Way back in 1978, a dude named John Lewis Gaddis started in his academic career by publishing Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (America & the World), which looked at U.S./Russian relationships from the time of Catherine the Great to Jimmy and Leonid. John probably expected to spend his life attending conferences and writing papers on the latest modalities of the communist menace, but time’s winged chariot had other ideas. When John was a mere stripling of 48, the USSR folded its act and slid gracelessly into kaputsville.
In 1997, John wrote a book, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, using the sort of Kremlin archives he surely thought he’d never see to write a behind-the-scenes history of the greatest power struggle the world has ever seen—a book that, obviously, I am just getting around to reading. We now know so much, so much more than it seemed we ever would, but the greatest revelation of all to John is this: They really believed that shit! Those commie bastards actually believed that they were the good guys!
Naturally, I exaggerate for comic effect, but John does seemed stunned to learn that communist leaders actually saw themselves as the leaders of the dispossessed, actually looked forward to world of socialist bliss after they had crushed the forces of Yankee imperialism once and for all. It wasn’t all about the caviar and dachas and mistresses!
Well, it wasn’t. It was largely about power—“A Russia that can stand up!” as Stalin put it, “A China that can stand up!” as Mao put it, but both spoke for legions who saw their world turned upside down by the forces of global capitalism, whose mysterious “rules” all seemed to lead to the same outcome: “We win, you lose.” It’s fascinating to learn how little Marx most Marxists actually read—“Only heroes read Capital,” said Molotov, but they didn’t need to read it. The truth of capitalist exploitation and expropriation hit them in the face every day.
Well, the Marxists, bloody murderers that they were, are thankfully and deservedly on the dungheap of history, where they belong, but capitalism still hasn’t gotten all the kinks worked out. As Francis Fukuyama (and others) have pointed out, the Industrial Revolution has triggered the greatest change in the way human beings live since we’ve been on the planet, and it’s all happened in the course of two centuries. So it’s not surprising that we haven’t quite the hang of it yet.
Afterwords
According to Wikipedia, Gaddis is close to George W. Bush and helped work on his speeches. So I guess he doesn’t know much about the Middle East.
