The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity [antikvár]

Preface This book has been in the making for a long time. It has given its author the extraordinary experience of having lived through the events it describes and then being able to study them from the inside evidence as Soviet and other communist archives opened their doors. The price of that experience has been much writing and rewriting, sometimes with no end in sight. 1 first conceived the study of the last Stalin years as a sequel to my Russia's Road to the Cold War during the Reagan years of the "second Cold War." Although a Soviet-certified "enemy of socialism and détente dressed in a scholarly garb/'* I found it difficult to believe that the adversary could possibly be as formidable as it appeared at a distance to so many American conservatives, including some of my colleagues at Boston University, where I was teaching at that time. A desire to find out more about the sources of Soviet insecurity gave the initial impetus to my research in U.S. libraries and archives, which the university's Center for International Relations generously supported. In 1988-90 my leave of absence in Western Europe provided an exposure to different, though not necessarily more accurate, views of the Soviet Union, informed by its greater proximity. The Federal Institute for East European and International Studies in Cologne and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Wassenaar, where I was successively a visiting fellow, offered a stimulating intellectual environment and excellent working conditions, thus allowing the project to move forward. Its progress would have been much faster if I had not been distracted by too many other worthwhile projects as the Cold War was coming to an end. The slowdown turned out to be a benefit in disguise once the end of the confrontation as well as of the Soviet empire brought both new *"Podstrekateli" [The Firebrands], Kiasnaia Zvezda, February 12, 1981.