What exactly was the Cold War? When and where did it begin? Why? Who started it and could it have been avoided?….
…In the Far East, the Japanese had also moved. They occupied Vladivostok, and the Soviets saw themselves encircled by capitalist and imperialist forces. They never forgot the nightmare of this intervention. It contributed to the miasma of mistrust, fear, and suspicion that would reach its apogee three decades later in the Cold War.
—Red & White: Russian Civil War
Arise, Russian Land, defend the faith!
Russia’s holiness awaits victory.
Respond, the Orthodox host!
Where is your Ilya Muromets, where is Dobrynia?
The mother is summoning her sons.
- Farewell of Slavianka
Click image for source…
Professor Henry Roberts of Columbia gave appropriate weight to the argument that the intervention of 1917-18 colored East-West relations from then on. However, in his essay “Russia and America,” he emphasized that the split between Russia and America arose principally out of the personalities of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. According to Roberts, Wilson projected upon the world scene “an American concept of Town Hall democracy,” while Lenin also responded to “an internal mechanism- the class struggle- as against external mechanisms, such as the balance of power.”
—By James Recently, the United States arrested 10 people pretending to be spies so they could escape Russia and own a home of their own, and also dig up bags of free money from a field in upstate New York. And also write in invisible marker, which I always unsuccessfully tried to find a secret use for when I was a kid. (At least we landed on the moon before them.) Everyone is talking about the impending spy swap between the cold war loser Russia…click image for source…
Both men, Roberts argued, failed to understand the world as it was and sought to reshape it according to their own native experiences, couching their prejudices in utopian terms. “Further complicating and deteriorating their relationships, neither Wilson nor Lenin knew much about the other’s country, a condition that has afflicted most of their successors to date,” he wrote.
From the end of WWII to Detente, we saw the results of the Wisonian-Leninist confrontation of utopian visions, and saw them complicated by self-righteousness and a crusading proselytizing spirit. If Russians and Americans were only utopian dreamers and high spirited missionaries, their hot and cold running battles, would long ago have ceased. But both peoples, and certainly those who rose to leadership form the ranks, were the most cynical of dreamers, the most tyrannical of missionaries, determined to save the world if they had to destroy it in the process. ( to be continued)…
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