COLD WAR HISTORY FOR BABY BOOMER BEGINNERS

The Cold War?

Even the name sounds dismissive.

Are today’s students reading it and thinking, ‘No one got killed like a Hot War so what’s the big deal? Wasn’t it more peaceful after WWII?’

I know I did.

But history isn’t about picking and choosing, hunting and pecking. It’s about the slow roll of time and how we respond to the changes.

It’s all about rolling with the changes, the sharp edged and soft.

So let’s roll:

History is a series of dates, names of important people, and war winners.

At least that’s what history books leaned into, what history teachers and lazy professors assigned until they recognized other parts of history, the relatable parts.

Since we’re not all famous for doing things important enough for a national holiday, or win wars singlehandedly, we need more historical access.

That means social history, economic history, evolutionary history, ___ history.

You can name anything and add history to it, but no one is circling David Day for time off.

I mean, I am, but few others.

Like me, and every other history major worth a damn, I read for relevance, historical relevance.

Most of all, I read with my bullshit detector set to 11.

I’ve not read U.S. Grant’s memoir. Yet.

 

Shortly after losing all of his wealth in a terrible 1884 swindle, Ulysses S. Grant learned he had terminal throat and mouth cancer. Destitute and dying, Grant began to write his memoirs to save his family from permanent financial ruin.

As Grant continued his work, suffering increasing pain, the American public became aware of this race between Grant’s writing and his fatal illness. Twenty years after his respectful and magnanimous demeanor toward Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, people in both the North and the South came to know Grant as the brave, honest man he was, now using his famous determination in this final effort.

Grant finished Memoirs just four days before he died in July 1885.

Published after his death by his friend Mark Twain, Grant’s Memoirs became an instant bestseller, restoring his family’s financial health and, more importantly, helping to cure the nation of bitter discord. More than any other American before or since, Grant, in his last year, was able to heal the country’s greatest wound.

 

When I read, I ask the same question I always ask about writers:

 

 

Since it’s U.S. Grant, former Union General, former President of the United States, he’s been thoroughly vetted and reviewed.

If his personal account of history is off, there’s been plenty of time for corrections.

Is he who I think he is? I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt because Mark Twain liked him.

 

An Authentic Voice

One of the mortal sins of history is intentionally altering facts to show the outcomes you wished for, not as they were.

The Cold War in Russia, during the Soviet Union-era, worked to fix history for their people.

After the glorious victory in driving the German army out of their country, did the people need to know all of the details, all of the needless loss of life due to poor planning and worse execution?

 

“You, go to the front. You don’t need a weapon, You’ll get a rifle and ammunition from a dead soldier. You may die there, you may not die there, but I can assure you that you’ll die right here if you don’t go. Now.”

 

That’s not the sort of recruiting slogan to attract the best and brightest.

With Stalin at the wheel, the Soviets rolled over eastern and Central Europe, pushing the German army back, back, way back.

After the war the Soviets uprooted German people who’d lived in communities for centuries and put them on the road.

Russia took a part of Poland in the east and gave Poland a part of Germany in the west.

All of the German people living in the former eastern part of Germany?

Evicted. Ethnically cleansed. Thrown out.

Documentaries show the people packed into train cars and leaving.

Bloggers have posted their reaction.

 

I’ve been watching a series about life behind the Iron Curtain, which were the countries the Soviets saved from German occupation after WWII.

The story includes the incremental take over of the cultural and social institutions of nations swept back and forth between the Germans, then Russians, in accordance with the Yalta Conference.

Free and democratic elections were part of the agreement.

The Soviets went along and everything looked good at first in the later 40’s, but they controlled the national security and local police forces.

They organized their party in every country and answered any opposition with the largest army in the world.

After the inhumane behavior tolerated in WWII, anything less was acceptable.

But the Russian grip tightened and Stalin proved to be another cruel and ruthless leader with arrests, executions, and imprisonment.

He worked on conspiracies and ethnic cleansing and re-writing history with little pushback.

A joke from those times has one man coming home from the gulag after five years.

His friend said, “Five years? What did you do?”

The man said, “Nothing. If I had done anything it would have been twenty years.”

 

It’s History, Not A Fairy Tale

For the work I do I need reliable sources, like the Library of Congress.

Where else would the cold, hard, facts be unimpeachable?

The Stalinist leadership felt especially threatened by the intelligentsia, whose creative efforts were thwarted through the strictest censorship; by religious groups, who were persecuted and driven underground; and by non-Russian nationalities, many of whom were deported en masse to Siberia during World War II because Stalin questioned their loyalty.

 

The question of loyalty is a big one.

Ask someone you know what they are most loyal to. Their answer will tell you how well you know them.

Loyalty in Cold War Russia wasn’t enough to keep you out of the gulag.

Have things changed since the fall of the Iron Curtain?

 

Vladimir Putin’s “keeper of secrets” died on Christmas Day, less than two years after the Russian president fired him.

Colonel-General Yuri Sadovenko, 56, died suddenly from “heart disease” on Christmas Day in Moscow, according to Russian news outlets.

Sadovenko, who had been sanctioned by the U.S., U.K., and other Western states, reportedly showed no signs of ill health before his death

In July this year, Putin sacked Transport Minister Roman Starovoit, 53, who was found dead hours later in a park with a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide.

On the same day, Andrei Korneichuk, 42, another transportation official who had worked closely with Starovoit, collapsed and died of what was said to be a heart attack.

Other Russian officials’ deaths have long sparked jokes about staying away from windows.

 

PS: Cold War history for baby boomer beginners hits closer to home than younger generations. It shouldn’t.

 

PSS: An American Cold War against America is no way to move forward. Creating doubt among the least informed people is not a message but a threat. You’re better than that. I’m better than that.

Are we better than that? What would Stalin do?

He’d fix history to his liking, of course.

 

U.S. democracy relies on the education of its difficult and messy history alongside the hopeful and aspirational.

But erasing the darker parts of that history muddles the allegory that everyone can participate in democracy and conceals the fact that individuals can start social movements that lead to greater freedoms and liberties.

This erasure is an attempt to undermine the history of America and, in doing so, redefine who America is for.