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Essay on Effects of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991
The Cold War, to return to Albright's observation, was not just, then, a useful background for spy fiction and James Bond movies. Rather: It was a time of relentless and institutionalized tragedy; of proxy wars that destroyed lives in every continent, of barbed wire stretched across Europe's heart; of gulags and forced confessions; and of countless thousands killed while trying to escape. Above all, it was a time of fear of showdowns in Korea, Berlin, and Cuba.... Each night we knew that within minutes, perhaps through a misunderstanding, our world could end and morning never come.
Today's leaders, in the major capitals throughout the world, have no greater responsibility than to ensure that the history of the Cold War does not repeat itself. Although no one would seriously question the centrality of the Cold War to the history of our times, scholars have long debated how to write this history. Until the early 1990s they did so within the confines of the Cold War itself, with little or no expectation that it could or would end soon. Now that it has, however, the entire field needs reassessment, and that process is well underway.
The opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s together with the declassification of the so-called Venona papers -- translations of some 3,000 messages sent between Moscow and Soviet intelligence stations in the 1940s led to the publication, in the late 1990s, of four major works on Soviet espionage that proved without question "the Russians were running a good many spies in the Untied States in the 1930s and 1940s, that they recruited them from the ranks of the left, that they ran them to steal secrets, and when they got caught at it they went to ground and waited for a better day". The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America The Stalin Era, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilev.......
