[er, that is the late 1990s documentary series The Cold War]
Some kind soul a long time ago posted this: a documentary series,
produced by CNN and made by the same production staff of ITV's landmark
series The World At War. The last month or two I've finally got
around to watching it, while working on a bitch bastard whore of a
model. (It's that 1/350 Zeppelin Takom released last year. It's been
death by photoetch.)
TL;DR: It's a great series and I learned a lot
Slightly longer: Can you believe that a series that is 26 episodes long
and fifty something minutes long each, and it still feels like stuff is
left out? That's more the material than any flaw in the series itself -
telling the story of the Cold War is like telling the story of the
Napoleonic era in history: shit's gonna get left out. That's pretty much
the only substantive criticism I can make, though. The series was made
in the late 1990s, and the biases it has are that of the bias of its
time, rather than favoring one side or the other. Even that can be
educational: one genuinely interesting thing I found about the series is
that it portrays something I haven't thought much about: just in many
ways how happily the Cold War ended. The Warsaw Pact and the USSR fell
apart with (in context, anyway,) remarkably little violence for such a
major geopolitical event.
Rather than tell the story chronologically, the series organizes itself
by topic. This can mean events are touched on multiple times, but are
usually covered in depth someplace. And being made in the late 1990s, it
has a frankly astonishing collection of people interviewed. I don't
think it is a stretch to say they interview either the actual top
decision makers, or their closest aids throughout the Cold War. For
example, Fidel fucking Casto features predominantly in several episodes
(at one point he gets the off-camera interviewer to laugh.) Gorbachev,
naturally, every living US president at the time, save Reagan? A merely
elderly Henry Kissinger, actual spies and assassins, CIA agents, the
former head of the Stazi, even Boris Chertok, he who authored "Rockets
and People." It is a truly astonishing collection.
Given "it's CNN" and every episode ends with "series idea Ted Turner"
you can be forgiven for thinking that the series is going to pull its
punches with US Cold War policy, and I can assure you they do not. In
regards to the coup in Chile, for example, America comes across
monstrous idiots - the CIA generally comes off very poorly. Both
Vietnam and Afghanistan (1980s) are seen as bloody, pointless wars that
cause immense human suffering to no real benefit. Similarly, when both
sides begin to back sides in regional wars with material, the result is
usually a never-ending conflict in a war that refuses to resolve. The
most depressing episodes are the ones where forever wars start in Angola
(much to the annoyance of the USSR, who thanks to a really generous
economic aid package to Cuba basically empowered Cuba to mess in
regional conflicts without consultation) or, interestingly, the spies
episode. After establishing that intelligence work played a small but
critical role in keeping the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating, most
intelligence work, especially the creation of secret agents, as somewhat
pointless. The interviews, especially, with former Soviet spies are
just damning; they come off as conventionally intelligent men with
enormous functional blind spots, for whatever their motive come off as
causing an inordinate amount of death which they seem oblivious to.
Speaking of emotions, all viewers should be aware that this series does
not spare you from people being killed on camera, collections of freshly
killed bodies, etc. They do this with little to no warning, too: the
first time it happens to my recollection is when they show Cubans being
executed by communist firing squads? Definitely a blanket trigger
warning over this whole series if you are sensitive. Somebody watching
this series, please make note specifically of what episodes have the
triggering stuff, and ideally when in the episode it happens?
So if you only know yer Cold War history for hot takes on Twitter or
somebody who knows a lot about this stuff and just wants a refresher,
this series is a solid recommend. The entire thing can be watched for
free here:
https://archive.org/details/Cold_War_1998_CNN_Kenneth_Branagh/01+-+Cold+War+%5BCNN%5D+-+Comrades+%5B1917-1945%5D.mkv
Random thoughts:
- The second-weirdest moment in the Cold War is when global communism
is saved partially by the intervention of Nixon and Kissinger, who
threatened to back the defender with nuclear weapons in a war between
the USSR and China.
- I've read that post war, the happiest time in the USSR was
under Khrushchev, which I can believe. I also get why apparently the USSR was in the end glad
to be rid of him. He attempts two agricultural reforms: one, trying to
plant Soviet steppe lands, and one involving young Communists and
claiming "we can grow Corn here now." The former fails with crops
rotting in the fields because despite how much the Soviets invested
doing this steppe farming thing, they forgot to build grain trucks and
rail cars to go with it, and the second is one of the dumbest
agricultural plans I've ever heard of, and it ended with corn dying in
the cold and the shattered hopes and dreams of the young Communists.
- Gorbachev comes off as a fantastic leader in this documentary,
despite being the Barrack Obama of Communism: a man who wanted reforms
in order to save the existing system, unable to see the system itself
was doomed. I'm not sure anyone could have saved the USSR at that point,
but it was a bold attempt.
- The USSR and the Warsaw pact had the same problem: Marxism
should have made the people there richer, but had not, and with its
policy failures could only stay in power via one-party dictatorship.
This set up Marxism to fail, because without the freedom to point out
mistakes of the state, there was no mechanism to correct errors of the
state. This fits in well with a broader criticism of Marxism, which in
its literature, anyway, aspires to be scientific, but doesn't understand
what that actually means. In science, any given statement is in theory
can be revised or provable to be false, a type of freedom that the
Warsaw pact was terrified of. Further, when spring finally came to these
nations, the one thing everybody could agree on despite their
differences was "communism sucks and needs to go."
- Gorbachev became increasingly unpopular at home, and did what
national leaders do when this happens but are popular elsewhere: they go
elsewhere.
- Speaking of, one thing I don't think I really understood until
now was that Boris Yeltsin was moving ultimately to break off Russia
from the USSR. That makes sense, of course; it's what all the other SSRs
were doing, but Yeltsin being a rival of Gorbachev while backing him
during the Coup now makes sense to me. From 2022 it is darkly hilarious
to me that Russia wanted this move because it was by far the richest of
the SSRs.
- The Sino-Soviet split appears to be about Mao seeing his
opportunity to take over "world communism" by defending Stalin, a guy
who did Mao few favors in his lifetime, but set the precedent of World
Communism being overseen by a infallible cult of personality. Mao loved
both those things when he was the possessor of them.
- Speaking of Mao, after causing massive famine by having
literally all of China pointlessly making metal, and then getting tens
of millions more killed in what was Mao basically asserting his
authoratah over the Chinese Communist party after being kicked upstairs
to chairman of the board, a Chinese reporter describes Mao's efforts to
open up to the west as "Finally, Mao doing something good!"
- It is something of
an irony that the two most avowed anticommunist US Presidents during
the Cold War were the ones who did the most to end the Cold War. Only
Nixon could go to China (as then old Vulcan saying goes), but at the
same time, it took two to tango. Both Nixon and Reagan (eventually) had
Soviet leaders open to such things.
- Speaking of China and America, there's a really funny line
about how America was "heartbroken" when China went communist, like all
of America was deeply hurt by the turn of events. I'm not saying that's
not true; I'm just saying that's funny.
- Speaking of funny, apparently when Carter and Breshnev signed
their arms control agreement, all the Soviet big-wigs in the background
were speculating on if Carter and Brezhnev were going to kiss.
- Carter, oddly, despite wanting to further arms control
reductions, comes off as kinda hapless, first wanting this thing without
being able to articulate the details, and then signing a not very good
agreement just to say it had been done.
- The fact that Reagan went from basically not understanding
nuclear war to wanting complete disarmament, at least privately, is a
positive attribute of Ronald Reagan.
- Reagan was described at Gorbachev's first meeting with him as a "caveman."
- The single weirdest moment of the Cold War was when in arms control negotiation with Reagan, Gorbachev proposed complete nuclear disarmament, which Reagan was all for, but refused, because Gorbachev wanted Reagan to give up his essentially imaginary SDI program.
