From Stalin to Putin, a Push to “Run the World”
BOOK REVIEW: To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power
By Sergey Radchenko/Cambridge University Press
Reviewed by: Tom Nagorski
The Reviewer — Tom Nagorski is Managing Editor at The Cipher Brief. He served previously as Global Editor for Grid and as ABC News’ Managing Editor for International Coverage. At ABC he was also Foreign Editor, Senior Broadcast Producer for World News Tonight and an international reporter and producer. He has also served as Executive Vice President of the Asia Society. Nagorski has reported from dozens of countries, and his journalism has been honored with eight Emmy Awards, the Dupont Award for excellence in international coverage, the Overseas Press Club Award and a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation.
His writing has appeared in several publications, and he is the author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.”
REVIEW — Timing can be crucial with works of contemporary nonfiction; a book about a current war might lose its relevance if the conflict ends, while another rockets to relevance based on global events. Just ask Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist whose 2000 book Taliban was little noticed until September 11 of the following year. For terrible reasons, Taliban became a bestseller.
All this came to mind while reading To Run the World, Sergei Radchenko’s sweeping look at the Cold War. It’s a no-stone-unturned account of the period, from the last days of World War II to the moment the Soviet Union’s red hammer-and-sickle flag was brought down over the Kremlin in December 1991. But it’s also a book stocked with lessons for the current moment.
Radchenko’s aim is to understand what motivated Soviet leaders from Josef Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, but To Run the World leaves a reader thinking often of the current occupant of the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin is not a subject of Radchenko’s book (he appears only in its final pages) but it’s well-known that Putin pines for the Soviet period, and the parallels between Putin and his Soviet predecessors – Stalin in particular – are on full view.
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Craving respect
It’s a meticulously researched work. Radchenko uses recently declassified Cold War-era documents to answer the core question: What animated the men who ruled the USSR? Was it Marxist-Leninist ideology? Soviet domination and expansion? Economic success? Or a craving for recognition and legitimacy on the world stage?
For the most part, Radchenko lands on the latter. Much as the current leaders of China and Russia (and former U.S. President Donald Trump) speak of restoring their nations to greatness, successive Soviet leaders were consumed with the feeling that their nation wasn’t getting the respect it deserved, as the world’s largest country and the one that had sacrificed the most to defeat Nazi Germany.
Marxism-Leninism is an “ill-fitting cloth” to explain the actions of these men, Radchenko writes, more important was a “desire for recognition,” and sometimes for raw power. To take one of many examples, Stalin was interested in controlling Poland rather than “communizing” the country; the Soviets had “no plans for turning the world red.” (Not that such motivations mattered much to the Poles or Hungarians or Czechs, who would see their freedom trampled and their economies decimated in the name of Kremlin control.)
Radchenko calls his approach a “radical new interpretation” – and that’s a bit of an overpromise. But To Run the World is an impressive achievement, covering nothing less than “the making and breaking of Soviet superpower,” as the author puts it. It’s also a grand tour of the crises of the time – from the Korean War to Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis to the six-day war in the Middle East. And it comes with rich portraits of the main players – not only Stalin, Brezhnev, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, but their counterparts in the U.S. and China as well.
Then there’s the Putin connection.
The Putin factor
Just as China’s Xi Jinping is compared by some to Mao Zedong, Putin has recently drawn comparisons to Stalin, who ruled with paranoia, an iron fist, and an Orwellian system of disinformation. The parallels can seem overblown – after all, Stalin’s purges were blamed for the deaths of more than 20 million people – but To Run the World is a reminder that some comparisons are apt. Implicitly at least, Radchenko makes clear the Soviet influences on the current Russian leader.
This is especially so with Stalin. Writing about the aftermath of World War II, Radchenko notes Stalin’s fury that the U.S. and its European allies weren’t according Moscow the legitimacy he felt it deserved, growling that “they lack the basic sensitive respect;” Putin today has a similar grievance. Stalin fulminated about American and British “imperialist and expansionist aspirations;” substitute “Putin” for “Stalin,” and “NATO” for “American and British,” and you have a sentence that would fit in a modern news story. Later, Nikita Khruschev was obsessed with the Soviet Union’s place in the global order. He complained to President John F. Kennedy that “you speak about your prestige, but you do not take our prestige into account;” again, easy to imagine Putin making the same complaint.
Radchenko calls Khrushchev “an opportunist par excellence,” animated by the idea that the Soviets could win friends around the world by contrasting themselves with the West (another Putinist strategy in play across what is today called the “Global South.)” The Soviet Union was a paragon of “progress and socialism,” Khruschev argued, whereas the U.S. represented “the darkness of exploitation and capitalism.” This was the case the Soviet made from India to Egypt, Indonesia to Burma and beyond.
When it came to the twin superpowers’ roles in the Middle East, the Soviets wanted their piece of that pie. Here it was Brezhnev’s turn, “seeking recognition as an indispensable player, on a par with the Americans,” as Radchenko puts it. Once again, the Kremlin craved stature and legitimacy above all.
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The end of Radchenko’s story is the end of the Soviet experiment, the moment when “the stark reality – that the USSR was not the superpower that it was claiming to be – had finally caught up with the policy.”
But it was not the end of the Kremlin’s ambition. “Even though the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight,” Radchenko writes, “its successor, Russia, still eyed a position of prominence in the global order, looking for America’s recognition.”
Enter Vladimir Putin. He arrived in the Kremlin in 2000, and he lands in Radchenko’s book in its final chapter. “To many a Russian he stood for something that they longed for: stability, sausages. But also — a renewed sense of greatness.”
When Russia snatched Crimea in 2014 and then invaded Ukraine nearly eight years later, Radchenko says, “Putin had in effect proclaimed Russia’s exceptionalism.”
To Run the World leaves the reader with a better understanding of the through line from Stalin to Putin, and a chilling final thought. Invested with all the hopes and dreams of the Soviet leaders, Putin dreams that the West will fall, and “with the right combination of chutzpah and good luck, Russia could one day recover its elusive greatness and its insatiable, self-destructive ambition to run the world.”
To Run the World earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats
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