Sources, Methods, and Competing Perspectives on the End of the Cold War

The facts ... are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean. ... What the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use. It goes without saying that a decade of glasnost has been a boon to scholarship on Soviet politics and history, including diplomatic history. Although archival revelations have not, to date, supported any radically new interpretations of Soviet foreign policy, they have served to clarify important issues and strengthen one or another long-standing argument on the causes or consequences of the Cold War.2 Moreover, new documentary sources have contributed much to works that shed valuable light on precisely how the “Kremlin's Cold War” was waged.3 But the archival windfall brings potential pitfalls. And, as Carr's dictum serves to remind us, one of these is overreliance on the new sources, a temptation to view Politburo, Central Committee, or Foreign Ministry records as definitive in and of themselves. The temptation is understandable given that they offer access to what seems most important: the inner councils of a highly centralized, dictatorial system. But herein a danger lies, for so centralized and dictatorial was the Soviet system – fully autocratic under Josef Stalin – that the decision-making locus was not the Central Committee or Politburo, but Stalin's own mind. Also complicating the historian's task were Stalin's aversion to records of his deliberations and his pains to deflect responsibility and depict authority as lying elsewhere.4 Thus, the “black box” of early Cold War decision making is still only partially open, and only yields to judicious use of new documents in conjunction with memoirs, interviews, and other sources

Argument (complex analysis · Autocracy · Cold war · Democracy · Foreign policy · Judgement · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Temptation · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law · Philosophy

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• The End of the Cold War

  Open Access•Margarita H Petrova•European Journal of International…•2003

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