Experimental Blog # 230

Quotations from and comments on "The Cold War" - A World History by Odd Arne Westad

"The human cost of Stalin's state-building was immense. Lenin had set a bloody pattern by executing at least one hundred thousand people without any form of judicial process."
"At least ten million Soviet people were killed by Stalin's regime from the late 1920s up to his death in 1953. < > In addition, at least three million died in the Ukrainian famine, which the regime did much to provoke and nothing to prevent."
"How could the Soviet system, based on terror and subjugation, appeal to so many people around the world?"

"Eastern Europe was remade by Communism, western Europe was remade by capitalism. < > Part of the reason for the success of the new were the disasters of the old. After Europe's calamitous half century, any stability would do, even one that was imposed by outside powers through the Cold War."

"Communism was to be China's weapon for modernization < > It would make the country rich and strong."

"By the late 1970s much of Latin America was ruled by military dictators. < > In all, fifteen out of twenty-one major states in Latin America were led by military dictators by the end of the decade."

"The Cold War in Europe ended because years of closer association between East and West had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other, and because of western Europe's proven record of successfully integrating peripheral countries into the European Community."

    This is a very long book with about 629 pages of text and about 638 footnotes. The author was born, in 1960, and grew up in Norway. He later seems to have spent years in Britain at the London School of Economics; and only very recently has become a professor at Harvard University.
    Of course, everybody can only have their own subjective point of view; and this author can not be an exception. Norway has a short border with Russia; and the author is very involved with the Western European and American points of view.
    Although Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev seem to be, by far, the most written about people in this book, there are only 2 other Russians, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev, as compared to 9 Americans, in total, in the top 20 people talked about in this book. The Americans are, in alphabetical order: James Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
    The remaining 7 of the top 20, in alphabetical order, are: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharal Nehru, and Zhou Enlai.
    It seems that the author, Odd Arne Westad, might say that these 20 people are the most important "world players" in the Cold War era.