The Russians are coming, again: the first Cold War as tragedy, the second as farce

297 Pages·2018·2.18 MB·English

by  Jeremy Kuzmarov

The Russians Are Coming, Again
THE RUSSIANS ARE
COMING, AGAIN
The First Cold War as Tragedy,
the Second as Farce
by JEREMY KUZMAROV and JOHN MARCIANO
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2018 by Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher
ISBN: 978-1-58367-694-3 paper
ISBN: 978-1-58367-695-0 cloth
Typeset in Minion Pro
Monthly Review Press, New York
monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Russians Are Coming, Again
1—Anti-Russian Hysteria in Propaganda and Fact
2—“The Time You Sent Troops to Quell the Revolution”: The True Origins of
the Cold War
3—Provoking Confrontation: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War
4—The Cold War and the Attack on U.S. Democracy
5—Truman, McCarthyism, and Domestic Repression
6—A War on the Global South: The Cold War in the Third World
Conclusion: Avoiding a Third World War
Notes
Bibliography
Index
To the millions of victims of the Cold War,
and those who have struggled valiantly for a lasting friendship
between the American and Soviet/Russian people
Acknowledgments
WE WISH TO THANK David Gibbs, Jerry Lembcke, and Michael Parenti for their
careful reading and comments. Thanks also go to Philip Bennett for his reading
of the manuscript; Chuck Churchill for his comradeship throughout; Michael
Yates of Monthly Review Press for his editorial support and encouragement;
Erin Clermont for her fine copy editing; and Leslie Dwyer, always strong,
keeping her eyes on the prize. Jeremy would also like to thank the staff of the
McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa for assisting him, and to Kate
Blalack and the staff at the Woody Guthrie Archive for permission to quote from
Woody’s songs. In addition, he thanks his lovely daughters, Chanda and Olivia,
for their patience while he typed away in his office, and his wife, Ngosa, and
parents. We trust that everyone mentioned will find this book worthy of their
solidarity.
INTRODUCTION
The Russians Are Coming, Again
T
he 1966 Academy Award–winning film The Russians Are Coming, The
Russians Are Coming, directed by Norman Jewison, parodies the Cold War
paranoia pervading the United States as the war in Vietnam was heating up,
depicting chaos that seizes a small coastal New England town after a Soviet
submarine runs aground.
Half a century later, U.S. citizens are again being warned daily of the
Russian menace, with persistent accusations of Russian aggression, lies,
violations of international law, and cyber-attacks on U.S. elections, as reported
in leading outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The charges are many and relentless: the Russians invaded neighboring
Georgia; the Russians attempted to subvert and overthrow the Ukrainian
government; the Russians shot down Malaysian Flight MH17 in July 2014 over
eastern Ukraine or supported rebel forces that did so; the Russians annexed
Crimea in 2014 in an aggressive move reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s
postwar actions in Eastern Europe; the Russians have threatened smaller NATO
nations in that region; and, most recently, the Russians engaged in cyber warfare
by attempting to interfere in the U.S. presidential election and then tried to
manipulate the president through connection to key figures in his inner circle.
A prime example of the new Russian hysteria comes from a 2016 report in
the New York Times by national security correspondents David Sanger, Eric
Schmitt, and Michael R. Gordon:
For his part, Mr. Putin is counting the days until Mr. Trump is in the
Oval Office. Despite a failing economy, the Russian president has been
pursuing for the past four years what most Western analysts see as a plan
to reassert Russian power throughout the region. First came the
annexation of Crimea and the shadow war in eastern Ukraine. Then came
the deployment of nuclear-capable forces to the border of NATO
countries, as Moscow, working to fracture the power structures in
Germany and France and promote right-wing parties, sent a reinvigorated
military force on patrol off the coasts of the Baltics and Western
European nations.1
Possessing some unproven assertions masquerading as fact, such as that
Putin was working to fracture the power structures in France and Germany and
promote right-wing parties, the article fails to acknowledge that a verbal
agreement was made in late 1990 between Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S.
Secretary of State James Baker. According to the Russians, whose version is
corroborated by hundreds of memos and transcripts at the George H. W. Bush
Presidential Library, Baker made a pledge to Gorbachev that NATO would not
expand east toward their border, in return for Russian support for German
reunification.2 Since then, of course, the United States has armed and funded
NATO’s eastward advance to include states that share common borders with
Russia.
The United States also provocatively increased its naval presence in the
Black Sea, carried out military exercises in former Warsaw Pact countries,
forged ties with former Soviet republics like Azerbaijan, built oil pipelines to
bypass Russia with the involvement of major Western oil companies, and
covertly supported Putin’s opponents through the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) along with Islamic terrorists in Chechnya as the British had
done a century and a half earlier.3
In 2014, the State Department fanned protests that led to the overthrow of
Ukraine’s semi-autocratic but democratically elected pro-Russian government,
prompting the Russian annexation of Crimea, which was voted on by a 95
percent majority of Crimeans. The United States then provided over a billion
dollars in security assistance to a newly installed Western-friendly right-wing
regime that suppressed a pro-Russian uprising in the eastern Donbass region.4
By omitting these aggressive U.S. actions, the New York Times and other
media sources failed to provide proper context for many of Putin’s policies,
hence furthering the impression that he alone is a major danger to world peace.
In summer 2016, the Obama administration announced the construction of a
future U.S. missile defense site in Poland and the activation of a missile defense
system in Romania.5 This came on top of a previously announced trillion-dollar
nuclear modernization program, prompted in part by lobbying undertaken by the
Bechtel Corporation, that includes the development of new nuclear-tipped
weapons whose size and “smart” technology, according to a leading general,
ensures that the use of nuclear arms is “no longer unthinkable.”6