The Soviet Cold War Machine
Lessons from the Sino-Soviet Rivalry + Why Boredom Starts Wars
Welcome to part two of our Cold War history series with Sergey Radchenko. Here’s part one.
In today’s epic interview, we discuss…
Khrushchev’s removal from power and the transition to the Brezhnev era,
How the USSR and China managed their relationships with Vietnam,
Sino-Soviet border conflicts, Brezhnev’s negative feelings toward China, and Nixon’s rapprochement,
Watergate and the inability of China or the USSR to understand American politics,
Why the Soviets decided to invade Afghanistan,
Reagan’s approach to negotiations and his relationship with Gorbachev,
How to manage the containment paradox and unknown adversary motives when competing with China and Russia today.
Co-hosting today is Jon Sine of the Cogitations substack.
Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
The Fight For Vietnam
Jon Sine: At the end of part one, we were just talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, there was the transition in 1964, when Khrushchev was unceremoniously deposed. My question is, in your story of status, how much does prestige carry over with each new leader? Brezhnev’s era was described as “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev,” after all.
Sergey Radchenko: The phrase “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev” was coined by the Chinese. They were unhappy with how the Soviets continued to pressure China to adopt policies that the Chinese deemed unacceptable. They believed that although Khrushchev pursued anti-Chinese policies and was removed, the policies remained in place. Thus, they invented the term “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev” (没有赫鲁晓夫的赫鲁晓夫政策).
Regarding what happens to the standing of new leaders when leadership changes — that’s actually a very interesting question. Khrushchev was removed in October 1964, at which point he basically was Soviet foreign policy. He stood head and shoulders above everybody else in the Soviet Politburo. He could make decisions single-handedly without consulting anybody, like sending missiles to Cuba. There were some people like Anastas Mikoyan who spoke up against this, but even he was very careful in his opposition. Khrushchev was unassailable in many ways during his last years in power.
Once Khrushchev was overthrown — or, “retired” as they put it — you have a new set of Soviet leaders, including Leonid Brezhnev as the Party First Secretary, who later becomes the General Secretary. You also have Alexei Kosygin, who is effectively the prime minister, and Nikolai Podgorny. They form a triplet, a “Troika” (Тройка) of leaders that ran the Soviet Union for a period of time.
Starting from 1964, Brezhnev, who is nominally in charge as the First Secretary, feels out of his depth. Brezhnev came to power not entirely confident of himself, particularly in foreign policy. He was consulting with others in a way that Khrushchev never did.
This explains why, in 1965, Alexei Kosygin went to China in a bid to repair relations with Mao Zedong. Brezhnev didn’t go himself, but he could not stop Kosygin from doing so. Kosygin wanted to repair relations with China, and Brezhnev agreed to let him try. Of course, nothing came of it because Mao Zedong told Kosygin that their struggle with the Soviet Union would “last yet another 10 thousand years – less is impossible.”
Meanwhile, Brezhnev, in order to improve his standing and legitimacy as the leader of a communist superpower, extended aid to Vietnam. When we talk about legitimacy and its practical effects, Vietnam is a key case study. Khrushchev didn’t really care about Vietnam, and the Soviet Union was not heavily involved there until 1964. Beginning in 1964, there was escalation with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and increasing American presence, but there also was renewed Soviet commitment to Vietnam.
Why? Because Vietnam was a communist ally in need. Helping Vietnam bolstered Brezhnev’s personal legitimacy and standing as a leader, especially with the Chinese watching. The Chinese were accusing the Soviets of trying to sell out communist movements around the world. Brezhnev, as the leader of this communist superpower, had to help Vietnam then.
That’s why we see the beginning of massive Soviet involvement in the Vietnam War, including advisors on the ground and military equipment. This would not have happened under Khrushchev, but for Brezhnev, there was a deficit of legitimacy, and Vietnam filled this gap.
Jon Sine: Can you explain why you see this change in attitudes towards Vietnam? In your book, you write that the Chinese position under Mao favors conflict, struggle, and violent revolution as something to be promoted, whereas Khrushchev prefers peaceful coexistence. What changes with Brezhnev?
Sergey Radchenko: I struggled with this question in the book because I could not understand why Khrushchev was so committed to supporting Fidel Castro while not caring about the Vietnamese. I have no answer except for perhaps some personal factors. Ho Chi Minh visited Moscow quite a few times in the late ’50s and early ’60s, trying to repair the relationship between the Soviet Union and China. During these visits, Ho Chi Minh contradicted Khrushchev softly and tried to teach him in a way that I think annoyed him.
It’s difficult to read into these dynamics, but somehow Khrushchev just didn’t like Ho Chi Minh and didn’t want to bother with this faraway place that he did not understand. He preferred to focus on another faraway place he didn’t understand — Cuba — for reasons unknown, getting deeply involved there but not in Vietnam.
Was Brezhnev very different? In terms of his knowledge about Vietnam, no. He was on the same page as Khrushchev and knew nothing about Vietnam. But for Brezhnev, it was a matter of demonstrating his commitment to the communist cause of struggle against American imperialism.
Part of the explanation for Brezhnev’s increased commitment is that it coincided with American escalation in Vietnam. If at this point he had done nothing — saying, “I don’t care about Vietnam, let the Chinese handle them” — he would have looked weak and appeared to have abandoned a communist ally. These factors contributed to the increasing Soviet involvement.
Jon Sine: Let’s stay on this discussion of American involvement. The Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 arguably changed a lot in the course of this sort of ménage à trois between the US, the USSR, and China. On the Chinese side, you read into their documents and show that Mao’s Third Front movement (三线建设) was basically inaugurated by the American escalation in Vietnam. That is to say, Mao was able to build the biggest economic change in China since the Great Leap Forward as a result.
In writing this book, what new insights about this did you discover during the research process?
Sergey Radchenko: The most interesting thing for me regarding Vietnam — and there’s a whole chapter on the Vietnam War in the book — is that we in the West typically think about Vietnam as America’s war. We focus on American boots on the ground, how the Tet Offensive and impacted the United States, the bombing campaigns, and so on. We look at the situation through American eyes.
What I was trying to do in this chapter was to understand how Vietnam mattered for the Soviets. What I discovered was that it wasn’t even American involvement in Vietnam that drove the Soviets crazy. The Soviets were really worried about how Vietnam impacted their competition with China.
As you mentioned, the Chinese in the mid-1960s became increasingly radicalized and saw Vietnam as a case study where they could showcase their influence and vision for world revolution. Mao was at the forefront, advising Vietnamese leaders and saying, “The Americans are invading? Well, that’s not a big deal. That’s fine.” At one point he said, quoting this Chinese proverb, “You have green hills in Vietnam — you can go into the green hills and there’s always firewood there (留得青山在，不怕没柴烧).” Reading this, you might wonder what he was talking about, but his attitude was that revolution was on their side, the future was on their side, so they should fight against the Americans and not listen to the Soviets.
The Chinese were really upset about the Vietnamese taking Soviet aid. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese were trying to balance between both sides, telling the Chinese about how much they admired Chairman Mao, how wise he was, what good advice he gave. Meanwhile, they also felt that they needed Soviet aid and weapons to fight against the Americans. They were balancing both sides.
From the Soviet perspective, this was basically a struggle for influence. Who would win in establishing influence in Vietnam, the Soviets or the Chinese? That was their Vietnam War.
Jordan Schneider: You also bring up the aspect of logistics — how the Soviets were getting aid to the Vietnamese. Partly, they had to go through China. The US innovated during that time too — this is when containerized shipping first came into play.
What can you say about how the Chinese were interfering with Soviet aid to Vietnam?
Sergey Radchenko: It was awkward because the Chinese could not tell the Vietnamese, “We hate the Soviets, so therefore we’ll be blocking the aid they try to send you once it crosses our borders.” But in reality, the Soviets did try to slow it down. There was a pileup of train shipments at the border.
The weapons had to go across China, starting from the Northern border and going all the way to Southern China and then onto Vietnam — sometimes those train consignments were looted by the Red Guards. There was something akin to a civil war going on in China in the 1960s. It was chaos.
The Soviets would always raise this issue with the Vietnamese. They would say, “Look at the Chinese. You say they are your friends, but look what they’re doing. They’re not transporting our weapons, which you desperately need.” The Vietnamese response was, “Please, just let us handle it. We have to be very careful, and we have to understand the Chinese are having a difficult time.” This was a real problem for the Vietnamese and certainly a propaganda point for the Soviets in the late 1960s.
Jordan Schneider: Were the Vietnamese actually that unruffled by the Chinese interfering with the shipments?
Sergey Radchenko: They hated it. There are so many things that the Vietnamese hated about what the Chinese were doing in the 1960s. We have to understand, of course, that the Chinese were extending considerable aid themselves to Vietnam, and their aid was also important in terms of light weapons and railroad workers — about 300,000 people at some point over the entire period. There was actually considerable Chinese involvement on the ground, and it was important to the North Vietnamese.
But what they did not like was the Chinese interfering with the Soviet weapon shipments, and their pressure on Vietnam to stop taking Soviet aid. They did not like this at all.
One thing they really hated was when Chinese domestic politics became radicalized during the Cultural Revolution — from mid-1966 onwards — and the Chinese tried to promote a Cultural Revolution in Vietnam. If you imagine being the Vietnamese at this point, fighting this war against the Americans, and the Chinese come with their crazy radical ideas and Red Guards and whatnot, that is not something that’s going to sell well with the Vietnamese Communist Party leadership.
You see already at that point a cooling in the Vietnamese approach towards China. They don’t like what the Chinese are doing, and they’re more willing to listen to Soviet advice. The Soviet advice, by the way, is basically to talk to the Americans to end the war, or at least engage in peace talks, whereas the Chinese told them to keep fighting.
Jordan Schneider: I would recommend folks check out The Dragon in the Jungle: The Chinese Army in the Vietnam War, which is a fun dive into Chinese archives regarding this question in particular.
Greatness over Grain and Unlikely Partnerships 狐假虎威
Jordan Schneider: Anyway, let’s take it to Nixon. Brezhnev all of a sudden develops this incredible love affair with one of America’s arguably least lovable presidents. What changed about Brezhnev’s approach to Vietnam, the US, and China once Nixon came onto the scene?
Sergey Radchenko: Jordan, as a way of introduction, we have to understand where Brezhnev finds himself in the late 1960s. First of all, there was effectively a war going on with China. They fought a border war in March 1969 over this little island, which is actually closer to the Chinese side of the Ussuri River. The Chinese have a reasonable claim, but they fought a war over this island. Then, the Soviets made noises about a potential preemptive nuclear strike on China. This was a nasty situation, and the Soviets were worried about a Chinese invasion.
The Chinese, by the way, were afraid of a Soviet invasion. “Afraid” does not cover it — they were paranoid. They thought the Soviets were ready to do a 1968 Czechoslovakia-style special operation all over again. By 1969, they were really preparing for a Soviet invasion.
The Soviets, by contrast, thought that the Chinese were going to invade Siberia. There’s even a Soviet-era joke about the war between the Soviet Union and China that lasted for only two days. On the first day, war is declared. On the second day, the Chinese surrender, and 100 million Chinese cross over the border as prisoners of war. Then the Soviet Union declares unconditional capitulation.
There’s this sense in the Soviet Union that China is an existential threat on their border in the Far East, and that drove Brezhnev nuts. He really hated the Chinese so deeply. You can see that in his various commentary about China and the Chinese — how they’re unreliable, how you can never trust them. There are a lot of orientalist tropes there.
One of the things that I was able to do in my book was track where Brezhnev got his ideas about China. It turns out that he got them from 19th-century Russian orientalist literature.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay on that weird racist arc for a second. Do you think these ideas precipitated the Sino-Soviet split, or do you think the breakdown in relations emerged from other factors and then Brezhnev just used orientalism as a justification?
Sergey Radchenko: It’s both. You also see these tendencies under Khrushchev, even when the relationship with China was pretty close. Khrushchev never trusted Mao and thought that Mao was this sketchy character, dictatorial in his ways, and so on.
Once the relationship really started to deteriorate in the 1960s, it became so much more pronounced, both for Khrushchev and especially for Brezhnev, who basically just went full-blown racist on China, saying really nasty things about the Chinese and contrasting them very negatively with the Europeans and the Americans whom he thought he could have a good relationship with.
We have to, of course, put this in context. What was happening in China in 1966-67 was crazy. The Soviet Embassy was literally under siege by Red Guards who erected a scaffold, a platform to hang the ambassador. This was canceled at the last moment because Zhou Enlai came out and talked to what I think was a 14-year-old girl who was in charge of this Red Guard contingent trying to storm the Soviet Embassy.
Zhou Enlai said that hanging the ambassador would interfere with diplomatic relations, so they canceled the operation. But from the point of view of Soviet diplomats, they were about to be lynched, and this was all relayed to Moscow in the form of reports. The Soviets were reading this saying, “What is going on? These people are crazy.”
This contributed to this quite racist thinking about the Chinese and complete failure to understand what was going on there. The Soviets were not alone — nobody could understand what was happening in China. The Cultural Revolution was madness in so many ways, but it contributed to Brezhnev’s thinking that Europe was the better place to build bridges.
Already in the late 1960s, even in the mid-’60s, he began his engagement with de Gaulle, then Pompidou, and later with Willy Brandt after the German Social Democrats came to power in September 1969. Brezhnev felt that Willy Brandt was the way to go, and Brandt, of course, had his Ostpolitik and the promise of economic cooperation with the Soviets.
Brezhnev started developing this European détente before he even turned to the United States. At this point, he was saying nasty things about Nixon. Nixon, of course, was known to Soviet leaders — he was in Moscow in 1959 having the famous, or rather infamous, Kitchen Debate with Khrushchev. They knew who Nixon was, and they didn’t like him. Brezhnev also said things about Nixon that were not very complimentary, but then things changed.
What changed was, first and foremost, Henry Kissinger visited Beijing in the summer of 1971, and Nixon’s visit to Beijing was announced. Brezhnev saw that as an “Oh my God” moment. I don’t know if he believed in God, but he was thinking, “The Chinese are our enemies. The Americans are going there — this is really bad — so we have to get Nixon to come to Moscow.”
He really invested himself into this summit, which ultimately happened in May 1972, and he developed a fairly friendly relationship with the American president. After that, I think it really built from there. Somehow, he thought that he had Nixon’s trust, and he then went to Washington to visit Nixon and went all the way to Nixon’s Western White House, which is not far from LA.
Jordan Schneider: Brezhnev was pushing for détente with Nixon. You emphasize that when Khrushchev was envisioning himself on the world stage, he thought he could spread his wings and play some big nuclear weapons-backed games. But Brezhnev, as you say, had a different vision of the US and Soviet relationship — he wanted to run the world together. How did he come to want such a world, and how did that manifest in his policies?
Sergey Radchenko: Jordan, to explain that, let’s go back to Khrushchev. Khrushchev was a really optimistic character. He thought that the Soviet Union was surging ahead and doing so well economically, and in terms of science and technology. The launching of Sputnik made him really optimistic — and for good reason. That’s why he proclaimed that in 20 years’ time they would “establish communism."
As the Soviet joke goes, they decided to hold Olympic Games instead because it was never going to be realized. But in 1960, it seemed like this was possible. Then after that, things went downhill pretty quickly.
The Soviet economic situation wasn’t turning out so well. In 1963, the Soviet Union was already importing grain and spending gold reserves. How can you build communism if you cannot even feed your own people? That was a major problem.
By the late 1960s, it was totally obvious that this promise of communism was not being realized. The Soviet Union was not coming closer to that goal of building abundance and joy for everyone that was part and parcel of that initial promise Khrushchev made.
In 1968, there is this memorandum from Andropov to Brezhnev which basically said, “Look, we’re losing the Cold War. We are losing to the Americans because we’re not investing enough in R&D, in education. Our labor productivity is low,” and so forth.
I was able to access the Soviet Politburo Discussion from 1966, which includes hundreds of pages of discussions about the state of the Soviet economy, and they all knew that things were not going well.
They tried to implement reforms, the Kosygin reforms, introducing incentives, basically making the country more capitalist. But it wasn’t working. They tried to tinker with it here and there, but the whole system was just garbage. It was just not delivering.
Because of that, the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet system started to fall apart. People were not buying anymore because the material abundance was not there. Brezhnev understood that. Brezhnev was looking for a new idea, and that is where this external aspect of greatness comes into play. America would recognize the Soviet Union as an equal superpower, and that could be sold to the Soviet people as Brezhnev’s achievement.
Together with this came the idea of peace, and Brezhnev saw himself as a peacemaker leader of the USSR. In his conversations with Nixon, he would often refer to the fact that the Soviet Union and the United States together had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world six, seven, eight times over, and so they had a responsibility to fix the world — to resolve the nuclear problem, to stabilize China.
The title To Run the World came from the moment in the spring of 1973 when Henry Kissinger went to Moscow, and Brezhnev took him hunting wild boars. It was outside of Moscow in this dacha, and they were in this hunting tower, just Brezhnev, Kissinger, and the interpreter, waiting for the wild pigs to come and feed so they could shoot them.
Kissinger recounted that moment later in a conversation with Nixon, he said, “Look, Brezhnev told me, ‘Don’t take any notes, but I’ll tell you this. What we want to do is we want to run the world together with the United States.’” That struck me as a very interesting proposition from a leader of a communist superpower, working together with the United States. How do you even explain this from a Marxist-Leninist perspective? That doesn’t make any sense.
True, it doesn’t make any sense! But it does make sense from the perspective of selling Soviet greatness to the Soviet people.
Jon Sine: Nowadays, there are strategists talking about how the US could peel Russia away from China. It’s interesting that, at various points during the Cold War, both the Soviets and the Chinese were seeking to align with the US against the other.
What historical lessons from that dynamic do people forget today?
Sergey Radchenko: This is my favorite example of how ideology can be just cast aside. We can talk about China being this revolutionary power that complained endlessly about the Soviet Union betraying the global revolution, but then we get to the late 1960s, and they basically come around and embrace the United States.
An interesting moment discussed in the book was, I think in the fall of 1970, when the American Mao biographer Edgar Snow turned up in China, as he did on occasion. The Chinese leaders thought Snow was a CIA spy, but he was actually just a leftist journalist.
Anyway, Edgar Snow turned up in China and had a conversation with Mao Zedong in which Mao said, “We think that Nixon is a good fellow.” Snow essentially said, “Well, how can you say that? You don’t mean that, right?” Mao Zedong repeats himself, “We think he’s the best fellow in the world.”
Mao, of course, hoped that Edgar Snow would carry this to the Nixon administration — remember, in his mind, Snow was a CIA agent. Later, the summary of this conversation was circulated to the party committees around China to introduce the Chinese people to the idea that China was changing course and turning toward the United States.
Do you know how party committees would have kind of fake debates? They had debates and questions were collected, and those questions were reported back to the center. Questions included things like, “If Nixon is the number one best fellow in the world, why are we having a quarrel with the Soviet Union? Can’t we repair relations with them as well?” The Chinese party officials were confused about this, but Mao would not have any of that. He felt that those people didn’t understand strategy, and that China had to turn to the United States because the Soviet Union was the enemy.
You see, it doesn’t matter that turning to the United States entails turning to “imperialism.” That’s not what matters.
Going back to your question — at that point, both the Soviet Union and China were willing and able to set ideology aside and turn to the United States and try to improve relations with them on the basis of geopolitical great power competition with each other.
Jon Sine: That’s exactly what I was thinking, because normally the story is you have brilliant strategists and Kissinger making that flight to Pakistan and then secretly flying off to China for this engagement. But some have argued, and I think your findings support this, that Mao in some ways, insofar as anyone deserves credit, might be the one making this move.
Reading back through Mao’s various writings, when he talks about the Japanese, for instance, he will sometimes half-jokingly, half-seriously say, “The Japanese are the people that we have to thank the most, because without them, we would never have come into power.” Are you sure there’s no element of speaking tongue in cheek here when he’s saying these things about Nixon being the number one good fellow?
Sergey Radchenko: You always have to be careful with his pronouncements. Mao does say that about the Japanese consistently. What he basically means is that because of the Japanese invasion, the nationalists were weakened — the Kuomintang Party was weakened — which provided the space for the Chinese communists to establish their power.
In a sense, it does make sense what he says about the Japanese. Of course, he’s being sarcastic to a certain extent.
With regard to Nixon, when Nixon and Mao met in February 1972, Nixon tried to engage him in conversation, and Mao kind of brushed it all aside and said, “Oh, you can talk to Zhou Enlai about practical matters. I don’t care about practical matters, I want to talk about philosophical matters.” He says something like, “We like rightists, and we voted for you in the 1968 election."
I don’t think Nixon quite gets that. Nixon is like, “Okay, well, listen...” But Mao is trying to say that he finds the Republicans more trustworthy because although they’re reactionary, as far as Mao is concerned, at least you always know where they stand. Whereas with the Soviets, you don’t. The Soviets would say one thing, and they would cover their actions with leftist phraseology, but in reality they do something completely different.
The same goes for Social Democrats, and he’s full of disdain for Social Democrats like the Europeans — Willy Brandt and all those people in Europe who are basically trying to engage with the Soviet Union, which would allow the Soviet Union to deal with China. He’s accusing the Western Europeans of trying to orchestrate another Munich, where they would sell out China.
Those are the kind of issues that Mao brings up, and I think he’s quite honest about it. It’s not a sarcastic comment when he says that he likes Nixon.
Jon Sine: The Soviets also really liked Nixon. This is probably my favorite part of your book — certainly the funniest. I was actually laughing. They find out about the Watergate scandal and see Nixon about to be removed from power, and Brezhnev is flipping out, thinking that the whole political system in the US is specifically trying to undermine détente. Then he sends a message, I believe it was to Andropov, essentially saying, “You’ve got to help Nixon. You’ve got to find some dirt on his opponents to help him.”
Sergey Radchenko: It is funny. It shows what kind of great material you can find in the Russian archives. In this particular episode, Andropov of the KGB is there, and you have Brezhnev’s aide asking, “Do we have some compromising material on Nixon’s opponents that we can use to help Nixon?”
It is hilarious, but the Soviets never could understand Watergate. Mao also did not understand Watergate. They could not comprehend how you could remove such a wonderful president who was creating détente and bringing the Cold War to an end and who had just won a big election. How? Clearly it’s some kind of conspiracy. At one point they say, “You see? They killed Kennedy, and now the same people are bringing Nixon down.” That was Brezhnev’s take on this. They never get it; they never understand what this is about.
Jon Sine: That was such a crazy time in American politics, from that decade on — the president literally having his brains blown out on TV, to then having a president actually impeached and removed from office. We forget today how things have been very crazy in the past.
The last analogy I was thinking of is when Nixon was about to become president. Some people say he engaged in what might technically be called a treasonous act by being in contact with the Vietnamese and trying to discourage them from agreeing to a peace deal. His rhetoric might sound familiar to people today who pay attention to news about Ukraine. He came in saying that the war in Vietnam was a complete disaster and we needed to get out of it immediately. But what ended up happening was an escalation beyond anything previously seen. I don’t know how much of a warning that would be for today, but I did think it was interesting.
To be fair, I heard Stephen Kotkin bring this up, so I thought it was an interesting analogy, though obviously there are many disanalogies — things that don’t map equally.
Sergey Radchenko: Niall Ferguson also raised this in a recent article comparing Trump to Nixon. The difference between Ukraine and Vietnam was that in the late 1960s, American troops were in Vietnam, which had a direct impact on American society and politics. There were anti-war protests going on in the United States. Today, American troops are not in Ukraine, so you don’t have the same kind of impact — no protests.
Both Nixon and Trump see these theaters as peripheral to America’s core interests. There is a parallel there.
Nixon’s way to get out of Vietnam was to try to coerce Vietnam, including by intensifying the bombing, dropping threats of a nuclear attack on Vietnam (which did not really work), and also working with the Soviets. From his perspective, that was a big part of the whole engagement with the USSR — finding an exit for the United States, “peace with honor,” getting out of Vietnam, and getting the Soviets to facilitate this.
The problem was that the Soviets were not facilitating any of this. From the Soviet perspective, they loved the fact that the Americans were engaging with them. They loved the honor of being a co-equal superpower. But if you’re a co-equal superpower, aren’t you supposed to have clients? You’re not supposed to betray your clients or force them to surrender to the United States. For them, this linkage never worked. They thought they could both help Vietnam and have a good relationship with the United States. That did not really work for the Americans.
Jordan Schneider: I love this line in your conclusion. This is talking about Khrushchev, but it applies to Brezhnev as well. The core question is, “Would he be willing to moderate Soviet foreign policy in return for being accepted as America’s equal? The proposition never worked because of the very fact that being accepted as America’s equal meant rejecting external constraints on foreign policy behavior.” What sort of equality would you talk about if you couldn’t have proxy wars or missiles in Cuba?
“Soviet engagement in the Third World, and indeed American acceptance of this engagement, were part and parcel of what it meant to be a superpower.”
This gets at the other core question as we come to the end of Brezhnev’s effectiveness — if he had stayed healthy and if Nixon wasn’t impeached, they could have kept the good thing going. But once his health deteriorated and Nixon departed, you argue that bureaucratic interests took over, and everything started ramping up again.
What are your thoughts on the transition?
Sergey Radchenko: It’s hugely important. We’re talking about health and power. It’s a big question for the late USSR, and we’re also familiar with this question in the West.
Brezhnev was very charismatic, very active, and very engaged until about 1974, and then he declined rapidly. He developed all kinds of ailments and basically became a figurehead. By the late 1970s, he didn’t really decide anything.
If you look at his summit with Carter in Vienna, he was just reading from pieces of paper. He wasn’t even thinking about what he was reading. When Carter responded, he would turn to his aides and ask, “What should I say now?” They would give him another piece of paper and he would read from that.
The Soviet deep state took hold in the late 1970s in a major way. The bureaucratic interests took over, and the Ministry of Defense became really important. For them, promoting various geopolitical schemes in the Third World was a key issue. They also resisted nuclear disarmament. They thought it was a bad idea. They wanted more investments from the state, so increasingly the Soviet economy became more militarized.
You have the interests of the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party, whose role is to promote revolutions in the Third World. It’s in their job description — promote revolutions. Previously, Brezhnev would have pushed them away because it’s beyond their pay grade to define policy. But by the mid to late 1970s, they come to influence policy in a major way, and we see that in the increasing Soviet involvement in Africa.
Then you had the Foreign Ministry and the KGB, and they all had their own distinct interests. Those bureaucratic interests increasingly came to dominate Soviet policymaking, and it drifted as a result. Policymaking became more conservative overall because there was no single figure who could break the ice and take charge the way Brezhnev did with the Nixon Summit in 1972. The bureaucracy was against it, but Brezhnev did it anyway.
Well, by the late 1970s, he couldn’t do that because he was no longer mentally alert. It is part of the story of Soviet decline, and it also shows how having an active leader at the top could actually have good results. Not always, because sometimes you could have an active dictator who will do terrible things precisely because he’s not constrained by the bureaucracy. But in the Soviet case in the late 1970s, power at the top was missing and the bureaucracy took over.
Boredom and the Graveyard of Empires
“When everything is calm, measured, stable, we are bored… we want some action.”
~ Vladimir Putin on the invasion of Ukraine, December 2024
Jon Sine: The last important thing that happens under Brezhnev, though he’s not really conscious of it, is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To your point, you have Gromyko, Andropov, and Ustinov — the KGB, defense, the Troika. They go into Afghanistan, and on the US side, my understanding is Carter and maybe Brzezinski assumed this was a play to get all the way to the Persian Gulf.
What was the motivation to invade? If you were to identify some continuity of motivations between regimes, what did you find that was new about what was driving them?
Sergey Radchenko: I found some interesting things. We’ve had many people write about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, from Arne Westad to Rodric Braithwaite and many others. It was difficult to find anything new, but I did manage to discover some interesting materials from the fall of 1979.
At that time, there was already a conflict between Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin in Kabul, but Amin had not yet killed Taraki. Taraki came to Moscow, and Brezhnev had a conversation with him — though “conversation” is in quotation marks because Brezhnev was in no position to have any productive dialogue. He does offer a warning to Taraki, “Look, when you go back, be careful because there’s a problem in your senior party ranks.” Taraki says, “Leonid Illyich, don’t worry about it. Everything is fine."
He goes back, and of course, he’s arrested by Amin’s men and ultimately put in prison and murdered on Amin’s orders.
What we see then is Soviet leadership thinking about how to respond. Their first instinct is actually to work with Amin despite the fact that they consider Taraki’s death an absolute slap in the face, a betrayal of the USSR. They feel they could work with Amin because he’s surrounded by “pro-Soviet people,” people who had studied in the USSR. Brezhnev writes about it in some exchange of memoranda at the senior leadership level, which I discuss in the book. This suggests they might continue working with Amin.
But by December 1979, they decided that they had to remove him. I ask in the book why this happened. There are different possible explanations for Soviet involvement — perhaps the Soviets were just adrift with nobody making foreign policy anymore, but I don’t think that fully explains it.
A more interesting explanation, which I highlight in the book, is that they worried Amin would “do a Sadat” on them. They had lost President Sadat in Egypt, who was supposed to be a pro-Soviet client, but they dumped him because he decided to align with Kissinger and Nixon. The Soviets got outplayed in Egypt.
After losing Egypt, the Soviets viewed almost every country in the Middle East as potentially another Egypt, and Afghanistan fell into that category. They grew suspicious of Amin, thinking he had ties with Americans. They received information that he was in contact with Americans and concluded he was potentially pro-American and could sell them out. They feared Americans would then establish a presence in Afghanistan, creating a strategic problem for the Soviets. They decided to act primarily because they didn’t want Amin to become another Sadat.
Jon Sine: Let’s transition to Gorbachev — and start with the Gorbachev-Trump analogy.
DOGE is American perestroika, at least in the charged anti-bureaucratic approach. Under Gorbachev, the Soviets decreased employment in the ministries and party personnel by something like 30 to 40%, which the current administration would certainly aspire to with the civil service in the US.
You have Gorbachev willingly giving up the Warsaw Pact, which some might analogize to Trump’s stance on NATO. Ultimately, as Axios reported, you have Trump’s desire for a Nobel Prize and the prestige and legitimation of doing something great for a foreign audience. People criticized Gorbachev for similar reasons when he wrote his 1987 book, Perestroika and New Thinking. He had it translated immediately into English, and it was written for a US publisher.
Sergey Radchenko: The book was also published in the USSR. Historical analogies are limited to some extent, but I see some interesting parallels.
One counterpoint I would offer is that the Soviet economy was basically going to hell in the 1980s, and they knew it. They knew they were losing the Cold War and that the promise of deliverance for the Soviet people was just a fake promise. The American economy, if you look at productivity, investment in technology, R&D, and so forth, is far beyond anything else anybody in the world can offer.
The question is one of necessity. I understand some people will say, “America has to carry out reforms because of the national debt” or other issues. In the Soviet case, perestroika was absolutely necessary, and they knew they had to do it. They knew it in the ’60s, but they didn’t act then because they craved stability under Brezhnev and were trying to avoid political upheavals.
They were also, to a certain extent, bailed out by the price of oil and the discovery of oil in Western Siberia, which they could sell for hard cash. This helped feed the Soviet people because they could import grain and some technologies. But they knew the system wasn’t working. When Gorbachev came to power, he had to begin doing something because doing nothing was not an option.
Jordan Schneider: You write:
Gorbachev had everything in 1985 — an empire (however decrepit), an ideology (however stale), and above all, an office with truly awesome power. What he did not have was greatness, as he chose to understand it, greatness before history. He pursued that fleeting dream for himself and his country all the way to the famous Pizza Hut ad.
When you compare what Gorbachev and these other historical figures define as greatness, and what Trump defines as greatness, you see that the Trump definition is smaller, more personal — “People respect me, and speak to me nicely in the Oval Office.” All these other leaders had a vision of being grand historical figures who achieved something monumental.
There are parts of Trumpism that claim to revive America, defeat wokeness, and bring back ideals. Every once in a while, he’ll mention something about manufacturing, but “Make America Great Again” is much more about Trump personally than it is about a national vision of prestige and greatness.
Sergey Radchenko: It’s related to a certain extent. Soviet leaders desired greatness for themselves and for their country. This book is applicable to almost any other would-be great power or superpower. To a certain extent, it can be read as an allegory of the United States. This is how John Lewis Gaddis saw it in his review in Foreign Affairs — he thought that between the lines, the United States was clearly lurking there, really telling the American story, not just the Soviet story.
The question of legacy is super interesting and important because, as you say, Jordan, Gorbachev is at the helm of a superpower. He has all the power concentrated in his hands, and yet he wants something more. It’s similar to Mao Zedong in 1965. He had all the power, he could do anything. Even after he got rid of people he thought were conspiring against him by 1966, he continued the Cultural Revolution. For what? For legacy, for greatness before history.
If you think about Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, he has all the power, and yet he’s invading Ukraine. For what?
For greatness before history, the way he understands greatness.
If we return to Gorbachev once again and ask, “Fundamentally, why did he do it?” The answer is because he wanted something greater than what he had. He wanted to be remembered as a person who would bring the Soviet idea to life for the first time because he thought his predecessors never made it work. He would make it work, make it globally applicable, end the Cold War — this was his mission. That, I believe, is very important.
Jordan Schneider: We talked in the first episode about national ambition — is it a gas or is it a solid? Will it expand until it hits another obstacle that contains it, or does it have some natural limits? It’s interesting to analogize that not at a national level, but at a personal level.
When you’re in power for 15 years, you get bored. You’re probably already a bit of a gambler if you were able to make it all the way up the system. You just want more. This is why term limits are important — leaders tend to go a little cuckoo after too long. Either they go senile like Brezhnev — who thankfully didn’t start World War III because he was worried about his bladder — or they do something like Putin in Ukraine. It’s a scary thing to contemplate.
Sergey Radchenko: I agree. It’s fascinating to consider how these leaders, perhaps out of boredom, perhaps because they have nothing else to do, take dramatic actions. That might sound ridiculous, but speaking of boredom, Putin was once asked about Ukraine in one of his recent press conferences, and he essentially said, “We were kind of bored, and we decided to do it.” I’m paraphrasing, but he literally mentioned the word “boredom” in his comments on why he invaded Ukraine.
That sounds crazy, but if you’re a leader with all the power in your hands, you need something else. Schopenhauer in the early 19th century reflected that one of the major problems human beings face is generally the problem of boredom. They don’t know what to do with themselves. Now multiply that with absolute power, and you get people like Gorbachev who think, “Why not do something so great that everybody will remember me?” And well, he certainly succeeded.
Jon Sine: There’s a hedonic treadmill effect when it comes to status. You’ve achieved so much and yet, when you look back once you’ve achieved it, you realize you could achieve more, and the last thing you accomplished no longer seems as good. Now you’re wondering, “How can I really leave a legacy that my children and my children’s children will remember?”
What better than changing your borders, acquiring Greenland, getting back Panama?
Sergey Radchenko: Exactly. Or launching Perestroika. That’s why Gorbachev’s book which you referred to, the one published in the West, was actually subtitled “Perestroika For Our Country and For The World.” He was trying to restructure the entire world, not just his own country. That’s the extent of his ambition.
Humiliation and Containment
Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the dance that the Europeans and the Americans did with Gorbachev. The goal was to get the Soviets to understand that their relative power was decreasing, and that America and its allies had won the economic, science, and technology competitions. But you also want to allow a leader like Gorbachev to pursue his vision without risking something like a Stalinist revanchism, which wasn’t totally out of the cards.
Could you talk about how the West managed Gorbachev’s moment of defining national greatness as Perestroika rather than, say, conquering Germany?
Sergey Radchenko: First of all, the Americans were quite worried about Gorbachev to begin with, and that’s a well-known story. They were concerned because they thought he could actually succeed in what he claimed to be doing — reinventing the Soviet idea and making the Soviet Union a much more serious strategic competitor to the United States.
Some thought Gorbachev wasn’t for real and his reforms would ultimately be undone. Then, a moment came when American leaders thought they could reach out to Gorbachev in the name of international peace and reach some agreements.
Reagan was the key person here because he also believed in the importance of avoiding nuclear war and felt the great responsibility that was on his shoulders. Many people in the United States like to talk about Reagan “winning the Cold War” and how tough he was on the USSR. For me, the real Reagan was the one who believed that nuclear war had to be avoided and that we needed to talk to the Soviets.
As Reagan said at one point, Soviet general secretaries kept dying on him, but then he finally had a partner in Gorbachev with whom he could talk. They first met in Geneva in 1985, then in Reykjavik. There came a remarkable moment in Reykjavik where they discussed abolishing nuclear weapons altogether. It was “almost decided” to the horror of Reagan’s advisors. Here was an interesting moment when an American leader thought, “What if we actually try to play along and see how far we can get? Maybe we can actually change the course of history.” Reykjavik represented that possibility.
Jordan Schneider: Going all the way back to Stalin and Truman, you have this quote from Henry Kissinger who wrote in a 1957 book, “The powers which represent legitimacy and the status quo cannot know that their antagonist is not amenable to reason until he has demonstrated it. And he will not have demonstrated it until the international system is already overturned.”
We’ve got our answer with Putin, but we don’t quite have our answer yet with Xi’s China. This presents a very difficult choice — on the one hand, if Stalin had turned out to be reasonable, we could have had a different timeline. But if not, the price for running that experiment would have potentially been the Soviet conquest of Europe or even the world.
How are we supposed to think about that dilemma sitting here in 2025, imagining the future of US-China relations?
Sergey Radchenko: Jordan, that’s a great question. The fundamental problem is we don’t know what the other side is really thinking. The other side may not even know what they ultimately want. This is the case with Stalin. Even with the passage of all these years, we don’t know what Stalin’s ultimate ambitions were. Was he limited in his appetites? Would he stop, or unless he met with counterforce, would he keep pushing? Would he keep going until he conquered Europe, and from Europe jump over to conquer Asia and the world?
It sounds fantastic, but “appetite comes during eating” as the French say (“l'appétit vient en mangeant”). If you’re an American policymaker faced with this situation, you’re thinking, “How do we stop that? What is the most reasonable policy we can adopt?” It seems the most reasonable approach is the policy ultimately adopted — containment. You push back on expansionist desires, and the other side has to take this into account. They are deterred and limit their ambitions, but as a result, a struggle unfolds that becomes a prolonged confrontation like the Cold War.
It’s a sad situation, but maybe inevitable and unavoidable. It’s like choosing between two evils. On one hand, containment and counter-containment lead to a Cold War and could potentially lead to a hot war. On the other hand, doing nothing could expose you to a situation where you’ll basically have to accept that the other side dominates everything.
It’s the same with China. The fundamental problem we face today, even with Russia as well, is that we simply don’t know what the other side wants. Does Xi Jinping want to overturn the existing order, or is he just trying to change China’s position within this global order? That question has been debated for 20 years, even before Xi Jinping.
We don’t know the answer. Some people say, “We know Xi Jinping is trying to overturn the world order because here’s the evidence.” I would say, “I’m looking at this evidence, and I’m not 100% convinced.” We simply don’t know whether Xi Jinping himself knows what he wants to do.
Under those circumstances, what’s the best policy to pursue? The policy is probably a combination of containment, firmness, plus clear signaling — “We see what you’re doing. This will be our response.” No jumping around and doing impulsive things, which American foreign policy sometimes tends to do. We’ve seen that with Trump, but also with previous administrations.
With China, consider Nancy Pelosi’s ill-advised visit to Taiwan. What did it achieve? It was very provocative and completely useless in many ways. As a result, we had a breakdown of communication at senior levels between Chinese and American militaries. Did it benefit anyone? No. What was the point? There was no point.
We have to be firm, maintain dialogue, and signal to the other side that we see what they’re doing and are preparing certain countermeasures. But if they back off at the right moment, we will also not proceed with those countermeasures. I think that’s the way to mitigate great power confrontation in this potentially new Cold War that is unfolding before our eyes even today.
Jordan Schneider: I want to apply the lessons of prestige to the US-China relationship, and Putin as well. Are leaders satisfied by the rate of change of prestige or by the absolute value of prestige? Are there ways to give prestige that don’t fundamentally compromise core national interests and power? It seems that prestige is often in the eye of the beholder, and America can give prestige in many different ways — some costly, some much less so.
Sergey Radchenko: Core interests for prestige certainly exist. In my book, I discuss Poland and how it was central to Stalin’s security concerns in Europe. No matter how much prestige he would have received from the allies, he was determined to do what he wanted in Poland because he considered it a fundamental red line core to his security interests. You might say this also applies to Putin or Xi Jinping today.
On the other hand, we sometimes underestimate the importance of recognition, respect, and acceptance. We also tend to underestimate how our actions can humiliate the other side and provoke adverse reactions we would rather have avoided.
Consider President Obama’s rhetoric about Putin being “the kid in the back of the classroom,” which reportedly outraged him. You might ask whether Putin would have still invaded Ukraine if Obama hadn’t made those remarks. Perhaps he would have because Ukraine is central to his neo-imperialist vision of Russia, or perhaps not. It’s a counterfactual — we simply don’t know.
The question is whether he feels he has standing and respectability. I believe it ultimately does matter. The same likely applies to the Chinese leadership.
It’s important to note that, despite our strategic rivalry with China and difficult relationship with Russia, these countries are ruled by autocrats who sometimes make decisions impulsively, for no particular reason, and occasionally in ways that clearly contradict their country’s national interests. They do this because they feel insulted or humiliated. We should not underestimate those sentiments. In dealing with these countries, we should be careful — respectful but firm.
Jordan Schneider: Perhaps even more famously, Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner made fun of Donald Trump for the birther conspiracy, and some trace Trump’s desire to run for president back to being humiliated on national television.
Sergey Radchenko: That’s a great counterexample.
Jordan Schneider: Maybe this is the 4D chess with Trump — we’re going to stop calling Putin a dictator and say he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Will that make him pull out of Ukraine?
Sergey Radchenko: Maybe not, but it’s a cumulative effect. Over time, these things matter. It’s not as if we suddenly say, “We love you, come back to the G7, let’s have a good relationship,” and he’ll respond, “Yes, I’ll pull out from Ukraine.” We’ve already turned that corner, and it’s very difficult to go back. But on the road to confrontation, these factors do matter, in my view — perhaps not decisively and not always, but they do matter.