The Cold War: a Trip Report

[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.