Ideas - What Russia wants most of all is U.S. recognition

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

The direction of the Cold War depended on more than the strategies of two superpowers. It also depended on psychological motivations — in particular, a desire for greatness on the part of Soviet leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev. The desire could never be satisfied, resulting in frustration and explaining why U.S. presidents’ personal behaviour toward Soviet and Russian leaders has caused outsized consequences for history, as Sergey Radchenko argues in the book that won this year’s Lionel Gelber Prize.

Okay, so I'm Tom Power. I host the award-winning interview show Cue, and it's not just about art. It's also a podcast that delves into conversations with artists as to why we create at all. Like you'll hear boy genius member Lucy Dacus open up about why she's dead dissatisfied with the way we talk about love. You'll hear Cate Blanchett describe what it's like to forget the sound of your own voice. And you'll hear how Coleman Domingo actually honed his acting skills in the circus. Listen to Q with me, Tom Power, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, I'm Nala Ayaed. Before we get into today's show, I'd like to ask you for a favor.

If you enjoy ideas, please hit the follow button on whatever app you're using. We've got some fascinating conversations coming up that you won't want to miss. And if you already follow the show, perhaps you can also leave us a rating and a review. It goes a long way to helping ideas reach more listeners like you. Okay, now onto today's show. We thought Russia would become a normal country. It did not. Because it still had the same desire. Why this mess of American imperialism? It craved and continues to crave recognition as one of the major global powers. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

What's interesting about this ambition is that it seems to be so constant, it never goes away. The historian Sergei Radchenko was in Toronto to receive the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book about international affairs written in the English language anywhere in the world. I still cannot believe that I won this prize. Radchenko's book is called To Run the World, the Kremlin's cold war bid for global power. And it gives us psychological spin to the Cold War, focusing on feelings of unfulfilled ambition on the part of Soviet leaders. A trait that continues in the man leading Russia today. I think that helps us understand the depth of Putin's resentment.

But the book is, at least on the face of it, an account of the 20th century. And so, while giving his speech after accepting his $50,000 award, Sergey Radchenko asks us to cast our minds back. I want to take you back to 1945, where this book ostensibly begins with the person of Joseph Stalin. There's a universally known rule Stalin postulated not long before he set off for Yalta. If you cannot advance, then resort to defense.

But once you have accumulated your strength, go on the offensive. In his time, Stalin continued, Lenin did not dream of the correlation of forces that we have attained as a result of this war. Lenin never thought that you could be allied with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight the other wing. We managed it. And then he added, and I quote, we're not guided by emotions, but by reason, analysis and calculation. Sergey Radchenko gave this speech to an audience of fellow scholars at Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

He flew in for the occasion from his home in Bologna. He teaches at the Italian campus of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. We reached him there shortly after he accepted the Gelber Prize so he could fill us in on the context for his book's argument and the anecdotes mentioned in his speech in Toronto. Is that a lovely church near your home? Is that what we were hearing just now? Yes, well, Bologna is so full of wonderful medieval churches, and yes, they start reading bills here every half an hour. You cannot escape that.

Yeah, lovely. Okay, we're forewarned. Now we know. If it happens again. Picking up on an anecdote that you told at the very beginning of your lecture, of your acceptance speech for the Gelber Prize, you tell a story of Joseph Stalin just before he went to the Yalta Conference to meet Churchill and Harry Truman to discuss the future of Europe after World War II. He says, we, meaning the Soviets, are not guided by emotions, but by reason, analysis and calculation. And I wondered if you could tell us what your own view is of whether Stalin was correct in making that claim.

You know, Stalin, I think, was correct when speaking about himself. He was a very cold creature. He was a calculating individual. He was very Machiavellian. This word is sometimes overused, but I really think it makes sense in Stalin's context. He was brutal. Some other Soviet leaders were more emotional, more prone to outbursts of passion, hatred, or love, or ambition, etc. And I talk about in my book about those leaders, people like Nikita Khrushchev, who was just really passionate in the way that Stalin simply could never be. Was he guided by rational calculations?

Yes, sometimes he was, of course he was. But you also have to understand the emotional side of him, otherwise we're never able to answer the core questions about why he did this or that. And the same applies to Brezhnev, the same applies to Gorbachev. You know, one that makes me wonder, and I do talk about him in the book, is Putin. I don't know if Putin... You know, Putin is a cold creature as well. He's also guided by calculations in the way that Stalin was, but I sense an emotional side to Putin that I think sometimes is understated. So that is where he is more similar to people like Khrushchev than people like Stalin.

Joseph Stalin came of age on the periphery of a sprawling empire in the twilight years of Russian imperialism. Imperial conceptions, which included the idea of the spheres of influence, became part and parcel of how Stalin viewed the world and shaped his approach to 1945 into the post-war world. Now that the correlation of forces was clearly in his favor, he sought to extend Soviet influence into the heart of Europe. This is what he meant by going on the offensive.

And he expected that the United States would defer to his ambition. America had its own sphere of influence, Stalin thought, on the other side of the ocean, and it would not get involved in European affairs, leaving the Kremlin in a position to assert its uncontested power across the continent. So what Stalin hoped to achieve at Yalta was American recognition of this new reality and, through such recognition, legitimation of his new role as the arbiter of Europe's destiny. It was a vision of great power cooperation based, as Stalin thought, on a realistic assessment of the balance of power. Only it didn't work out this way.

The American leaders were worried about Soviet ambitions in Europe or were not willing to give Stalin a blank check even on countries that bordered the USSR, much less in those that lay beyond Moscow's immediate reach. But where the Soviets exercised considerable influence through local communist parties. President Truman, for his part, believed that in questions of the post-war settlement, the United States should get its way 85% of the time. After all, it had the atomic bomb, a very powerful argument in any diplomatic negotiation. Truman feared Soviet subversion and the spread of communist ideas and therefore the extension of Soviet influence. Stalin, for his part, feared the spread of American influence, backed by the power of the US dollar. Seeing that

the communist influence was actually beginning to wane even in areas under his direct control, the Soviet dictator abandoned his hitherto preferred project of left-wing popular fronts and began imposing direct communist rule. So let me take you a half step back to this idea that Stalin would have thought that there were peaceful means with which to achieve what he wanted, i.e. through maybe an electoral process, a democratic process, and it's not something we really associate with Stalin. You never think about Stalin as being, you know, really into the electoral politics,

but this is one of the things that I talked about in my book. In sort of 45 and 46, he was thinking in those terms. He thought the communists actually would be there. And to be fair, they were quite popular. I mean, think about the communists standing in France or a communist standing in Italy. They were actually quite popular. In Czechoslovakia, communists were very, very popular, were winning elections effectively, until they were no longer able to win elections. And this is where Stalin decides, okay, well,

since we cannot get to control those countries through the ballot box, we'll have to basically impose military force. But he couldn't do that in the areas that he did not actually control. So Western Europe already escaped his grip. Could you pinpoint the moment, like which election or which country,

or where was it that this pivot happens? I think it happened in the spring of 1947 and I think it happened not necessarily even in connection with any particular election but the general direction of where things were going in Europe. Now some historians have pointed to the Marshall Plan as a point where Stalin realized the danger of the Americans staying in Europe, that the Americans would actually not just stay in Europe but also provide for European recovery. And the Soviets, of course, were paranoid about it. They did not want this for this to happen and they did not want to allow their clients to participate in the Marshall Plan.

So Stalin had very nasty meetings with the Czechoslovaks, for example, saying you cannot do that, right? I banned you, you know, I'm not going to allow you to do that. But you can already see that, you know, Marshall Plan was, this is like June 1947, already earlier than this, we have events happening in the United States, we have the Truman Doctrine, and that was in connection with what was happening in Greece United States, we have the Truman Doctrine and that was in connection with what was happening in Greece really, because of course there was a civil war in Greece and Truman thought that communists could come to power basically capitalizing on the desperate economic situation. And so Stalin, who until then never really helped the Greek communist movement all that much,

suddenly begins helping them. He has secret meetings with them. He provides weapons in May 1947. You know, in the Russian archives you have whole lists of weapons that Stalin would go through and he would say, okay, I'm going to give this, I'm going to give this, I'm going to give this. And those were all German weapons to confuse the Greeks. Of course, they would not understand where those allegedly not understand where the weapons came from. So Stalin somehow starts to see American fader to leave Europe to its own devices and to potential Soviet influence is increasingly turning point and he's also willing to up the stakes. So whereas

previously he would stay out of Greece, he would encourage parliamentary road. Now he's thinking, okay, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. So we have to resort to more brutal means, including supporting guerrilla forces in Greece, by the way, without any success, but also to basically imposing communism across all of Eastern Europe. One feature making Sergey Radchenko's book exciting for his colleagues is his focus on the psychology of Soviet leaders, and more broadly of Soviet and Russian culture. This makes it quite different from previous histories of the Cold War. I asked him how he was able to go deeper into what was really driving Soviet leaders. So what we knew about Stalin before was what various historians have written in memoirs,

you know, his Machiavellian nature, his brutality, etc. All of that was already there from memoirs, from studies of Stalin, from biographies and so on and so forth. What I was able to do was to look closely at his daily life, his correspondence with his underlings, people like Vyacheslav Molotov. And once you get this granular picture, you get a better view of what the person was like. Maybe you do not actually necessarily abandon the overall picture. Yes, he was calculating. Yes, he was cold.

Yes, he was brutal, cynical, etc., etc. All of those things really matter. But you also discover things like vanity, for example, that you would not normally discover. You discover things like ambition that sometimes does not come through if you just focus on well-known public documents that, you know, Stalin's speeches and so on and so forth, when you read his conversations, his telegrams, you just see what he was thinking from day to day. And he comes across as a very sophisticated individual. And I think that is the benefit of working in the archives with those documents. You get a better view of what they were like as people, with all their

mistakes, all their follies, all their delusions, ambitions, and so on. You find all of that in the documents, and I think it's such a rewarding process. Can you explain what it is that you got to look at that you had never seen before? So this is, you know, this is the exciting part for a historian to go into the archives and hopefully see things that nobody else has seen. And I was so fortunate to have had that opportunity, not just in Russia, but also in China. I lived in China for years and of course things have really turned the glistens Xi Jinping's rise, but I was there on the cusp of that. So I was there during the late Hu Jintao era into early Xi Jinping. When you can access things in the archives.

And I would go there. It was not uniform. You would go. You would quarrel with the archival people and say, well, you know, I should be. Please show that to me. Or you don't want to show it to me. OK, well, show me something else. And so we'd have these kind of discussions which were hilarious.

And then what happened is the Russians came on board in a massive kind of discussions which were hilarious. And then what happened is the Russians came on board in a massive kind of way and completely unexpected because the Russians, there's been a trickle of documents since the early 2000s. I would go to Moscow as a doctoral student and find nothing, absolutely nothing, because everything was classified. And then in the early 2010s, I think about 2013-2014, they suddenly declassified this incredible amount of documentation, which allowed me to retell every aspect of the Cold War from a new perspective. There's always new stuff that we did not know. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis, new stuff, take the Yom Kippur War, new stuff, everything,

because we had this really granular view for the first time. So I was very privileged and people asked me what happened and why did the Russians decide to declassify it. Well, it's so surprising. You know, it's not what we associate with Putin's government. Yeah, it is. Because it's a hideous regime and you'd think that just crackdown and everything. And they're starting to do that.

They're starting to close things down, which is why sadly I was probably the last person for a long time to have availed myself of those wonderful opportunities. And I speak to graduate students all the time now and they say, well, what can we do? We cannot go there because we can become hostages in the hands of the Russian government and they won't let us into the archives. I say yes, yes, this is all true. But there was a period from 2013-14 to approximately really to the outbreak of the war against Ukraine that I would just go there and have access to Khrushchev's personal documents,

Stalin's personal documents, Brezhnev's personal documents, thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of pages on every conceivable topic. And so I just kind of vacuumed all of this stuff. And then I was trying to go through it and the challenge, this is why the book was so long. You know, my word limit was supposed to be 100,000 words, which is about normal for an academic book

with Cambridge University Press. And then I produced my book, I sent it to them, they said, are you kidding us? Which it was like 350,000 words. I said, look, there's all this crazy stuff here that nobody ever heard anything about. You got to publish it. And so they said, well, you have to cut some things. So I cut some things, but it still is a massive book. you know anybody I just I feel sorry for all those poor students who have to now read it. So no one has access to those documents anymore? Basically no. I mean I think if you are a James Bond type person then you want to

get in there and go there you know all the power to you but I'm not. Okay. I'm past that moment. What I tried to do above all was to show how Soviet leaders from Stalin, Tulaev Brezhnev, finally Mikhail Gorbachev, perceived themselves in the world, how they pursued Soviet interests and how they defined those interests. More than anything, in the book I look at the idea of greatness, what it meant to the Kremlin, why the Soviet leaders were so obsessed with it, why they were so single-minded in the pursuit of the so-called greatness, even

the great cost to their country and to their people. This is at first sight a strange question. The Soviet Union was certainly not the only country that historically has aspired to greatness, nor its leaders, the only leaders in history, driven by ambition. If anything, struggle for power and for recognition of one's power by rivals as well as by clients has been a defining feature of international politics ever since recorded history. In this sense, the Cold War falls squarely within the broader story that takes us back to Athens and Sparta or to China's war in states States period, or in projects

forward to yet uncertain future. So we can say what we made about how unique the Cold War was, but in one respect it was certainly not unique, and that was the struggle for recognition. No one wanted this recognition more than Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. We remember Khrushchev for his fist waving and shoe-banging, allegedly, for his almost childish enthusiasm about the prospects of communism, but also for his risk-taking that brought the world to the precipice of a nuclear war. When in May 1962 he decided to send nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev wanted to prove that his was as great a country as the United States, that it had every right to protect its allies, even if, like the Cubans, they were deep inside

what for Stalin would have certainly counted as America's sphere of influence. Yet, he backed off at the last moment, showing that even in the striving for greatness, there were limits. Khrushchev was worried that a nuclear war could start inadvertently, by accident, or simply because of the breakdown of rationality in the heat of the crisis. So he chose to lose face rather than play with fate. In his usual foxy way, Khrushchev recounted one of his favorite stories. This is the time the Cuban Missile Crisis. He recounted one of the stories about a Tsarist army officer who accidentally, how to put it

correctly, broke wind at a bowl. So the Tsarist officer was very embarrassed by this and he blew his brains out That's a story that Khrushchev told. I don't know if it's a true story. Khrushchev told the story He would not make the same mistake. Khrushchev would not make the same mistake It was embarrassing to have his Cuban bluff called by the Americans But he wouldn't do anything stupid and criminal like for instance start a nuclear war over Cuba. When Fidel Castro hinted at the possibility of launching a preemptive nuclear strike, Khrushchev was livid.

What is it? He raved. A temporary madness on Castro's part? Or is it the absence of brains? Nikita Khrushchev was removed in a coup in October 1964. He was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, a consensus builder who wasn't quite as prone to taking major risks. He wanted rather to build a positive relationship with the West, in particular with the United

States. He too craved recognition as a leader of a great power to a greater extent even than Khurshov in his time. By the late 1960s Soviet power was already beginning to peak. If Khurshov looked forward to a future when the Soviet Union would emerge as the world's supreme and antikonomic power, for that was the meaning of the promise that Khurshov had made that we will bury you. For Brezhnev this was no longer the case. He could no longer entertain these kinds of hopes.

Soviet economic growth was slowing and the Soviet Union was entering a period of stagnation. Brezhnev pragmatically set aside the ideological postulates and sought accommodation with the Western world, became known as the Helsinki Process. This process led in 1975 to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, which in some respects was a replay of Yalta, only now the Soviet Union was somewhat less threatening and more decrepit than it appeared 30 years earlier. It had, however, the world's largest nuclear arsenal and an ambition to be recognized in perpetuity as one of the world's two great superpowers.

Brezhnev thought that he had that recognition at last from Richard Nixon when they met in the United States in June 1973. Nixon invited him over to his residence in San Clemente, California. In a private toast over a late-night dinner, Nixon told Brezhnev what the Soviet leader had wanted to hear. The future of the world, the American president said, is in our hands, and while you and I lead our countries, this future is in good hands. Brezhnev thought that the United States could be relied upon not to try to push the Soviets

out of the Middle East, and for his part, as he told Nixon when they shared a helicopter ride from San Clemente, the Soviets and I call did not mind the presence of US forces in Europe. That is a crazy thing to say in 1973. The Soviets did not mind the presence of the United States in Europe. For years, the Kremlin had tried to break up NATO and destroy American alliances everywhere in the world. This is our ardent dream, as Nikita Khrushchev has said, about the idea of breaking up NATO. And now Brezhnev was willing to work hand in hand with Nixon to, as he put it, run the

world. And that is the title of the book. It was an unbelievable moment, and it didn't last. Why couldn't it? I don't know. Perhaps it was simply because for all the mutual rapport between Brezhnev and Nixon there was an internal logic to great power competition. To cite a Chinese proverb, two tigers cannot live on the same mountain. Those people who held in balance the fate of mankind were actually very regular people, you know, with their bizarre delusions and their like personal grievances and complaints. I felt a bit like a counselor in the room where they would vent their frustrations. Wow! Except you wrote a book about it. Yeah, I wrote a book about it, but that's how it kind of felt.

Yeah. So were you, not to get silly here, but were you able to look into Leonid Brezhnev's soul? Well, I think so. I mean, look, for example, I'll give you an idea. Leonid Brezhnev kept a diary, right? So we have his diary, which is handwritten. We have this view of Leonid Brezhnev as this old wreck of a man that basically by the end of his life was not making any decisions and was basically a figurehead, which is true, but it was a process. So he actually started as a very dynamic, charismatic person and he would write in his diary about his various meetings, what he thought he would meet with the North Vietnamese and talk about the war in Vietnam and he would air his views to the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese

would speak back, et cetera. But then as he declined mentally, you see all of that falling by the wayside. It's no longer there because he could no longer relate to this kind of stuff. But what he related to would be, oh, I had a shave today or I had a haircut or I checked my weight and there was so many kilograms closed

and so many kilograms naked. I mean it is hilarious as you read this you realize that this guy he's definitely losing it by the late 1970s. What's scary is this is the guy who is in charge of a superpower with the world's largest collection of nuclear missiles and so that is where those two things come together and you think, oh my God. You're listening to Ideas and to an episode called All That Russia Ever Wanted. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. You can stream us around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. Sergey Radchenko was born on the Russian island of Sakhalin near Japan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when Sergey was just a teenager, he moved to the US and graduated from a high school in Texas.

His world travels were just beginning. He then studied at a university in Hong Kong before moving to London, England. After that, he worked in China for several years. Then a job came up at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. When he started writing his Gelber Prize-winning book, he was a professor in Cardiff. By the time he finished, he was dividing his time between Wales and Italy. It's been a globe-spanning career for the historian so far, well-suited for the globe-spanning topic of 20th century relations between great powers.

And still, the heart of Sergei's analysis remains in Russia. The story he tells draws a link between the minds of Soviet leaders, from Stalin to Gorbachev. In the late 1960s and all through the 1970s, the man at the head of the Soviet Union was Leonid Brezhnev. This was a time of détente, the easing of relations between the US and the USSR, and the complicating of relations between both of those superpowers and China. In Sergei Radchenko's telling, much depended on emotions and personal relationships, especially between the three leaders Mao Zedong, Leonid Brezhnev and US president Richard Nixon. What kind of insight did you get into why Brezhnev and Richard Nixon got along?

Brezhnev started by sort of hating Nixon. I mean he knew Nixon. Nixon of course visited Moscow for the infamous kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev, of which in the book for the first time I have the Russian version of this, which is hilarious. But anyway, so they didn't like Nixon. They thought that Nixon was this imperialist and a bloodthirsty individual. Of course, in the late 1960s, they were interested in improving relations with the United States. But Nixon was seen as an obstacle to this because of the war in Vietnam.

They would say, okay, we want to improve relations, but you've got this terrible war in Vietnam. You have to stop that before we can actually do anything. What really changed all of this was Kissinger's trip to China and the announcement that Nixon would be going to Beijing because that alerted the Soviets to a very unfavorable strategic situation. If the Americans improved relations with China, and China, of course, was an enemy of the USSR at that point, they were fighting and they had fought a border war in 1969, that was not great.

So at that point, the Soviets were like, OK, how do we work it out? And so they start this dialogue first with Kissinger, who would travel to Moscow and they ultimately agreed that Nixon would come to Moscow, which happened in May 1972 for the first Brezhnev and Nixon summit. And somehow Brezhnev just really liked Nixon as a person. And so after that, you see this development of almost some sort of admiration on the part of Brezhnev. And you can see that very clearly from the time that Brezhnev travels to the

United States in June 1973, because he met Nixon in the Oval Office and there's a recording of that because Nixon was recording his conversations in the Oval Office which is remarkable. This is one document where we actually have like a private conversation between the leaders of two superpowers. Brezhnev really just tried to impress Nixon and talked about his family and talked about how he wants to have Nixon come to Moscow again etc. So he's really trying to reach out to Nixon on this person-to-person basis. And he was really just heartbroken when Nixon was forced out. Effectively, he resigned, obviously, in August 1974. And Brezhnev was like, oh,

what happened? You know, what is this Watergate thing? And you discovered that he actually tried to help him in some way, something to do with Kompromat? Yeah, so we know the word Kompromat. It's sadly one of the words that appears in the English language now, courtesy of the Russians. Yeah, so there was a guy who was Brezhnev's aide, who wrote a memorandum to Andropov, Yuri Andropov, who was the head of the KGB, saying, well, it seems that

Nixon's enemies who are trying to ruin detente are trying to undermine the president, so don't we have any compromise on them, any compromising materials? And Andropov writes back saying, well, you know, maybe not, but we'll try to find something. Obviously, they were not able. Inconceivable. It's pretty funny. But, you know, that's Brezhnev for you. He really thought that he could reach out on a person-to-person basis to Nixon. And although he saw himself as the leader of the communist world and the American president was the leader of the capitalist world, he felt that this ideological stuff, all this empty words, they didn't actually mean all that much. What mattered was the personal relationship between

if they only managed to speak directly and forcefully to one another and resolve their problems, the Cold War would be over. And in fact, Brezhnev told Nixon many times that he thought the Cold War was already over by 1973. One quick side note, the irony I thought too was that what Brezhnev saw that they had in common was the fact that they were both European. Well, that was a funny thing, and this brings in the cultural angle of my book because, you know, the people have discussed the book, the book's particular take, which is very unusual in that I downplay formal ideology.

So I say that basically Marxism, Leninism never really quite explained Soviet foreign policy, you know, and there are other factors like this desire for greatness or to have one's greatness recognized by the other side, i.e. the Americans, but also by other audiences around the world. But what I really mean with this whole argument is that what mattered most, it was not formal ideology per se, but it was the worldview. And the worldview was made up of different things, including cultural stereotypes that sometimes had a greater impact on the Soviet thinking than anything that they could read in Das Kapital.

And so China is an important element of this because Brezhnev just hated China. He had very orientalistic kind of 19th century view of China and he would frequently air his disdain for the Chinese as people, as like a nation. He would say, you know, this profiteous people, you can never trust them. In other words, very 19th century kind of thinking that he would then bring into policy and say, oh, but you know, Nixon is a European, which was, I'm sure, a great surprise for Nixon. But, you know, as Europeans, we can understand each other, but not those Chinese. Nobody understands what the Chinese are trying to do. So you have this sort of thing, which is crazy.

The tont proved short-lived. In the late 1970s, early 1980s, the Soviet Union and the United States returned to confrontation. It was then that the Soviet leaders began rethinking their relationship with China. China was a fixture in Soviet thinking throughout the Cold War. In the 1950s, it was an ally. But Nikita Khorshov never trusted Mao Zedong and very famously quarreled with him in 1959 when he traveled to Beijing. We have a record of this wonderful conversation where it just turned into a shouting match. Khorshov was shouting and the Chinese were shouting back.

And the relationship never recovered. Although the Kremlin tried to mend fences directly and through various intermediaries and well-wishers, my favorite episode of that was when in February 1965, Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin traveled to Beijing. He thought that there was nothing that divided China and the Soviet Union. They were both communist countries, so couldn't communists just talk to one another and agree on stuff? So, he reached out to Mao Zedong.

They met. Kasegin and Mao met in Beijing. Kasegin made the speech. So, let's try to repair our relations. And Mao Zedong told him, our relationship, our struggle will continue for 10,000 years. And Kasigin was like, that's ridiculous. Can you not change your mind about this? And Mao Zedong said, well, since you ask, I'm willing to take off 1,000 years. Our struggle will last for 9,000 years. Our struggle will last for 9,000 years. In 1971, Nicolae Ceausescu,

remember Ceausescu, Romanian communist leader, traveled to Beijing and he was also trying, he was trying to mediate, he was trying to improve the relationship between China and the Soviet Union. He was telling Mao, why don't you try to speak to them and figure it out. And here's what Mao said, whoever pisses on our heads, he said, we have to retaliate no matter the size of your country and the number of atomic bombs you wield. That put an end to that attempt. Brezhnev, for his part, was obsessed with China and the civilizational threat that in his view represented.

He did not trust Mao and tried to bring Nixon around to help him contain China. He would tell Nixon, we are Europeans, so we can understand each other, not like those Chinese. We don't know what they're doing. So we should work together to oppose China. This was the hope Leonid Brezhnev had. Now, the Kremlin worried also that closer US-China relations would worsen Soviet isolation and tried to warn Washington to be sure for perfectly self-centered reasons, not to overindulge in building up good relations with China.

You may be in a euphoric mood now about China, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko warned, but the time will come when you will be shedding tears." So warning from the Soviet Foreign Minister. Yet soon Moscow too began its re-engagement with China. It was a strategic choice. The Chinese weren't going to go away. A better relationship was needed. And something changed too. For the first time, the Soviets were willing to accept China

as an equal partner, not a younger brother, not a client, but a partner. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who understood this new reality better than most. And it was Mikhail Gorbachev who finally traveled to China in May, 1989 to inaugurate a new relationship of equals. He met with Deng Xiaoping. It was a really interesting conversation because you know what Deng Xiaoping told him, said,

we quarreled during the Sino-Soviet split. We no longer think that the things that we said at that time were correct. But you know what really mattered? You look down on us and we felt like we were being bullied. That's the reason. In your acceptance speech for the Gelber Prize at monk school, you mentioned a time when I have to say it properly, Deng Xiaoping, right? That's excellent. Thank you, I'm trying.

He spoke with Mikhail Gorbachev and explained to the Soviet leader that China's unwillingness to mend fences with the Soviets over so many years has been partly because they felt bullied. So just thinking on a global scale, not just about the Soviets, but about the world at large, what is the significance of that insight? That countries can be like us, can be like individuals in terms of having emotional needs and even finding themselves behaving against their own rational self-interest, when they're kind of in a mood. Well, that's right.

And we started with this. We started with this discussion of whether Stalin was a rational calculating actor, whether he was very emotional. And I said that Stalin was actually more on the calculating side and less emotional. But you often find that policy makers could have those feelings of humiliation, for example, a feeling of being bullied, for example, by the outside world and that really impacts and has impacted historically their view of the world. And the Chinese are a prime example of this. So Mao was Mao Zedong in China was constantly aware of China's so-called century of humiliation

and he would actually make this really a core point of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party to erase this humiliation. And so that's one of the reasons that he was so unhappy about the Sino-Soviet relationship, which was supposed to be a relationship between brothers, but turned out, as Mao Zedong called it, a relationship between a father and son or relationship between cat and mice. And so how can we improve relations with them? So that sort of thing was there already throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, and that really obstructed a better Sino-Soviet relationship until a new generation of Soviet leaders came along, people like Mikhail Gorbachev, who said, well, we don't want to be the father or the elder brother, we want an equal relationship with you.

And the Chinese would say, well, on this basis, yes, we can actually improve relations. And so we already have in the 1980s the beginning of the Sino-Soviet and later Sino-Russian rapprochement, which leads us to the current state of Sino-Russian relations, which is actually pretty good compared to almost any period in history. Do you feel this insight into about emotions gets enough respect from Cold War historians? Well, you know, Cold War historians tend to focus on strategy, right? When this all of that began, we would have a lot of emphasis on strategy, game theory would play into this. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a prime example of how for

years and years and years, the assumption was among historians that the reason that Khrushchev sent nuclear missiles to Cuba was because he felt that there was strategic inferiority on the part of the Soviet Union and he wanted to counterbalance this by putting some nuclear missiles under the United States, close to the South Underbelly as they would say. What we have found though with the emergence of new documents is that it was not necessarily the case. So yes, Khrushchev was worried about American bases that surrounded the Soviet Union, like for example the missiles, nuclear missiles that were based out of Turkey. He was worried about it, but interestingly not for strategic reasons. He was worried about it

for psychological reasons because he felt that the Americans were allowed to have bases around the Soviet Union. And why is it that the Soviets are not allowed to have bases next to the United States, right? So this is a weird sort of psychological thing. And there's another thing with regards to Cuba. There's new and pretty convincing evidence that when Khurshov said that he wanted to save Cuba from an American invasion and that was the reason for sending missiles there, the reason for that was that he was worried about the American invasion right after the Bay of Pigs. But what I do in my book is I emphasize that yes, this was one of the reasons, but I ask why is it that Khrushchev was so

worried about the American invasion? What would have happened if the Americans invaded and basically overthrew Castro's regime? And the answer to this is Khrushchev would have lost face. He would have been like a superpower that is unable to defend its client. And that is an emotional thing. It is a psychological thing. It's not necessarily strategic thing. Saving face. Saving face is a very, you know, people say that only the Chinese care about it,

which is totally not true. Everybody wants to save face. For his part, Gorbachev was happy to treat China as an equal partner. He also was a little bit opportunistic. He did not condemn the Chinese government, for example, for the massacre of students on June 4, 1989. When he heard during a Politburo discussion that as many as 3,000 students had been killed. He responded in a way that you would not normally associate with Gorbachev. 3,000, he said, so what? They, meaning the Chinese like us, have to hold on. That is to say, hold on to power.

In fact, he thought that China's post-German isolation was a good moment to try to foster closer relations with Beijing and also to bring India into this great power triangle. He would reach out to the likes of Rajiv Gandhi, saying, oh, look, the Chinese are isolated. Now, let's try to work with them and then we'll create a triangle. Gorbachev liked to talk about triangles. I do argue in the book that there was more to Gorbachev than that the IAEA, including continuities with previous Soviet leaders, but there were differences too, important differences. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet imperial grandeur had a hollow foundation.

He wanted to rebuild Soviet leadership on a new basis, an ideational basis, on the basis of new thinking which, as the subtitle to his famous 1987 book made clear was not quote for our country but also quote for the world. What he failed to realize was that claims to idiational greatness rang hollow in the absence of economic power to back them up. Back to Mikhail Gorbachev for a minute. You give a really fascinating take on his view of the end of the Cold War, kind of still holding on to these visions of greatness. He felt that he was leading the world to peace, in essence, rather than leading the Soviet Union to defeat. Was he being entirely foolish?

I don't think he was being entirely foolish. At a certain level, he was quite realistic. There's a good debate that can be had about the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet external empire, the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe and so on. I think one argument that can be made, and there's evidence for it is that basically the Soviets went bankrupt. They could no longer sustain an external empire like this and Gorbachev understood that. So he understood that not only was the empire unsustainable, even the Soviet economy itself was basically breaking down. This was already evident from the late 1960s, they were trying to repair it and find ways of coping with low labor productivity, for example, and all kinds of problems. And they could never do that.

They were kind of rescued slightly by higher oil prices. But when you get to the 1980s, it's basically clear the system is not working. So Gorbachev was trying to do several things. First, he's trying to reform the system internally, which we know leads to chaos and collapse. Externally, he's trying to step away from the sort of conventional rhetoric of Cold War confrontation against American imperialism and take the lead on the global stage by projecting almost post-Cold War consensus, as in, why are we even fighting? It doesn't make sense. The world is full of nuclear weapons. If we keep going this way, we'll all die. And those are universal human values, and we have to agree on that. And we have to proceed on that basis.

So you have this almost, you know, a leadership, a moral leadership, effort to project moral leadership for, on the part of Gorbachev. That's why, by the way, his book, Perestroika and New Thinking, that was published in 1987, has subtitles, New Thinking for our country and the world, right? He was trying to reform the entire world. He was not just thinking about the Soviet Union, he was trying to change the entire world. That's pretty ambitious. That is pretty ambitious. So that is my take and obviously what he discovered in the process of doing this is that if you want to project moral leadership in this kind of way, you better have some solid basis for doing so because once he untied some of the screws on Soviet control of Eastern Europe, everybody wanted to run away. Nobody wanted that Soviet leadership, you know,

the Eastern Europeans say, no, thank you very much. We'll turn to Western Europe and you know, we have other ideas. It's, is there, uh, do you think just as we're finishing off here, do you think the West or all of us, did we miss a moment? Do you think somewhere along the way in history where the Soviet or the Russian desire for greatness before history could have been satisfied? That's a really, really good question that I don't know how to answer because we had that moment after the Versailles Treaty, which was criticized by John Mayer at Keynes, who basically said,

well, look, you know, the economic consequences of peace, the sort of peace that was concluded after the First World War led to the rise of the Third Reich. And that argument actually resonated with many people, although it's no longer uncontestable. There are many, many who argue that this is not, that this was not actually the case. With the Soviet Union, there's some historians who are now coming forward with this notion that actually the West could have done more to avert an outright Soviet meltdown because what happened with the Soviet meltdown was that people just, you had a collapse of an empire and people got just, they lost their economic foundations

for reasonable life and turned to radicalism and that explains the rise of Putin, etc. So was there a missed opportunity for, let's say, a Marshall Plan? We talked about the Marshall Plan and how that was so important for Western Europe in 1947. Well, for the Americans in 1991, they didn't think in those terms because there was no external threat. I mean, perhaps if there was no Soviet Union in 1947, Truman also would have not thought of the need to sustain the West Europeans. So in 1991, so the Cold War basically winds down, the Americans face their own economic problems and there's no real desire on the part of

anybody in Washington to satisfy Soviet financial needs, which were pretty big. So I don't know what to make of this argument because I feel as a former Russian, I feel that the first thing the Russians like to do is they like to blame somebody else for their misfortunes. You know, is America responsible for Russian corruption? No. Is America responsible for Russian imperialism? You know, wars in Chechnya, the invasions of neighboring states? No, the Russians did it to themselves. And so a part of me says, well, yes, maybe something could have been done better and Russia could have been better integrated into this. But another part of me says the Russian ambitions were far, far beyond anything that the Americans could

reasonably satisfy in 1991, because they thought that the end of the Cold War was actually some kind of an accident. The Soviet collapse was some kind of an accident, and then in reality the Soviets should have deserved a much better place, and Russia, post-USSR, should have deserved a much better place in the international picking order. Could America have satisfied that? I don't think it could. So I think the Russians need to be a little bit more introspective and blame themselves before blaming anybody else. I think this is probably the first step on the road to changing their country for something better. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I was not quite 12 years old.

I was living in an obscure seaside town on the island of Sakhalin, 8 time zones away from Moscow. There were no indications, in my life at least, that things were about to radically change. And yet three years later, at 15, thanks to US government funded scholarship, I was already on my way to the big wide world. I spent three years in Texas, a big change from Sakhalin, you'll have to agree, and continued to Hong Kong and later England. When I was 25, I was living in Ulaanbaatar, where I married a wonderful Mongolian woman named Onom, we then bounced

around for a few years with a couple of suitcases and a young child. We even ended up in China for four years, just as Hu Jintao's golden age was giving way to Xi Jinping's uncertainty. That uncertainty proved too much for me, and after repeatedly running afoul of the Chinese government I escaped to Wales Wales where I began writing this book aged 35. Now the book took 10 years to write and while in retrospect I would like to claim that it was because the book was so damn good, in reality it was because I procrastinated most

of the time. In the meantime we had another child, a wonderful Welsh girl named Inessa Nandun. Inessa after named so after the Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand. And Nandun because Nandun means treasure in Mongolian. A fluent Welsh speaker, Inessa for me is a constant reminder that life can take absolutely extraordinary turns. So now I'm 45, I teach history at an American university in Italy. And like the Soviets and the Americans in their time, I haven't tried to run the world. But I certainly have been running around the world. Even my wife in Mongolian thinks that I'm too nomadic. Thank you all. It has been a long, winding, arduous road, but one with plenty of adventure.

And I'm very glad that I've come this far. Thank you. Sergey Retchenko, congratulations on your prize and your book. Thank you so much for talking to me. I'm so honored and so happy that I've had this opportunity and thank you for having me on the show once again. You were listening to All That Russia Ever Wanted with historian and winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize, Sergey Retchenko. This episode was produced by Tom Howell. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast.

If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nicola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. I'm N to be a good boy. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.