The origins, dynamics and nature of the phenomenon we call the Cold War are the subject of an enormous volume of scholarly and popular literature. Not surprisingly, that literature contains a wide range of different interpretations and viewpoints. During the Cold War itself, the study of the conflict had significant import for domestic, foreign and security policies and was therefore highly controversial and laden with ideological baggage of one kind or another. The end of the Cold War resulted in the opening of archives in East and West, resulting in access to primary documents, especially on the early period of the Cold War, which had been hitherto unavailable. Thus, it became possible to revisit all of the debates about the Cold War and test the propositions advanced in the academic literature against the wealth of new evidence that had emerged.
The origins of the Cold War remain deeply controversial. The academic literature distinguishes three different perspectives on this question—traditionalist, revisionist and post-revisionist.
- The traditionalist perspective has relied on two distinct and to some extent contradictory theoretical models for explaining Soviet foreign policy behaviour. The first is that of realism, according to which the Soviet Union acted as a great power, seeking to maximise its security and might. Another model sees ideology as a basic driving force of Soviet policy. The ideological basis of the view of the Soviet Union as a world revolutionary force is the Marxist–Leninist vision of a world communist society, which involves the abolition of the nation state and the establishment of a classless society. The resulting image of the Soviet Union was expressed in what Daniel Yergin terms the “Riga axioms”: the Soviet Union was seen as a world revolutionary state, denying the possibilities of coexistence, committed to unrelenting ideological warfare, powered by a messianic drive for world mastery.
From this traditionalist perspective, the Soviet Union is seen as responsible for the Cold War. The policy of containment, first announced by President Harry S. Truman of the United States, was a necessary response to a growing threat. As the Soviet Union recovered from the Second World War and consolidated its grip over Eastern Europe, the Cold War pattern of international relations established itself.
The revisionist literature on the Cold War, the beginning of which can be dated to the publication of Gar Alperovitz’s study Atomic Diplomacy in the mid-sixties, developed an entirely different framework for the interpretation of Soviet foreign policy.3 Daniel Yergin has described it as one which downplayed the role of ideology and the foreign-policy consequences of authoritarian domestic practices, and instead saw the Soviet Union behaving like a traditional Great Power within the international system, rather than trying to overthrow it.
The post-revisionist approach is a synthesis of the two earlier approaches. It accepts that the Soviet Union did not intend to invade Western Europe in the early post-war years, but at the same time concedes the perception of Soviet threat by Western policymakers
These are three different perspectives of the cause which led and was responsible for the Cold War to take place.