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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Good, March 9, 2008
This very good book is a largely successful effort to produce a portrait of the Cold War that is both accurate and accessible to a broad audience. Leffler accomplishes his objective by some smart decisions in limiting the content of the book. He focuses primarily on US-Soviet relations; he limits his discussion largely to the highest levels of diplomacy, particularly the decisions of our Presidents and the Soviet leadership at key moments; and he picks out five key sequences of the Cold War. The five key sequences are the initiation of the Cold War under Truman/Stalin, the end of the Cold War under Gorbachev/Reagan, and 3 periods when there were unsuccessful efforts to end/moderate the Cold War; Malenkov/Eisenhower after the death of Stalin, Kennedy-Johnson/Khruschev after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Brezhnev/Carter and the end of detente. The latter three are discussed as examples of how hard it was to escape the dynamic of the Cold War and explorations of the forces that sustained the Cold War.
The title of the book reflects Leffler's conclusion about perhaps the most important element of initiating and sustaining the Cold War - ideology. Leffler argues well that the competing ideologies of liberal capitalism and communism really drove the way the leaderships of the USA and the Soviet Union perceived each other and influenced decisions. Leffler also shows how important the experience of WWII was, particularly the trauma of invasion, for the Soviets. Well into the 1970s, the fear of being confronted by a hostile, aggressive, powerful German (and encircled by a powerful Japanese state) was a major concern of the Soviet leadership. In a good example of how Soviet concerns were often mirrored in the USA, worries about German democratization were a feature of American policy making into at least the 1960s. Leffler sees the Cold War as inevitable. Both the USA and the Soviets required a pacified Europe and Japan to attain security but their conflicting visions of what such security would require resulted in inevitable conflict. While Leffler uses relatively neutral language in describing this fact, it has to be said that the American vision of a democratic alliance was and is considerably more noble than what Stalin had in mind. Leffler is careful to point out that Stalin was initially pragmatic and interested in some form of accomodation.
Once initiated, the Cold War proved remarkably difficult to moderate or end. The next 3 episodes discussed by Leffler all show how ideology, the mutual fears inherent in this type of strategic rivalry, entrenched special interests such as interservice rivalries and a powerful defense establishment in the Soviet Union, and the powerful domestic political forces set in train by the Cold War all contributed to sustaining the Cold War. Leffler is generally even handed in dealing with the major actors. All the principal actors, American presidents and major Soviet leaders after Stalin, are shown to have been concerned with the dangers of the nuclear rivalry and concerned with reducing the risk of mutual annihiliation. Some of the portraits are a bit surprising. Leonid Brezhnev, usually presented only as the apostole of stagnation and a return to aspects of the Stalinist past, receives a relatively sympathetic analysis. Jimmy Carter is portrayed as a relatively resolute and unlucky individual who tried hard to make sensible decisions in the face of unfavorable public pressure.
Like a number of other historians, Leffler concludes that Gorbachev was really the key figure in the end of Cold War. While virtually all of the major Soviet leaders were concerned about the exhausting effect the Cold War was having on the Soviet Union, Gorbachev and his supporters were really the first to be willing to make radical departures in Soviet policy to break the deadlock. Its notable that while Gorbachev lived through WWII and the German occupation, he was a small child and his formative years coincided with the Khruschev era efforts to reform the Soviet state. Leffler's treatment of Reagan is particularly interesting. Leffler politely dismisses the conservative-Republican triumphalist version of Reagan bludgeoning the Soviet Union into submission. While he assigns Reagan a secondary role, he gives Reagan considerable credit for being able to recognize that real progress was possible and being able to overcome the barriers faced by prior Presidents.
While generally successful, Leffler's choices about the structure of the book have drawbacks. The concentration on the USA-Soviet relationship is probably unavoidable, but it obscures the important role of many others in important aspects of the Cold War. For example, the role of European statesmen in the formation of NATO or the role of Kim Il Sung in the genesis of the Korean war. A major feature of the Cold War was the remarkably destructive effects of US-Soviet rivalry in the developing world. There is little here about that feature. Leffler's concentration on the actions of the principal leaders of the USA and Soviet Union tend to obscure the role that domestic political factors, often with little relationship to international strategic realities, had in driving US and probably Soviet policy. Finally, a fair amount of Leffler's analysis emerges implicitly, rather than explicitly. That said, the summary section that concludes the book contains a well considered and concise assessment of American policy in the Cold War.
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29 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good reading, but didn't like the conclusions, October 19, 2007
I enjoyed the book for its research, and it makes for interesting reading, so I give it 4 stars. I'd recommend that anyone with an interest in this area read it.
BUT!
Am I imagining things, or did the vast majority of the book blame the United States for the Cold War, and claim the Soviets were always trying to end it? The writer claims that even Stalin honestly wanted friendly relations with the West, and would have behaved peaceably, but Truman killed it. In light of what we know about Stalin, this is difficult to believe.
With the exception of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the author clearly assigns the blame to Brezhnev here), each chapter has the same theme: the Soviets spoke peace, were being honest, and really meant it, while the Americans were always trying to play games,impose their will on the poor Soviets, and get better and better negotiating terms.
The conclusions are as one-sided as the old story of blaming "those Russkies" for everything. There is ample recent documentation that the Soviets were offensive-minded in their miltiary plans in Europe, and actually had plans to win a nuclear war. Such documentation is ignored in the book. Instead, Soviet leaders' quotes about desiring peace are taken at face value and quoted quite liberally. It was just too one-sided for me.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fair discussion of US-Soviet relations during the Cold War, January 29, 2008
"For the Soul of Mankind", by Melvyn Leffler, is a major study of the Cold War's political diplomacy. As the name would lead one to think, the focus is strongly on the ideological aspects of the political decision-making, but Leffler is fairly pragmatic and pays plenty of attention to issues of military strength, strategic interventions, Third World movements, and so on. There is also a lot of concentration on the personal characteristics of the countries' respective leaders, which sometimes leads it deplorably into "Great Men" historiography.
A lot can be said against this book. Not just the above-mentioned excessively biographical approach, but for example it does not actually cover all of the Cold War; Leffler describes it as covering five pivotal "episodes" in it, but in practice this means it is an all-out political history of US-Soviet relations during the Cold War, but with the odd aspect of (relatively) excluding Nixon and Ford. It seems that if one is writing about every other postwar president and leader anyway, one could as well add those too. But that aside, there is the fact that Leffler talks a lot about the economies of the respective countries, but without ever describing these and their development in concrete details. He also pays no attention to cultural and social developments, giving the book a very narrow international relations focus. One would also have liked to read more about the role of European leaders, both East and West, in the diplomatic and ideological struggle, but perhaps that is too much to include in one book.
However, this book is nonetheless a clear advance over the Cold War and neo-Cold War style of history writing, as opposed to the likes of Gaddis. Although Leffler excessively demonizes and fulminates against Stalin in the beginning, he treats the Soviet leaders remarkably sanely and accurately for an American historian of the Cold War, at no point falling for "evil empire" style propaganda. He clearly and concisely discusses not just the restraints and problems the American Presidents were facing during negotiations, but also those of the Soviet leadership. Commendable is the way in which he acknowledges the role of important leaders that were not the head of government, like Molotov, Mikoyan, Gromyko, etc. His description of Khrushchov in particular is very good, and in my view quite correctly re-establishes his intelligence, competence, and advanced insight into the problems of the USSR. He has been much maligned because of Stalinists hating him and anti-Communists also hating him, but this is quite undeserved. Some might say that Leffler overestimates Brezhnev's competence perhaps, whom he seems to hold in relatively high regard, but he does not diminish his weaknesses.
Leffler is very well informed about the substance of the major negotiation rounds between the US and the USSR, as well as the main points of contention and the periods of major crisis in the Cold War. He dispells some still common myths yet again, such as the idea that Reagan and the SDI program 'defeated communism', that Stalin wanted to attack Western Europe, that the Soviet leadership had wanted to invade Afghanistan, and that the USSR at any time wanted nuclear war. Leffler is rightly critical of both sides, and brings important things to the fore that are often underestimated as aspects of the ideological struggle: the enormous impact of the WWII experience on the USSR, the role of religion in motivating US Presidents, the complicated relationships of Soviet leaders to Stalin even long after his death, and the way the reformist Soviet leaders like Khrushchov and Gorbachov often felt betrayed by American belligerence. That the US misunderstood the situation in the USSR as often as the USSR did in the US is clear from this work, as is the fact that both sides were equally willing to be aggressor and interventionist when they felt threatened. In the end, as Leffler points out, it was Gorbachov's visionary leadership that inadvertently ended the USSR, which is both a blessing and a curse for the future of socialism.
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