NEWS ANALYSIS: Is the Cold War really over? (01/24/99)

NEWS ANALYSIS

Is the Cold War really over?

by Paul Goble
RFE/RL Newsline

A leading Russian foreign policy analyst has suggested that the Cold War is not yet over - an argument that not only challenges most assumptions about that conflict, but also underscores the difficulties its participants may have in cooperating in the future.

Writing in the current issue (No. 5, 1998) of the Russian foreign policy journal International Affairs, Sergei Kortunov argues that the Cold War has not been about ideology or containment of the Soviet Union, as Western writers claim, but rather reflects the West's "total rejection" of "the legitimacy and legality of historical Russia."

Mr. Kortunov, who is the vice-president of the Russian Foreign Policy Association, makes a number of points in support of this position. He says that Moscow won World War II "as Great Russia, not as a Red Empire." He insists that neither the Soviet Union nor Stalin had any ambitions after 1945 and that that the West rejected all Moscow's efforts to ease conflict.

And he argues that the West not only continued but expanded on the Nazi approach toward Russia by promoting the idea of "mythical" states to dismember the Russian heartland. Indeed, he says, "the world anti-Russian center moved from Berlin to Washington" following the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Consequently, no right-thinking Russian, Mr. Kortunov adds, can accept the idea that the West has been "right" during the Cold War because that would mean not simply "the renunciation of Communism" but the acceptance of "the fallacy of the entire Russian historical idea - of the entire Russian Orthodox idea in history." That, in turn, would mean accepting what he suggests is the Western view of Russia as an evil empire or even - and here he quotes former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski - "a redundant country."

Unfortunately, Mr. Kortunov goes on, "most democrats" in Russia itself do not deny Moscow's "defeat" in the Cold War or conceal their "joy" over it or even their role in bringing it about. And he cites with approval the observation of one Russian analyst that "it is much more convenient for the 'democrats' to pretend that the West has never carried on an unrelenting struggle against our former motherland, Russia-USSR, and that it was only by our own efforts that we destroyed the 'evil empire.'"

Mr. Kortunov argues that any fair-minded assessment will show that, "strictly speaking, the Russian Federation was 'fighting' against the USSR on the side of the West" and that only after the 1991 break-up have some Russians begun to recognize that they have been helping the West pursue an anti-Russian rather than anti-Soviet strategy.

On the one hand, Mr. Kortunov's article offers nothing new. All his arguments have been made by Soviet ideologues in the past and by Russian nationalist writers in more recent times. And all his positions have been dismissed by the most serious scholars in both Russia and the West.

On the other hand, Mr. Kortunov's argument is striking both substantively and politically.

Substantively, his suggestion that the Cold War is not over and will continue until the West accepts Russia's legitimacy and even its moral equivalence highlights the deep suspicion many Russians now have about the West.

Politically, the appearance of this article in Russia's premier foreign policy journal, one addressed not only to its own diplomats but also to the West, indicates that ever more people among the Russian political elite share Mr. Kortunov's anti-Western positions.

And by providing ideological justification for those in Moscow who want to adopt a tougher line against the West, Mr. Kortunov's argument may become a selffulfilling prophecy, exacerbating tensions between East and West to such an extent that he and others will be seen as justified in claiming that the Cold War is not yet over.

Paul Goble is publisher of RFE/RL Newsline

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