term is indelibly associated
with Winston Churchill, who made it the central image
of his famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri, on March 5, 1946, sounding the alarm about
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Comparative/World
Soviet postwar expansionist ambitions in and around
Europe. Churchill was perfectly happy to leave undisturbed the general impression that this was yet another
of his imaginative coinages. Actually, Joseph Goebbels,
similarly drawing attention to the Soviet threat, had
used the phrase earlier in 1944. Now Wright takes us
further back to the aptly named “iron curtain” devised
in the nineteenth century to provide some metallic security against the many deadly infernos caused in London theaters by the use of candles, oil lamps, lighted
chandeliers, and highly inflammable special effects, including fireworks. The iron curtain protected the audience, if not the less-enraptured actors and stage
hands on the other side. The transition to political imagery was made, appropriately, by the playwright and
pacifist/internationalist Vernon Lee. Shocked by the
advent and experience of world war in 1914, she lamented “the moment when war’s cruelties and recrimination, war’s monstrous iron curtain, cut us off so utterly from one another” (p. 80).
A variety of references to the “iron curtain” surfaced
during the turbulent 1914 –1920 period, although it
seems not to have become a stock phrase. Internationalists in Lee’s circle used it to express their anguish over
the breakdown of European civilization. Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians employed it in 1915 to condemn
the high tension electricity wires with which the occupying Germans closed the Belgo-Dutch frontier. A
postwar French prime minister warned against “lowering an iron curtain on the frontier of unoccupied Germany” (p. 222). It fell to the British leftist Ethel Snowden— who, upon her arrival in the postwar Soviet state
as part of a supportive delegation, noted “We were behind the iron curtain at last” (p. 152)—to pioneer the
henceforth more exclusive focus of the image upon the
Red specter. However, despite a good deal of venomous East/West imagery in the interwar years, actual references to the “iron curtain” appear to have been rare
and, as Wright acknowledges, “the phrase fell into comparative disuse during the 1930s.”
In the end then, although this book is very well written, interesting, and full of stimulating digressions, the
results of the quest, insofar as it relates to the metallic
phrase itself, are rather thin. One senses a certain unacknowledged disappointment in the author, who begins, as the small well of quotable usages dries up after
World War I, to use the phrase to describe various political tensions and ruptures in interwar Europe, especially with regard to the Soviet Union. The assumption
seems to be that if people were not using this particular
metaphor, they were nonetheless thinking along the
lines it had been coined to suggest. But that is not quite
the same thing, and the constant reiteration of the
phrase leads to a confused thesis.
One cannot help but wish that Wright, once he saw
the limits of a subject confined in this way to the odyssey
of a single phrase, had adopted a different strategy focusing not, as is the case here, on the many misguided
pilgrims to the new socialist state (whose illusions have
been exhaustively unmasked by many unsympathetic
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writers). Instead, he might have focused on the iron curtain, not as an exclusive mental construct but as one of
a number of similarly striking, strongly suggestive, and
surely related metaphors that have been devised repeatedly and with profound effect since 1914 to serve
particular interests and to shape public responses to the
tensions and divisions of European power politics. The
“cordon sanitaire” is one obvious example of a similar
image that could have been creatively linked (it receives
only a brief treatment here) with the “iron curtain,”
which in its familiar Churchillian form was perhaps its
lineal descendant, and one that then led in its turn to
the enduring “containment” images of the mature Cold
War. That would be a subject worthy of the literary and
forensic talents impressively on display here.
FRASER J. HARBUTT
Emory University
MICHAEL CRESWELL. A Question of Balance: How France
and the United States Created Cold War Europe. (Harvard Historical Studies, number 153.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 238. $49.95.
In the crucial year 1950, Western powers were on the
defensive in the global context of the Cold War. A communist government had gained control of mainland
China. France found itself bogged down in a colonial
war in Indochina. The Korean War erupted, stretching
thin the resources of the United States. And, despite
the signing of the NATO alliance the year before, Western Europe’s security seemed precarious in the face of
substantial Soviet conventional forces in Eastern Europe. To further strengthen the defense of Western Europe, given French colonial preoccupations and the
U.S.-led engagement in Korea, the Truman administration decided that West Germany, now rebuilding its
industrial economy, would need to be rearmed. There
were risks involved. The Soviets would oppose; the British would consent; but would the French be willing to
have Germans in uniform five years after the defeat of
the Nazi regime? An older historical narrative has
France accepting German rearmament reluctantly and
only as the result of high-handed pressure from the
United States—a French Caliban yielding to the material might of an American Prospero. Recent scholarship has challenged this story of American omnipotence and French dependency. The revision argues that
the United States did not always get what it wanted
from the French, despite the weaknesses of the Fourth
Republic and the asymmetrical power relationship between the two countries.
Michael Creswell’s extensively researched monograph makes a significant contribution to this revisionist trend and carries the assessment of France’s role in
the Cold War a step further by arguing that French
statesmen feared the Soviet threat to French security
more than they dreaded a revived German militarism.
The same statesmen understood, however, the psychology of the French electorate. Germany was the historical enemy and thus the Soviet Union, at least for a sub-
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