Cold War 1 was the defining geopolitical preoccupation of the world for the better part of forty years (1945 to 1989). It implicated the vast, globe-spanning ambitions of two divergent ideologies. It was fueled by two very different approaches to the design, development, and deployment of novel industrial, consumer, and military technologies. It spawned space technology and human space travel. It witnessed a divided world struggling to manage the kryptonite of its day—thousands of nuclear weapons. It came close to witnessing the carnage of an unimaginable nuclear war. Then, as the leading autocracy in the bipolar tango struggled to maintain technological pace with the leading democracy, many other inherent weaknesses of the autocracies emerged and ultimately took their toll. Finally, when the cement wall and Iron Curtain separating the two camps were dismantled by the bare hands of frustrated and hopeful citizens, the East Europeans were freed and the Germanies were reunited (but not the Koreas), all with hardly a burst of violence.
There are many differences between Cold War 2.0 and its predecessor. Nevertheless, there are certainly lessons to be learned from Cold War 1 that can help today’s leaders navigate the treacherous waters of Cold War 2.0. A common reality of the two conflicts is that both involved democracies pitted against autocracies. This is important. Most international wars spring from domestic factors. Moreover, an autocrat who refuses to abide by the rule of law at home will never adhere to treaties abroad; it is utterly naive—and dangerous—for the leader of a democracy to think otherwise. At the same time, some leaders in democracies pine to be autocrats. And because they find it difficult to vent their autocratic fantasies domestically, they try to pull off the autocratic playbook in some of their foreign affairs. Hence the usefulness of comparing these two conceptions of life and politics at the very outset.
Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during World War II, is reported to have said that a democracy is where the people own the government, and an autocracy is where the government owns the people. In essence, in a democracy the people get to decide who will form their government. This decision is exercised through fair, free, and credible elections, where multiple candidates (usually organized into diverse political parties) can stand for office (and no one can prohibit them from doing so), and an impartial organization supervises the election process to ensure it runs fairly in accordance with strict but neutral rules.
Winning an election gives the new government the legitimacy it requires to govern until the next election, typically to be held every four years. A key ground rule for elections in democracies is that if the political party in power loses the election, it will hand over power peacefully to the party that won the election, on the understanding that the winner will allow the losing party to continue to exist during the next four years, at which point it can contest the next election.
Democratic elections require that people be able to exercise key political rights, including the freedoms of speech and assembly (which includes having multiple political parties). If a candidate (especially one not in power) cannot talk to voters, directly or through the media, then the election is rigged, unfair, and not credible. Democracies protect these and other inherent political and legal rights regardless of which political party wins any particular election. Moreover, personal rights extend beyond the right to vote. They are central to the meaning of “democracy.” Personal rights include being treated equally under the law, not being discriminated against, and should someone be arrested for a crime, being deemed innocent until and unless found guilty before an independent judge and a jury of peers.
Democracy requires a free press. Most people have neither the time nor the expertise to scrutinize what happens in government, a courtroom, a corporate board room, or any other place where power is exercised in society. Journalists must follow these proceedings as the impartial information proxy of the people. Armed with this information, people can debate the events of the day, form views as to whom they will vote for in the next election, and hold elected officials to account. The free press is also required to report on the ability (or inability) of people to exercise their rights. Particularly in our complex world, it is inconceivable that democracy could survive for a week without independent journalism.
Democracy requires the “rule of law.” This means that laws are only made by the duly elected representatives of the people. It also means that no one in the country, not even the representatives elected to government or the president or prime minister, are immune from these laws—the law must apply to everyone and in the same way. Powerful, rich, or famous people are not treated better, or worse, under the law. Everyone is treated the same. No one in a democracy can behave with impunity; everyone must be subject to the laws passed by the democratically elected legislature.
Democracy and the rule of law require independent judges to interpret the laws and to apply them fairly and consistently. Similarly, the country’s military, police, and state security services must be independent of the elected government, and subject as well to the rule of law: for instance, the police cannot search a suspect’s house without a search warrant approved by an independent judge.
As for the economy, democracy requires an open market, albeit subject to reasonable regulation. “Open” means there are no material legal or political barriers to entry. “Regulation” means adherence to laws, such as those limiting pollution, safeguarding workers’ rights, or providing oversight of risky financial businesses1—especially in the wake of the implosion of so many cryptocurrency-related businesses. And finally, the economic system, coupled with the rule of law, must allow for “competitive displacement.”
A democracy requires all of the above elements. There are political systems missing some or other key piece (one of the three legs of the stool of democracy), but then these are not democracies. They are typically some form of autocracy, but they are not a democracy, and therefore shouldn’t be called a democracy. The phrases “illiberal democracy,” “minimalist democracy,” “sovereign democracy,” and “managed democracy” make no sense; the system they describe is an autocracy, and should be called an autocracy. On the other hand, a system that uses the phrase “flawed democracies” can be helpful.2
Democracy is rare. Since agriculture and cities began some 10,000 years ago, up until World War II, there were only a handful of democracies. It has been better for democracy over the last eighty years, but still today only about half the countries in the world are democracies. Many democracies slide into autocracy. These are usually “inside jobs” where a former leader who once believed in democracy, or at least was willing to behave himself, finally lifts his mask and plunges his country into autocracy.
Autocracies differ markedly from democracies. Autocracy is the rule by a single individual, the autocrat. Autocrats achieve and maintain power with the help of “enablers” (typically including the most senior people in the army, police force, and security services), a few key politicians who throw their lot in with the autocrat, the top members of organized crime syndicates, powerful businesspeople, and some religious figures and cultural icons. These enablers are well paid by the autocrat to keep the autocrat in power. These enablers then pay off, or suppress, whomever they have to in order to preserve the power of the autocrat (and themselves, of course). This structured scaffolding of hierarchical power relations, payments, and suppression is required because the autocrat lacks the consensual legitimacy bestowed by fair, free, and credible elections—one of the three secret sauces of democracy. In the absence of a legitimating vote, the autocrat uses bribes and violence to secure and remain in power.
Autocracies don’t hold elections, or if one is held (for show, as part of a propaganda campaign), it is meaningless because it is neither fair, free, nor credible. The autocrat and his (almost all autocrats are men) enablers are expert at rigging elections with false ballots, or they have the police (paid to be enablers of the autocrat) arrest the strongest opposition candidate(s) before the election campaign on false charges, such as fictional tax evasion—just enough to disqualify them from running for office. Sometimes the autocrat arranges for the murder of his opponent. This dissuades other good people from standing for election.
Autocrats govern without constraints, except for the rare one imposed by a powerful enabler. Autocrats typically destroy any non-enabler or any institution that attempts to serve as a check or balance against him. Autocrats rule with impunity, which means they can do as they please, subject to having to make good on certain promises made to enablers. At the same time, smart autocrats do realize that the people, if sufficiently hungry, will rise up and demand food, and then possibly freedom, and then more. To avoid these uprisings, some savvy autocrats share a little more of the country’s wealth with the citizens, by increasing pension payments and the like. Autocrats who play the long game don’t overly mind this, because they know they’ll still have years and years in which to steal and embezzle from the public coffers of the state.
Succession in an autocracy can be a real problem, because there is no organized way to hand power from the incumbent autocrat to his chosen successor. It is very common for many people to be killed in the battle surrounding autocratic succession. Autocracy is not for the faint of heart.
Autocracies do not operate under the rule of law. There is instead the “rule of the autocrat.” What the autocrat unilaterally decides has the force of law. In an autocracy there is the rule by law. Autocrats are expert at issuing—on their own and without anyone else’s input—new laws reflecting their will, but there is no rule of law in the sense of the autocrat and his enablers being subject to independent judges.
The autocrat who doesn’t abide by the rule of law domestically doesn’t respect international law either. Autocrats tend to start wars much more often than leaders of democracies. Equally, when they are in a war, they do not respect the rules of war. They view international treaties as being for suckers; they’ll sign them for show, but they adhere to them only sporadically and only for so long as it is in their interest to do so. Autocrats respect only brute force brought or marshaled against them. They have no sense of shame, but neither are they stupid, and they understand when they are outnumbered or outgunned.
There are no personal rights in an autocracy; there is no “private space” where someone is left alone to their own interests, their own lives. A citizen (even an enabler) cannot speak against the leader in public, let alone organize a protest or some other form of group assembly. Instead of an open economic market, in an autocracy all businesspeople need to follow the directions of the supreme leader. Even persons from outside the autocracy who operate a business inside the autocracy find themselves being muzzled.3 Everyone in the autocracy either falls in line with the wishes of the autocrat, or they suffer significantly; often they are exiled out of the country, typically never to return. Even a once-powerful enabler can suffer this fate if the autocrat turns on them. Autocrats don’t have long-term friends or allies, only expedient, short-term interests.
Judges in an autocracy don’t exist to interpret the law fairly and impartially. Rather, the judge (who is in the pocket of the autocrat) determines the case in the manner dictated by the autocrat. To the extent the judge has any discretion, it can be purchased for a price—corruption runs rampant in the judicial system of autocracies. The same goes for the police, the army, and the state security services; they don’t have any independence but rather do the bidding of the autocrat, as his personal hit squad and enforcement group. The autocrat buys off the senior leadership of the military, police, and state security services, along with the other enablers. Corruption is rampant as the autocrat typically allows his enablers to conduct illegal and unregulated side businesses of all types—in return for a cut of the action, of course.
Autocrats do not abide criticism, for the simple reason they don’t have to. There is rarely any freedom of the press or speech, let alone assembly, in an autocracy. Autocrats despise the truth and anyone personally or professionally dedicated to finding out or disseminating the truth. An autocracy survives and thrives in a cesspool of lies, deception, censorship, and disinformation. Not surprisingly, independent journalists are enemy number one for the autocrat.4 Life in an autocracy is therefore very risky for journalists who exercise the highest standards of their profession, allowing their stories to be driven by facts. Journalists who have contacts with foreigners are closely monitored by the state security police, and often arrested on fabricated espionage charges.5 Foreign journalists often suffer the same fate at the hands of the autocrat.6 Autocrats often have journalists murdered. In 2022, sixty-seven journalists around the world were killed, mainly in autocracies, simply for doing their job.7 Autocrats also despise comedians who do political humor.8 The degree to which a society is open and democracy-based can be gleaned from humor on offer at the local comedy club. In autocracies no jokes about the autocrat or the military are made in public places.
Autocrats are particularly horrified by public demonstrations against them. They read history and understand that very few autocrats over the last 250 years have died of natural causes in their old age while asleep in bed. Rather, over the last two and a half centuries disgruntled citizens have on many occasions hanged autocrats (sometimes with piano wire), or caused their heads to be otherwise severed from their bodies, typically when the country’s great mass of ordinary people have been oppressed by the autocrat to the breaking point. Or he dies in a coup orchestrated by an enabler who wishes to be the new autocrat. The newcomer autocrat becomes so by bribing the head of the army, police, or security services with more money than the incumbent autocrat.
The autocrat understands the risk of a violent end to his career, and he works hard to avoid it. His best-case scenario is to park several billion embezzled dollars in an offshore bank account, and to buy a large estate on a small, secluded island in the territory of another autocrat. The fleeing autocrat will escape to this tranquil place when he hears the shouts of angry citizens, or the clicking heels of the boots of the soldiers of the next autocrat, coming for him.
Cold War 1 started around 1945, but it is important to understand how Lenin and Stalin ruled Russia in the previous twenty-five years in order to really grasp how Cold War 1 worked from the Russian perspective. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the first communist autocrat leader of Russia. He came to power in late 1917. Russia entered World War I in 1914; by 1916 the war against Germany was going very poorly for Russia. The Russian autocrat-king at the time was Tsar Nicholas II. (Tsar means king in Russian; a Russification of the word caesar, referring to autocrat emperors of ancient Rome.) Nicholas II moved to the battlefront to try to boost morale among the Russian soldiers, but by early 1917 many were mutinying. A liberal politician, Alexander Kerensky, convinced Nicholas II to abdicate in February of 1917. The tsar and his family were put up at a country estate outside of Moscow, while Kerensky convened a constituent assembly to elect a government committed to democracy.
Lenin was a Communist. He followed the teachings of German-born philosopher Karl Marx, who called for workers to revolt against the capitalists who owned the factories. Marx’s political philosophy predicted that under communism the workers would eventually own all the means of production, including factories and farms. Lenin was a shrewd political organizer, and he had the Russian Communists run hard in the elections for Kerensky’s Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, Lenin’s Communists garnered only 24 percent of the seats, and as such Lenin was not going to be able to implement his Marxist communist manifesto through the ballot box as he originally planned. Good autocrat that he was, however, Lenin orchestrated a coup in the fall of 1917, in which the Communists took over the government of Russia by military force, and the Constituent Assembly was dissolved—autocrats have no need for such institutions of democracy. Today, Putin keeps the Duma around to give a patina of democracy to his ruthless autocratic governing style, but the scales fall from the eyes when the Duma regularly votes unanimously in favor of some legislation proposed by Putin.
To solidify his position, Lenin created the Cheka, the powerful and frightful state security police dedicated to keeping the Russian Communist Party (RCP) in power by force of arms. The Cheka looked and acted a lot like the tsar’s previous state security police (the Okhrana), which is not that surprising as Tsar Nicholas II was a supreme autocrat, as were his Romanov dynasty predecessors since 1613. The Cheka, in the 1920s and 1930s (it changed its name several times, becoming the NKVD in 1924), instituted a “terror” by continually rounding up real and fictional enemies of the state, and either executing them or sending them to labor or concentration camps. There, prisoners, after a few years hard labor, typically perished from overwork and insufficient food. Again, these autocratic RCP tactics didn’t change much from the tsar’s equivalent system, just as today. Putin’s FSB is a worthy successor to the Cheka, NKVD, and KGB in terms of its use of intimidation, baseless arrest, and thuggery.
Lenin had one of his most trusted colleagues, Leon Trotsky, create a new military force, the Red Army, that was wholly loyal to the new autocratic regime. Lenin also had another key compatriot, Joseph Jughashvili, more commonly known by his “nom de guerre” Stalin, which means steel in Russian. They traveled around the Russian Empire and make all the ethnic republics (conquered by the Russian tsars over the previous 400 years) into communist “soviets” that were still clearly under the direct control of Moscow. This was a critical exercise. In the wake of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian land empire had collapsed, giving rise to a number of new nation-states in the heart of Europe, such as Czechoslovakia. The Ottoman Empire collapsed at the same time, allowing several new states in the Balkans to emerge, such as Croatia and Serbia. The German Empire’s foreign colonies were spun out into new, stand-alone countries. The great wave of 20th century decolonization was underway—everywhere except in Russia. Contrary to one of the fundamental trends of the 20th century, namely decolonization, Lenin and Stalin were very careful to ensure that the Russian land empire continued as before, albeit under new management. Putin’s actions since coming to power in 2012 can in large part be understood as continuing this imperial agenda.
In the 1920s and 1930s Lenin and Stalin restructured Russian society and its economy in line with communist autocratic principles. Communist Russia became a one-party state. The only political party that was allowed was the Russian Communist Party. It is critical to appreciate that a political party in the democracies is vastly different than the RCP, or today’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The RCP before the collapse of Soviet Russia in 1991, and the CCP since 1949 (and going strong to this day) is the most important institution in its country by far. In a democracy a political party is a convenient way to bring together like-minded political supporters for the purpose of contesting an election. Between elections the party virtually lies dormant, focusing largely on raising funds for the next election. By contrast, in communist autocracies the party is the vanguard of the Revolution, and the Revolution never ends, it is continually ongoing; hence the communist party is constantly engaged in every minute aspect of the lives of all citizens. Plus, it runs the government. The communist autocratic party is a cross between an army at war and a cult following of the leader. It is everything. Although no longer a communist, today’s supreme Russian autocrat Putin cultivates a similar image and position in Russian society.
In Soviet Russia, after the 1917 communist takeover, the RCP nationalized all the factories and land, including farms. RCP bureaucrats in Moscow implemented autocratic economics. The RCP would henceforth alone determine what and how much factories and farms would produce. The state received all products and crops, which the RCP then redistributed across the country as the RCP saw fit, at prices determined by the RCP. The RCP also dictated who would live in which apartments, and in which cities. All economic and political decisions were made by the RCP, and within the RCP Lenin (and after his death in 1924, Stalin) had the first and last word.
People who stood in the way of the RCP, or today the CCP in China, simply get mowed down. Lenin and Stalin were on a mission, and they didn’t let anyone stand in their way. Millions of peasants in Russia (and later in China as well) didn’t want to work for collective farms; they were summarily murdered or left to starve when their crops were forcibly taken away by the state. In Ukraine, an “autonomous Soviet republic” within the Russian Soviet Union, this rural social reengineering included the “Holodomor,” where millions of Ukrainians perished in a man-made famine. Lenin and Stalin justified these deaths, and millions of others, as the necessary cost to be paid to transform Russia into a communist workers’ paradise. The only political leader more deadly than a regular autocrat is one who believes he is implementing a compelling universal system of values and social organization. Chairman Mao, China’s first communist autocrat leader from 1949 to 1976, implemented a similar universal social system, and caused the premature deaths of approximately 30 million people as a result. Of course the nirvana of a workers’ paradise never did come to pass in either Russia or China, but that misses the point—the autocrats intended to do it, and that end, in the minds of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, justified their horrible means. History is rhyming again when this utter disregard for human life is compared to Putin sending tens of thousands of young untrained conscripts to their reckless deaths in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022–2023.
It gets worse. One of the problems with autocrats is that after a lengthy time in office (because there are no term limits in autocracies) they become paranoid. They believe that a large number of people inside (and outside) the country are actively trying to kill them—which is not an entirely erroneous thought, because killing an autocrat is the only way to unseat one from power. When Stalin had these paranoid fears in the late 1930s he had the NKVD (the state security police) kill about 20,000 members of the officer corps in the Russian army, as Stalin believed they were all plotting coups against him. The losses were heaviest at the very senior levels: 11 of 13 army commanders, 57 of 85 corps commanders, and 110 of 195 division commanders. Tens of thousands of other important contributors to Soviet Russian society, from scientists and engineers to cultural figures, were murdered in these “purges” in the late 1930s. The “lucky” ones were merely sent to prison labor camps in Siberia, from which many never returned, as they were fed insufficient calories to survive the brutal conditions.9 Trotsky, once Stalin’s most trusted comrade in arms, fled Russia into exile. He was hunted down by the NKVD in Mexico and murdered with an ice axe. The fatal blow saw the adze of the axe penetrate 7 cm into his brain. The NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky served twenty years in a Mexican prison. When he was released he returned to Soviet Russia, where the autocrat of the day, Leonid Brezhnev, and the head of the KGB presented him with three medals “for the special deed.”
Another core defect with autocracy is that the autocrat’s “solo” decision-making produces very poor decisions. For example, in the 1930s Stalin watched with concern as Hitler, Europe’s other megalomaniac autocratic leader, swallowed up one central European territory after another: first the Saarland in 1935, then the Sudetenland (in Czechoslovakia) and Austria in 1938. Stalin worried that Hitler would eventually come after Russia, and so Stalin was greatly relieved when Hitler offered Stalin a peace deal contained in an agreement called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In this arrangement the two autocrats agreed not to attack each other. Instead, they both agreed to attack Poland and carve it up completely between the two of them, which they promptly did a month later (in September 1939). Stalin thought this was a masterful joint autocratic solution to satiate Germany’s stated expansion plans to the East (and Russia got a big chunk of land out of Poland as well), but his advisors warned this was just Hitler buying time and tying down Russia while Germany attacked and captured all of Western Europe. Stalin disagreed and countered that he knew how to handle Hitler. Stalin was wrong, and was deeply shocked and gravely disappointed when Hitler, on June 22, 1941, unleashed on Russia the largest invasion army ever assembled before or since—a total of 3.6 million soldiers, 3,000 tanks, 2,500 aircraft.10
Stalin the ruthless autocrat grossly underestimated Hitler. Presumably Stalin also greatly regretted murdering so many of his army’s top officers just a few years before. How many fewer Russians would have died fighting the Germans (and fewer Russian civilians killed by the Germans) had the Russian troops had the benefit of the thousands of seasoned military (and other) leaders that Stalin had executed in the late 1930s? Autocracy simply doesn’t produce high-quality decisions. This is a major lesson to be drawn from Cold War 1, and in respect of Cold War 2.0, Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a similar colossal decision-making blunder.
Largely because of the horrendous losses suffered by Russia at the hands of the Germans in World War II, Stalin insisted, in his negotiation with American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and British prime minister Winston Churchill on the security structure of postwar Europe, that nine countries in Eastern Europe be added to the Russian Empire. They were Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (fully incorporated into Russia proper), plus Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—collectively, the “East Bloc”—as client states. FDR wasn’t happy about the loss of Eastern Europe to the Russian Communists as “buffer states” against a someday possibly resurgent Germany, but he couldn’t afford to confront Stalin because FDR thought he might need the Russians to help the Americans fight the Japanese.
Stalin originally hoped that communist governments friendly to Russia would be elected in all of the nine countries comprising the East Bloc in the first elections after the war ended. In fact, in each country—in all nine countries—the communists were soundly defeated at the polls. No country chose to voluntarily live under a communist autocratic political and economic system. Having been thwarted at the ballot box, Stalin ordered his state security police to install by force communist governments in the East Bloc countries that were loyal to Moscow.11 By 1948 the job was complete, including by a brazen coup in Prague, where the state security police threw Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, out a fourth-floor bathroom window to his death because he would not collaborate with the autocrats. History keeps rhyming. Stalin installed one-party autocratic governments in each East Bloc country after failing to succeed at the ballot box—just as Lenin had orchestrated a violent autocratic coup in Moscow thirty years before when he failed at the ballot box. It is no wonder autocrats abhor democracy—they never do well when the people have a say in choosing their government.
What then began for the nine East Bloc countries was forty-five years of communist autocracy, where there were no free, fair, or credible elections; citizens had no personal freedoms such as freedom of speech or assembly; there was no rule of law; judges were not independent; there was no freedom of the press; the communist autocrats destroyed any vestige of civil society (such as private charities, or clubs like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, each having been replaced by state-run communist youth leagues); and the autocrats instituted fully the Russian system of economic autocracy where bureaucrats in the central government ran every aspect of the production of goods and services. As Churchill proclaimed at the time, an “Iron Curtain” had been drawn across Eastern Europe by the Soviet Russians.12
Meanwhile, democracy continued in the UK, with Churchill being voted out of office in July 1945, a truly astounding result given that he was the war hero prime minister who rallied the country to persevere during the darkest days of the 1940 blitz, when England stood alone against the autocratic Nazi menace, France having been defeated a few weeks before. This is, however, precisely the essence of democracy. The British people knew the war was about to end, they were exhausted of it, and they wanted a different leader to take them into the postwar world. This is the genius, the magic, and the allure of democracy. Stalin must have smiled ruefully when he heard Churchill did not win reelection, particularly as Stalin did not have to worry about such niceties as elections so long as he kept secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria busy killing Stalin’s real and imaginary enemies in Russia, and later in the East Bloc as well.
A few years later, democracy delivered another surprise, this time in the United States, when in November 1948 Harry Truman was elected president. The heavy favorite to win was the Republican governor of New York, Thomas Dewey. There is a famous photo of Truman holding up the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the banner headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This Truman victory, and Churchill’s loss in 1945, are emblematic of what can happen in a democracy when the people truly get to decide. In an autocracy the people merely get to endure. (Incidentally, Churchill was reelected in 1951, and served again as the country’s prime minister until 1955, another interesting twist for British democracy.)
An early test in Cold War 1 of the willingness and ability of the democracies to stand up against the autocrat in Moscow began in June 1948 in Berlin. This city was in Russian-administered East Germany, but the three other occupying powers (the United States, the UK, and France) also administered sectors of Berlin, in addition to overseeing respective regions in what was then West Germany. Stalin resented the presence of the democracies in Berlin, and he tried forcing them to leave by closing the route that the democracies were previously using to travel between West Berlin and West Germany across East Germany. Stalin anticipated that this “Berlin Blockade” would “starve” the democracies out of West Berlin.
Stalin’s plan did not work. Truman launched a massive armada of US Air Force planes to supply vast amounts of provisions to West Berliners. Each day up to 1,400 US planes landed at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport with food and other provisions. Stalin was very angry, but he was sure the Americans would give up quickly from exhaustion. The US did not quit. Finally, on May 12, 1949, it was Stalin who threw in the towel by terminating the siege. Thereafter, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the democracies were able to supply West Berlin using the overland route, and eventually they even used a railway that linked Berlin to West Germany. The democracies stood firm and stared down the autocratic Russian bully. This is a fine lesson for Cold War 2.0.
Given how Russia had installed communist autocratic governments in the East Bloc countries, and how Stalin tried to eject the democracies from West Berlin, the Western European countries worried that Russia would invade them next. The new United Nations Charter enshrined the principle of national sovereignty and inviolable borders, but the problem with the UN system was that Russia could veto any military effort by the UN to act against Russian aggression. This is exactly what happened in Cold War 2.0 when, on February 24, 2022, Russia (an autocracy) commenced its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine (a democracy), and the next day Russia blocked any action by the United Nations Security Council to exercise its veto. Therefore, the desire of Western European countries in the late 1940s to guard against further communist expansion into their own territories would require them to undertake “self-help” defensive measures.
In March 1948 five Western European countries (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) formed a mutual defense alliance called the Treaty of Brussels. (The French and British had actually started the ball rolling with their mutual defense treaty signed in 1947, the Treaty of Dunkirk.) Such “collective defense” is permitted under the UN system. The core principle in the Treaty of Brussels was that an attack against one country would be considered an attack against all of them; their collective defense posture was intended to deter any military aggression against them by Russia.
Realizing that strength in numbers was desirable in collective defense arrangements, other democracies were invited to join the Treaty of Brussels. The result was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), created in April 1949. Ironically, Stalin’s intention to weaken Western Europe through the Berlin Blockade instead strengthened Western Europe by inspiring the creation of NATO, just as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in order to weaken NATO actually had the opposite effect by prompting Finland to join NATO. Back in 1949, NATO comprised the five Treaty of Brussels countries, plus the United States and Canada, and also European countries Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and, joining in 1955, West Germany. NATO continues to thrive to this day—some seventy-five years later, now with thirty-one member states—as the most successful collective defense arrangement in history. Its Article 5 provides that an attack against any NATO member is considered an attack against all NATO countries. In practical terms, it is often said NATO has succeeded in “Keeping the United States in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
In parallel with NATO collective military security, the democracies moved quickly to rebuild the economies and civil societies of countries in Western Europe, as leaders believed communism could succeed in taking over a democracy if it had high unemployment or low living standards. The Americans launched the Marshall Fund, which provided loans and grants to sixteen West European countries. The Marshall Fund disbursed about $13 billion—around $150 billion in today’s money—mainly on rebuilding infrastructure like power plants, transport, and steel production, but some funds were also spent on technical assistance to improve productivity in manufacturing plants. Western Europeans themselves promoted economic rehabilitation by forming the European Economic Community in 1957, which survives to this day as the European Union (EU). Currently the EU comprises twenty-seven countries, all democracies (though some with serious flaws) that have agreed to tightly integrate their economies, including in respect of the movement of goods, people, and capital. These measures have made the region more prosperous, which in turn makes it more peaceful and secure from outside invasion.
The various efforts to rebuild an entire Europe of democracies worked. Today, the EU is a thriving community of 450 million people. In particular, the rehabilitation of the war-torn autocratic Nazi Germany, both economically and then as a solid bastion of democracy, has been nothing short of spectacular. When West Germany hosted the Olympic Games in 1972 and the soccer World Cup two years later, East Germans, the rest of the East Bloc, and Russians all looked on with envy at the magnificent sports facilities in Munich and the other cities that had been rebuilt from the rubble of World War II. Today, with the world’s fourth-largest economy, and regular peaceful transfers of power between different political parties through fair, free, and credible elections, reunited Germany is a marvelous economic and political success story, similar to that of Asian democracies Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
A second major early test of the democracies in Cold War 1 was a hot war started on June 25, 1950, when 223,000 troops of the autocratic communist government of North Korea invaded South Korea over the 38th Parallel, running across the Korean Peninsula. After World War II, Korea was divided in a fashion similar to East and West Germany, and the Russians installed a puppet regime in the North, under the new communist autocratic leader Kim Il-Sung. Kim had studied in Moscow during World War II, where he was being prepared to take over all of Korea. Kim’s attack on South Korea was approved by Moscow and Beijing, as China had become an autocratic communist state in 1949 under Mao Zedong. It started the Korean War, which in terms of the fighting lasted until 1953, but the two countries still haven’t signed an official peace treaty. The initial shock of the invasion worked, and communist troops from North Korea captured Seoul, the capital city of the South Korea, in a matter of days.
In response to North Korea’s unjustified aggression, the United Nations Security Council quickly authorized a military force to fight back against Kim’s army. (Russia did not veto the action because it was temporarily boycotting the UN.) After three years of very bloody fighting—more bombs were dropped in the Korean War than in all of World War II—the UN forces, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, fought the North Koreans back to the 38th Parallel. The US commanded the multinational force because it supplied 1.78 million troops, with about 1.5 million coming from South Korea, 100,000 from Britain, and 25,000 from Canada, and smaller numbers still from another eighteen countries. At one point the UN force pushed the North Korean army right up to the Chinese border, and were about to claim the entire peninsula for the South Korean government when China launched an attack of 700,000 troops (a total of 2 million Chinese soldiers would see action over the course of the war) to save Kim’s communist government. South Korea never forgot the role the US played in preserving their country. During the Vietnam War, South Korea sent a total of 350,000 troops to support the Americans in trying to keep the communist North Vietnamese from capturing South Vietnam. (The Americans supplied 550,000 troops.)
Russia’s willingness to use military force in proxy hot wars against the democracies (and states wanting to become democracies) continued even after Stalin’s death in 1953. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, initially signaled a possible thaw in Russia’s autocratic ways when he gave a six-hour speech to the 20th RCP Congress in March 1956 describing in detail Stalin’s many crimes, including the bloody purges of the 1930s and his catastrophic military decisions. Sensing possible room for maneuver, a few local leaders in the East Bloc countries began to test the bounds of Russian authority. In June 1956 there were short-lived riots in Poland.
In October 1956, Hungary’s Imre Nagy proposed limited reforms (including multiple candidates for elections), and some distance from Russia in economic policy. University students in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, supported Nagy, but wanted to go further. They started to protest Russia’s military occupation of Hungary. Events escalated into a violent uprising, with workers joining in cities and towns all over Hungary. Initially, it appeared the Russians might pull out of their vassal state, but on November 4, 1956, Russian tanks and infantry entered Hungary and brutally put down the demonstrators. A war of independence ensued, and 25,000 Hungarian freedom fighters were killed by Russian troops. More than 250,000 Hungarian refugees (from a population of 9.8 million) fled to democracies.13 Nagy and a dozen of his coleaders were tried for treason; he and five others were executed, and the rest received ten-year prison terms. The brief flicker of the flame of democracy along the Danube River was snuffed out. Post-Stalin, Cold War 1 was still a treacherous, dangerous time for would-be builders of democracy behind the Iron Curtain.
Russia’s ambassador to Hungary during this period was Yuri Andropov. He was very hawkish on crushing the Hungarian freedom movement. He played a decisive role in ensuring a bloody Russian crackdown. Subsequently, Andropov was elevated to the head of the KGB (the state security police), and later still (November 1982) he was appointed the paramount leader of Soviet Russia. (He served only fifteen months before he died of kidney failure.) In terms of his legacy, Andropov was Putin’s role model, and later in life Putin’s mentor. There is a clear parallel between Putin’s violent crushing of nationalist movements in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine in the 21st century and Andropov’s hard-line treatment of Hungary in 1956.
In Prague in 1968 a similar script played out, when Czech communist leader Alexander Dubcek called for reforms of that country’s autocratic economic and political systems. Once again, the Russians sent in their tanks, but this time the Czechs didn’t even try to fight, knowing the cause would be hopeless—they had seen the significant blood spilled in vain in Budapest ten years earlier.
In both the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the “Prague Spring” of 1968, the East Bloc countries hoped that the West, and at least the Americans, would give some support to their liberation movements, but troops from democracies never materialized. Not even military equipment was shipped to the freedom fighters. Still, televised images were beamed into East Bloc households showing how well middle-class people lived in the democracies. East Bloc residents saw open markets in the democracies producing, and their average citizens enjoying, abundant quantities of high-quality consumer goods. It was crystal clear that autocratic, top-down central planning, Russian and East Bloc style, was not providing sufficient necessities of life, let alone the middle-class comforts that the democracies were showering on their citizens.
The economic statistics supported the images. Underpinned by American leadership, from 1950 to 1990 the economies of the democracies grew at roughly 3.5 percent per year. The autocracies, by contrast, grew at roughly the same rate between 1950 and 1975 (but mainly by investment in heavy industry), but then declined in the following ten years to 2.1 percent annually, and finally between 1985 and the early 1990s annual economic growth in Soviet Russia collapsed to 1.3 percent. Moreover, much more of the economic growth in Russia was allocated to the production of industrial goods and spent on military expenditures than in the democracies. This would exacerbate the chasm between the standards of living of consumers in the two camps. Recall that at an annual 3.5 percent growth rate, wealth doubles every twenty years, while at 2 percent economic growth wealth doubles only every thirty-six years.
By the 1970s the economic race of Cold War 1 was being handily won by the democracies. This could have gone on indefinitely had the East Bloc not been right beside Western Europe, as East Germany, after all, shared a 1,381-kilometer border with West Germany. With such physical, cultural, and visible proximity, the discrepancy between the two camps became untenable. The parallel with Cold War 2.0 is striking, except the item of envy in the 2010s was not only economic wealth but also democracy itself. Putin concluded that he could not long keep his country shrouded in a closed autocracy when neighboring Ukraine blossomed into an open democracy oriented westward toward the European Union.
A further important difference between the two systems was that the amount of corruption in the autocracies far exceeded that in the democracies. While no political system is completely immune from it, in democracies corruption is a bug in the system and an affront to the rule of law, and law enforcement will pursue when the corruption is discovered. By contrast, in autocracies corruption is a central feature of the system and derives directly from the fact that a single, supreme leader runs the country with complete impunity. A couple of firsthand accounts of corruption in an autocracy during Cold War 1 involving the author will help illuminate the phenomenon.
In 1984 I had to obtain a visa to travel to autocratic, communist Hungary. The clerk at the Hungarian embassy in Paris explained their office would require forty-eight hours to process my visa. I responded that this timing didn’t work for me as I had a train to catch the next morning. “Ah,” the clerk exclaimed, “then you will want the expedited visa processing service. We can process your visa right now, but the fee would be double the regular price.” I handed over the additional money. To my amazement, she tucked it into her purse—right in front of my eyes! (She had already put the “regular” fee into the official cash register.) She then called to her colleague to stick the visa paper into my passport, which she then stamped. The visa processing exercise took them two minutes, as they didn’t do any background checks or anything else. Frankly, the entire visa charade existed to squeeze some money out of foreign visitors; the expedited service was a corrupt practice that lined the pockets of petty bureaucrats. A democracy might also have an “expedited processing fee” for some service, but the additional money would also go to the government.
At the end of the same trip, I had a few forints (the Hungarian currency) left in my pocket. The stern-looking border guard asked me whether I had any forints, and reminded me that taking forints out of Hungary was a criminal offense. I sheepishly rifled through my pockets and knapsack and found a few scrawny forint banknotes, amounting to about $10 in value. I pulled them out and showed them to the guard. I thought she would get angry with me. Instead, to my surprise, she pulled out a suitcase from under her counter and opened it to reveal a wide assortment of Hungarian souvenirs, like crocheted tablecloths and napkins. “Lucky for you,” she cheerily intoned (her demeanor having changed now that she was in sales mode), “I happen to have some handicrafts you can spend your last forints on,” which of course I dutifully did, all the while feeling queasy about the large pistol on her gun belt.
While these examples were fairly minor in nature, more serious incidences of corruption can have very serious impacts on the system that allows it, let alone fosters it. When Russia commenced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the column of Russian tanks and supply vehicles heading for Kyiv ground to a halt a few kilometers inside the Ukrainian border. One reason for the holdup was the fierce resistance put up by incredibly brave Ukrainian soldiers using shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles to wreak havoc on Russia’s mechanized brigades. Also at play, though, was that the tires on many Russian trucks gave out. It turns out the Russian vehicles had not been properly maintained. Russian military officers responsible for procuring maintenance services simply pocketed the maintenance funds themselves.
There is far more corruption in autocracies than democracies. Transparency International,14 which tracks corruption around the world, ranks Russia and China among the most corrupt. For example, President Putin’s official annual salary is about $122,000, yet since taking office in 2000 he has accumulated a personal fortune estimated to be between $70 and $200 billion.15 Among his assets are two gigantic mansions, one on the Black Sea coast and a newer, custom-built 75,000-square-foot dacha (the master bedroom is 2,800 square feet) in the forests outside Moscow, where his mistress, Alina Kabaeva, and their two children reside. Russian democracy activist Alexei Navalny has bravely brought this corruption to the attention of the Russian people—and the rest of the world—and now Navalny will likely literally rot in a Russian prison for more than thirty years on trumped-up charges brought by Putin.16
Then there is the endemic, systemic corruption whereby the autocrat and his enablers always do much better economically than the rest of the citizens. Throughout Cold War 1 there was immense disparity in consumption of consumer goods between the RCP elite and the mass of other Russians. Consumer goods were always in short supply for average Russian citizens—other than RCP elites. In Soviet Russia’s system of economic autocracy, most state spending went on heavy industry and the military-industrial complex (MIC), which designed and manufactured weapons and especially rockets and nuclear warheads. There was little money allocated to the everyday household goods that were increasingly taken for granted by growing middle classes in democracies, such as modern houses and apartments, cars, household appliances, and (in democracies) the all-important winter vacation taken in a warm southern country.
By contrast, Russian citizens, even those in the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, generally didn’t own a car and lived in tiny apartments. (Putin, in the 1960s, grew up in a flat where they shared the bathroom with another family, and he chased rats in the building’s stairwell.) They also wore tired clothes. I remember buying a pair of shoes in Budapest in the late 1970s. There was nothing on the shelves of a regular shoe store except the single style of dark gray, clunky communist footwear. The store manager saw I was an unimpressed tourist. He motioned me to the back room, where he showed me a gorgeous pair of shoes made in Italy of supple leather. I paid a king’s ransom for them relative to the cost of the shoes made in Hungary, but they were worth it. Regular Hungarians, without foreign currency, had to buy the depressing shoes found in the front of the store; foreign tourists with hard currency and members of the Hungarian political elite—friends and contacts of the autocrat and other enablers—got to shop in the back room where the superior stock was located.
Most infuriatingly, regular people in the East Bloc and Russia had to stand in line to buy even basic groceries. Most of the time the common grocery stores had shortages of even basic foodstuffs, like meat, milk, and eggs. I remember visiting Moscow in the early 1980s and walking through a regular grocery store. The only item in abundance was candy. Otherwise, the shelves were sparse or altogether bare. In the meat section there was actually nothing on the refrigerated shelves. Then there was a commotion because the staff was putting out some hams. People swarmed about grasping one or two while they could. I looked more closely at the hams. In North America they would be solid meat with a ribbon or two of fat. These Russian hams were the opposite, entirely white fat with a speckle of dark meat. I was astounded, and I felt bad for the average Russian.
I felt even worse for them the next day when I visited one of the stores for the RCP elite. A guard at the door kept out regular Russian citizens, but the store had windows onto the street so average Russians could see what the RCP members were buying. What they saw was close to a grocery store in a democracy, with lots of food and modern household items sourced from Western Europe. Here was the classic example of endemic, systemic corruption, because the average Russian could not shop there; entry was restricted to members of the Russian elite or tourists with “hard” currency, as I was. To me, this astoundingly unequal duality in economic opportunity—the autocrat and the enablers enjoying the gravy of the country, everyone else scraping for crumbs—was one of the strongest indictments of autocratic systems. I wondered: How did the Russian masses allow this kind of consumer apartheid to go on? My question was answered in 1989–1991 when the Soviet Russian system of economic autocracy fell apart, and their autocratic political system collapsed along with it, bringing Cold War 1 to an end—although the political autocracy and various elements of the autocratic economy were resuscitated under Putin in 2000.
Russia has lagged behind the democracies in technology and innovation for more than 300 years. Russian tsar Peter II learned on his 1717 trip to Western Europe just how backward Russia was, and in 1724 established the Russian Academy of Sciences, modeled on the German equivalent. Tsar Peter and his descendants, especially Tsarina Catherine II, also brought German professors to St. Petersburg to teach Russian university students the latest trends in science. For the past 300 years, Russian scientists have done a passable job in keeping abreast of the latest in science. Where Russia faltered, though, was in translating science into commercial technology that could be used by businesses or, in the last one hundred years, by consumers. The principal reason for this shortcoming was the hierarchical, top-down autocratic political structure endemic in Russia.
Stalin understood the importance of science and technology, but he did not trust scientists. He had hundreds of scientists murdered during the “terror” and purges of the 1930s. Many scientists escaped Russia even earlier when they saw the communist writing on the wall. One high-profile emigrant was Igor Sikorsky, a world-class aeronautical engineer who left Russia in 1918 within months of Lenin seizing autocratic power. He invented a working helicopter while still in Russia, but the commercial exploitation of his innovation all happened in the United States. To this day, the giant military contractor Lockheed Martin operates a large rotary wing division (making military and civilian helicopters) under the Sikorsky brand. (A predecessor to Lockheed Martin purchased Sikorsky’s company decades earlier.)
The core problem with Russian autocracy relative to the development of science and technology innovation is that the autocrat—whether tsar or leader of the Communist Party or, since 2000, Putin—holds stifling and overbearing personal power. During and after World War II, Stalin disliked computers and their precursor, cybernetics. As a result, computer science was essentially banned during Stalin’s lifetime. Stalin thought computers were a plot created by capitalists. He had more time for nuclear weapons, but in the early years of World War II he emphasized conventional technology that would be embedded in tanks and airplanes as he needed those desperately to repel the German army. He allowed several Russian scientists to tinker with nuclear science, but he didn’t really grasp the importance of it and so the field lay fallow. The United States, by contrast, invested heavily in building a nuclear bomb during World War II, as outlined in the previous chapter. For their part, the Russian physicists learned the theory behind the atomic bomb, but they were denied the means (the labs, the staff, etc.) to create the technology of nuclear weapons.
This all changed very dramatically when the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945. Stalin then understood the importance of nuclear weapons. Russia, though, was woefully behind the democracies in nuclear research, especially the technology required to make a nuclear bomb. Stalin’s response was taken from the autocrat’s playbook—he ordered his state security police to purloin from the Americans their secrets so that the Russians could catch up to the US. In short, Stalin’s approach was if you can’t make it, steal it. This has been the motto for Russian (and Chinese) R&D for decades. Tellingly, because he promoted theft rather than research, Stalin put his trusted lieutenant—head of Russia’s much feared state security police—Lavrenty Beria in charge of the world’s most important technology espionage project, in addition to Beria’s “day job” of murdering people identified by Stalin.
Beria was very successful in stealing plans for the US atomic bomb and its complex associated technology. He created a spy ring within the United States, Britain, and Canada that was able to steal copies of all facets of the design and technology innovation behind the US nuclear bombs. Armed with this industrial espionage gold rush, Russia tested its first atomic weapon in August 1949. It was an exact replica of the US bomb. The Russians, with spies like Klaus Fuchs, also stole plans for America’s hydrogen bombs. The Russians tested their first hydrogen bomb in 1953, only one year after the Americans unveiled theirs. The Russians profited immensely from their parasitic model of intellectual property theft.
Stalin built an entire separate city, Arzamas-16, dedicated to housing the scientists and technologists building atomic weapons. These people and their families, and other scientific and engineering talents in forty-one other such closed cities (for example, Zelenograd, dedicated to microelectronics), were treated very well in terms of access to consumer goods, and even products sourced from democracies. They were a pampered lot, living as members of an exclusive club. These cities were literally closed off to the rest of Russia, let alone the world. Entry was closely controlled by the KGB. The average Russian couldn’t just walk around these special cities and have a coffee, let alone decide they wanted to live there. For a communist regime supposedly creating a classless society, these forty-two closed science and military-industrial complex (MIC) cities were a rebuke to such lofty intentions.
Of these closed cities, thirty-three were built to service the military domain, which included the space sector. Collectively the people, research institutes, and companies in these thirty-three cities comprised the MIC of Soviet Russia. Russia’s MIC compromised some 2 million direct employees, working in about 300 R&D establishments and another 3,000 manufacturing facilities. As with the nuclear community described above, the members of the MIC clan were well cared for, even while much of the rest of the Russian citizenry was hard-pressed to find fresh vegetables or shoes that fit at the local shops in their neighborhoods. The MIC had some success, as when Russia was the first country to launch a satellite (called Sputnik) into space orbit. A few years later they beat the Americans again by launching Yuri Gagarin into earth’s orbit. In the 1950s Russians were proficient in space technology because it was based on their rocket science, which they required as delivery vehicles for their nuclear bombs. During the first two decades of Cold War 1, the Russians devoted huge research budgets to nuclear weapons, the missiles that delivered them, and then the missiles that took satellites and crews into space.
At the same time, though, researchers working in other areas of science and technology were downgraded, and sometimes starved for research funding altogether. In these nonmilitary areas, the lead scientist would have to establish a rapport with the supreme autocrat, as failure to do so would doom the research project, if not the researcher’s entire discipline. In Cold War 1 the autocrat and his political party (the RCP) were the vanguard of society, and they alone decided the direction of Russia, including what scientific fields of endeavor the country would explore and exploit—but also which ones would not be pursued. In its most trenchant formulation, a single scientist with the right connections to the supreme leader and the RCP could decide the fate of an entire research domain within Russia.
Consider the role and impact of Trofim Lysenko. He was a biologist, active in the Russian scientific research community starting in about 1938. When in the early 1950s the British biologists James Watson and Francis Crick made their breakthrough discovery of the DNA double helix, and “Western microbiology” began its quest to decode the human genome, Lysenko adamantly refused to go along, as he had concluded that genetics was not useful for understanding biology. That alone should not be a catastrophe, as individual researchers will often have disagreements about specific scientific matters. In this case, though, Lysenko had the ear of Stalin, and later Khrushchev (Stalin’s successor between 1954 and 1964), such that the entire Soviet Russian government forbade anyone from conducting research in genetics. This ban began in 1948 and was lifted only when Lysenko died in 1976. The result was a stunning backwardness in biological research that exacerbated the number of deaths from famine in Russia and in China as Beijing also adopted Lysenko’s erroneous theories. His malign influence survived his death for about twenty years, given that when he died there were no young biologists ready to move up into senior ranks of the profession. Even to this day holes in the scientific and research skills in Russian biotechnology can be attributed to the “Lysenko drought.”
Learning from the Lysenko example, rocket scientist Vladimir Chelomey tried to get into the good graces of Khrushchev by giving jobs to Khrushchev family members. This plan went well until Khrushchev was abruptly ousted from power by Brezhnev in 1964, and then Chelomey’s design was promptly dropped. In an autocracy, the scientist who lives by corruption typically dies by corruption. This is yet another structural flaw in the autocratic system.
Perhaps the most acute deficiency of the Soviet autocratic system of science and technology in Cold War 1 was the general dearth of domestically produced computers (including semiconductor chips) in Russia.17 There were a number of Soviet Russian scientists who saw the enormous value and potential in computers, and some brilliant theoretical researchers in the basic mathematical and physical subdisciplines necessary for building state-of-the-art computers. Still, when these early pioneers of the computational sciences tried to translate their expertise into manufacturing actual computers of Russian design, the RCP appointees in the various centers of power (including in feuding government ministries) vetoed such plans, or fought among themselves at the political level as to which ministry was to take the lead, and what the five-year economic plan (the core tool for implementing the autocratic economy) ought to say about computers, and so on.
The KGB and the Interior Ministry were particularly nervous that individual Russian citizens might obtain computers for use in their own homes. Given the eventual role of smartphones and other computer devices in helping to organize and support the so-called color revolutions for democracy in Russia (and in other autocratic countries) decades later, these fears in the 1960s would prove prescient. Most important, though, during Cold War 1 Russia lacked an economic system where individual technology entrepreneurs could work with a scientist to bring a novel innovation to market through advanced manufacturing and marketing techniques. Russian autocracy did not allow a Russian version of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates to work their entrepreneurial magic. The Russian government essentially decided in the early 1970s that they would not invest in creating a domestic computer industry, especially on the hardware side, and that thereafter they would for the most part have to buy or steal computing devices (including SC designs) from the democracies and buy (or steal/pirate) software from the democracies as well. What little computer production was done in Soviet Russia was slavishly derivative from products sourced from the democracies. The Russian Agat, for example, was a clone of the Apple II. In effect, Russia decided to sit out the computer revolution in Cold War 1. Given the enormous role of computing in the modern economy and society in the last quarter of the 20th century, this was a huge mistake on the part of the Russian government.
By contrast, California’s Silicon Valley took off like a rocket in the 1970s, feverishly driving the world’s computer revolution. Soon after the Americans landed a crew on the moon (in July 1969), the Russians abandoned their own quest to do likewise, partly because they didn’t have a computer strong enough to support this task. Moreover, it wasn’t simply that Russia was behind the United States in the field of computing; it was that computing science was barely a field of study (let alone one of entrepreneurship) in Soviet Russia. I remember visiting one of my cousins in Hungary in the mid-1980s who worked in tech. He said their R&D amounted to smuggling into Hungary two- or three-generations-old American computers and trying to reverse engineer them. He told me he knew this was a pathetic business model. Incidentally, a young Vladimir Putin, fresh out of KGB training in the early 1980s, was sent to Dresden in East Germany to help oversee, among other things, the smuggling of high-tech products into East Germany (from Western Europe), for onward shipment to Russia. Putin was schooled early on in the black arts of stealing technology from the democracies.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s it became clear to leaders in both Soviet Russia and the democracies that computer technologies were becoming central to modern weapons systems. In particular, semiconductor chips were becoming the core technology of guided weapons, such as cruise missiles. As Russia didn’t have state-of-the-art SCs, Russia’s munitions in this area were becoming clunky, and falling far behind in performance compared to those produced by the United States. Mikhail Gorbachev—who became Russia’s supreme leader in 1985, and lasted to 1990—carefully considered the capacity of Russia for keeping up with the US on the technological front, and he concluded (as had many others both inside and outside the Russian government), that in its then current form, Soviet Russia simply couldn’t keep up with the Americans. (And by then also the Japanese and, in certain domains, the West Europeans as well.) Already some 30 percent of Russia’s federal budget was going to pay for military items. Gorbachev concluded that to increase this by another significant amount to try to stay abreast of US technology was not realistic. The writing of the Soviet Union’s demise was on the wall of the Kremlin.
In the mid-1980s, Gorbachev’s response to Russia’s dire economic situation was to open up Russia politically and economically, in the hope that new entrepreneurial savvy and energy would overtake Russia’s ailing state-controlled enterprises—in effect, to try to inject Silicon Valley dynamism into lethargic technology and manufacturing firms. Glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev’s signature policies, were too little and too late. Economically speaking Russia was bleeding badly, and drastic measures were called for. The first earth-shattering step was that Russia jettisoned the captive countries in the East Bloc that were costing Russia huge sums in subsidies. Literally from one day to the next the Berlin Wall was dismantled, and the Iron Curtain simply ceased to exist. This led to the unraveling of the Soviet Empire in 1989, when all nine countries of the East Bloc left the Russian orbit. Moscow pulled out all 500,000 Russian troops from those countries by the end of 1989, with the exception of East Germany, where withdrawal followed over the next twenty-four months.
After the East Bloc imploded, ethnic nations within Russia itself, like Ukraine, saw an opportunity to push for their own independence. In a series of referendums in 1991, many constituent republics of Soviet Russia (like Ukraine and Moldova) became stand-alone countries. Due to an inability to deliver technological progress and economic prosperity to its citizens, the world’s largest land empire collapsed between 1989 and 1991, all without material bloodshed or violence. It was the most remarkable geopolitical event of the 20th century. Cold War 1 had come to an end. The democracies had prevailed over Soviet Russia.