More than thirty years after the end of the Cold War, we are as far as ever from a consensus on how and, especially, why it ended. Archie Brown's latest book, much in line with his earlier contributions, is a well thought-through, prodigiously researched, and occasionally polemical restatement of Gorbocentrality. Notwithstanding the appearance of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on the dust jacket, it is Mikhail Gorbachev whom Brown credits with ending the Cold War. He repeatedly and emphatically denies that it ended because of western (especially US) pressure. By contrast, he argues, such pressure during the first Reagan Administration merely strengthened the Kremlin's resolve to play it tough until the appearance of Gorbachev with his exceptional open-mindedness and his ability to improvise.

The argument proceeds approximately as follows. The Cold War was raging in the early 1980s—with no end in sight. Then there emerged in the Soviet Union a new kind of leader who was essentially different from anyone else in the Soviet ruling establishment in his willingness to go beyond the ideological constraints of Marxism-Leninism. Gorbachev thereupon rejected the arms race (because he understood the danger of nuclear weapons), withdrew from Afghanistan (because it was a “bleeding wound”), democratized the Soviet Union (because he recognized the flaws of the old system), and allowed the Soviet empire in eastern Europe to collapse (because he respected east Europeans’ freedom of choice). The Cold War was effectively over by 1988 because Gorbachev by then relinquished the Marxist-Leninist notion of class struggle in favor of universal human values.

Ronald Reagan's role in the above was confined mainly to gracefully receiving these gifts of the gods. However, he also played a role by at last recognizing that Gorbachev was for real. In this process, the American President was aided by Margaret Thatcher, who helpfully discovered the future Soviet leader in 1984 and, in fact, even before that, saw novelty in Gorbachev, especially that she was helped by able academic advisers, including Archie Brown himself (which is where the author humbly fits into the broader story of the Cold War's end).

This short review does not permit a detailed engagement with such a thought-provoking book. Let me therefore highlight a few areas of potential disagreement with the author. First, he occasionally disconnects Gorbachev from his context. The Soviet Union of 1985 that Gorbachev assumed leadership of, teetered on the brink of insolvency and faced international isolation. It was also embroiled in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. The reality is that US policies of the preceding decade massively contributed to these Soviet problems, and, indeed, prompted Gorbachev's predecessors to look for a change of direction, whether by seeking a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan, or by relative restraint in Poland (recall Iurii Andropov's famous quip that “the quota of our foreign interventions has been exhausted”) or, indeed, by seeking rapprochement with China (which predated Gorbachev).Footnote ¹ There is much greater continuity between Gorbachev's predecessors and Gorbachev himself than Brown seems willing to acknowledge, nor does he credit the west with pursuing policies that framed the Soviet desire for better relations.

Brown's rejoinder to his potential critics is to draw attention to the early Cold War, when the Soviet Union faced an incomparably stronger, nuclear-armed United States. “If the Soviet leadership was not compelled to make concessions for the sake of achieving a constructive relationship with the West at a time when it was far weaker than America in military terms,” he argues, “it is an odd claim that they were obliged to do so in the mid-1980s…” (289). The problem with this argument is that, in fact, the Soviet Union did make concessions—even under Stalin! For example, the Soviets withdrew from Iran in 1946, and it is hard not to recall that only the US resolve prevented West Berlin from being taken over by the Communists in 1948–49. Stalin was by no means a mindless expansionist but, as George Kennan had long observed, often retracted when faced with superior force. In the 1940s—as in the 1980s—what the west did or failed to do mattered a great deal, because western policies provided the context for Soviet decision-making. A different US policy in the late 1970s–early 1980s may well have led to a different range of options for Soviet decision-makers. But Gorbachev was dealt a bad set of cards, which was why his effort to lower the temperature of Soviet-American relations resonated across a wide spectrum of elite opinion in the USSR.

My second point of disagreement with Archie Brown is that he often tends to overemphasize ideational, at the expense of material, factors. Nowhere is this clearer than with his account of Gorbachev's pursuit of nuclear disarmament, which he generally attributes to the Soviet leader's understanding of the dangers of nuclear conflict. Without denying that Gorbachev did have such an understanding (though I would argue so did many other Soviet leaders, beginning with Nikita Khrushchev), it is difficult to dismiss the economic strains of the nuclear arms race, especially since Gorbachev himself acknowledged them. As he argued at the Politburo in October 1986—right before Reykjavik—if the Soviet Union did not quit the arms race “there will be unthinkable pressure on our economy.” “If we are dragged into another round of the [arms] race, we'll lose it!”Footnote ²

The same approach can indeed be useful in understanding why Gorbachev decided not to intervene in eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Archie Brown once again argues in favor of ideational factors—Gorbachev's respect for the freedom of choice—and of course these played an important role, but so did Gorbachev's realism. To quote the Soviet leader: “Some people accuse us now: where is the Soviet Union looking, why is it letting Poland and Hungary ‘drift’ to the West. But we cannot underwrite Poland…Poland already paid out 49 billion dollars, and still has to pay out almost another 50 billion.”Footnote ³ The same problems, he explained, applied to Hungary. The reality was: intervene—and then what?

Interestingly, where Archie Brown highlights Gorbachev's attachment to ideas, he is considerably less complimentary about Boris Yeltsin, whom he effectively accuses of a Machiavellian power grab: “His prime aim…was to remove Gorbachev from power and to take his place in the Kremlin” (315). If Brown examined Gorbachev with an equal degree of detachment, he would have probably also drawn a more nuanced picture of the man with his ideas and his delusions, his constraints and his political realism, ever trying to feel his way forward on a narrow path between two opposing poles: continuity and change.

I highly recommend this book to readers. Brown is right to highlight the “human factor” in ending of the Cold War, even if I disagree with his interpretation of how exactly this factor played out. My disagreements, such as they are, in no way detract from the sharpness of many of Brown's insights, condensed with commendable crispness in this 500-page, eminently readable foray into a highly contentious subject.