Historiography of the Cold War

Soviet historiography on the Cold War era was overwhelmingly dictated by the Soviet state, and blamed the West for the Cold War. In Britain, the historian E. H. Carr wrote a 14-volume history of the Soviet Union, which was focused on the 1920s and published 1950–1978. His friend R. W. Davies said Carr belonged to the anti-Cold War school of history, which regarded the Soviet Union as the major progressive force in the world, the United States as the world's principal obstacle to the advancement of humanity and the Cold War as a case of American aggression against the Soviet Union. Carr criticized those Anglophone historians, who he felt had unfairly judged the Soviet Union by the cultural norms of Britain and the United States. == Orthodox accounts ==

The first school of interpretation to emerge in the United States was "orthodox". For more than a decade after the end of the World War II, few American historians challenged the official American interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War. For example, Thomas A. Bailey argued in his 1950 America Faces Russia that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate years following World War II. Bailey argued Joseph Stalin violated promises he had made at the Yalta Conference, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. The interpretation has been described as the "official" United States version of Cold War history. Although it lost its dominance as a mode of historical thought in academic discussions in 1960s, it continues to be influential. == Revisionism ==

The role of the United States in the Vietnam War disillusioned New Left historians and created a minority of historians with sympathy towards the Viet Cong communist position and antipathy towards American policies. Much more important were the revisionists who argued that both United States and the Soviet Union were responsible for blundering into the war and rejected the premises of "containment". They battled the "orthodox" historians. The Wisconsin School was distinct from the New Left; while members of each found themselves allied at times, New Left critiques tended to be a good deal more radical both in analysis and in proposed solutions. Following Williams, revisionists placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of their efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. They argued that American policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining the market system and capitalist democracy. To achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for American business and agriculture. Revisionist scholars challenged the widely accepted scholarly research that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar expansion of communism. They cited evidence that the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale and that Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies. In that view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of World War II to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States, who maintained a nuclear monopoly until the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949. Revisionist historians have also presented the view that the origins of the Cold War date to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Some reach back even further as Wisconsin School historian Walter LaFeber in his study America, Russia, and the Cold War, first published in 1972, argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and the United States over the opening of East Asia to American trade, markets and influence. LaFeber argued that the United States commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to American influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War. Starting with Gar Alperovitz in his influential Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965), revisionists have focused on the United States decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of World War II. In their belief, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in effect started the Cold War. According to Alperovitz, the bombs were used not against an already-defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets by signaling that the United States would use nuclear weapons to stop Soviet expansion, though they failed to do so. New Left historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (1972) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War. The Kolkos argued American policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The United States was fighting not necessarily Soviet influence, but also any form of challenge to the American economic and political prerogatives through covert or military means. In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, but more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy. == Post-revisionism ==

The revisionist interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own. In a variety of ways, "post-revisionist" scholarship before the fall of Communism challenged earlier works on the origins and course of the Cold War. During the period, "post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by accepting some of their findings, but rejecting most of their key claims. of post-revisionist scholarship became a major channel for guiding subsequent Cold War research. An almost immediate move to challenge Gaddis' framework came from Melvyn P. Leffler, who "demonstrated that it was not so much the actions of the Kremlin as it was fears about socioeconomic dislocation, revolutionary nationalism, British weakness, and Eurasian vacuums of power that triggered US initiatives to mold an international system to comport with its concept of security". That provoked "strong rebuttals" from Gaddis and his followers, but Leffler deemed their objections inaccurate and unsubstantiated. However, Leffler himself still falls within the overall post-revisionist camp. Out of the "post-revisionist" literature emerged a new area of inquiry that was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who started the conflict than in offering insight into United States and Soviet actions and perspectives. Gaddis is now widely seen as more "orthodox" than "post-revisionist". 21st century scholarship Since the 2000s, benefiting largely from the opening of Cold War-era archives in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world, Cold War historians have begun to move on from questions of blame and inevitability to consider the Cold War in the longue durée of the 20th century, alongside questions of culture, technology and ideology. Historians have also begun to consider the Cold War from a variety of international perspectives (non-American and non-Soviet) and most especially have stressed the importance of what was then called the "Third World" in the latter half of the Cold War. They have sought emotional explanations for political decisions and developments typically examined from a rational perspective and have analysed interpersonal dynamics between world leaders. Frank Costigliola is a prolific proponent of the role of emotion in historical analysis. For example, he positions the breakdown of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union and the hostilities of the early Cold War as being, in part, a result of the heightened strong emotional of key figures in American foreign policy, like Averell Harriman, following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. To Costigliola, it was the "attitudes and rhetoric" of key diplomats at the end of World War II that set the tone for future relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Consistent with the move away from questions of blame to questions of culture and ideology, American historians have also begun exploring the intersection between domestic U.S. political developments and the early years of Cold War outbreak. One such example is Thomas Borstelmann's 2003 work "The Cold War and the Color Line", which defines domestic racial discrimination after 1945 as a foreign as well as a domestic issue: America’s closest allies against the Soviet Union were colonial powers who had interests that needed to be balanced against those of the emerging 'Third World' in a diverse multiracial, anti-Communist alliance. Domestically, at the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the national consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle. Revisionism in the 21st century Despite the overall focus away from the Orthodox vs. Revisionist debates there have been new revisionist works that have emerged in the 21st century. One such example is Norman Naimark's 2019 Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty.. Another work arguing that Stalin in fact sought to avoid the Cold War is the 2006 ''Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953'' by Geoffrey Roberts. ==Espionage==

After 1990s new memoirs and archival materials have opened up the study of espionage and intelligence during the Cold War. Scholars are reviewing how its origins, its course, and its outcome were shaped by the intelligence activities of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other key countries. Special attention is paid to how complex images of one's adversaries were shaped by secret intelligence that is now publicly known. == See also ==

• Berger, Henry W. ed. A William Appleman Williams Reader (1992). • Ferrell, Robert H. Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. (2006). 142 pp. excerpt and text search. • Fitzpatrick, Sheila. "Russia's Twentieth Century in History and Historiography," The Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 46, 2000. • Gardner, Lloyd C. (ed.) Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams (1986). • Garthoff, Raymond L. "Foreign Intelligence and the Historiography of the Cold War." Journal of Cold War Studies 2004 6(2): 21–56. Fulltext: Project MUSE. • Isaac, Joel; Bell, Duncan, eds. Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (2012) online review by Victoria Hallinan. • Kaplan, Lawrence S. American Historians and the Atlantic Alliance, (1991) online edition.. • Kort, Michael. The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (1998). • Matlock, Jack E. "The End of the Cold War" Harvard International Review, Vol. 23 (2001). • Melanson, Richard A. "Revisionism Subdued? Robert James Maddox and the Origins of the Cold War" Political Science Reviewer, Vol. 7 (1977). • Melanson, Richard A. Writing History and making Policy: The Cold War, Vietnam, and Revisionism (1983). • Olesen, Thorsten B.Ed. The Cold War and the Nordic Countries: Historiography at a Crossroads. Odense: U Southern Denmark Press, 2004. Pp. 194. online review. • Stephanson, Anders. American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters, Verso Books, 2025 • Suri, Jeremi. "Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?" Journal of Cold War Studies - Volume 4, Number 4, Fall 2002, pp. 60–92 in Project MUSE. • Trachtenberg, Marc. "The Marshall Plan as Tragedy." Journal of Cold War Studies 2005 7(1): 135–140. Fulltext: in Project MUSE. • Walker, J. Samuel. "Historians and Cold War Origins: The New Consensus", in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (1981), 207–236. • Watry, David M. Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden in the Cold War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. . • Westad, Odd Arne, ed. Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (2000) essays by scholars. • Westad, Odd Arne, "The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms," Diplomatic History, 2000, Vol. 24 in EBSCO. • Westad, Odd Arne, ed. Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (2000) excerpt and text search. • Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History, Basic Books, 2017. . • White, Timothy J. "Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies" International Social Science Review, (2000). • Xia, Yafeng. "The Study of Cold War International History in China: A Review of the Last Twenty Years," Journal of Cold War Studies10#1 Winter 2008, pp. 81–115 in Project MUSE. == References ==