Six Cold-War Western Heroes

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 | by Eli Lehrer

In later works -- most significantly his long novel about prison-camp life, The Gulag Archipelago -- Solzhenitsyn revealed his strong anticommunist views and ardent support for Christian values that made him a dissident in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn found himself arrested, deported and exiled to the United States in 1974, after communist hard-liner Leonid Brezhnev again clamped down on cultural freedom. "He wasn't a political figure as such, but he still had a massive political influence at least as great as any politician" says Lichenstein. "He was the one who changed everything."

Churchill -- who in 1946 coined the phrase "Iron Curtain" to describe the Soviet empire taking shape in Eastern Europe -- called on the West to oppose communism aggressively, but he didn't live to see its eventual defeat in Europe. Indeed, one might see him as a prophet without honor in his own time: The British public voted him out of office on the doorstep of victory over the Nazis in 1945. When he returned to 10 Downing St. in 1951, the collapse of the British Empire combined with domestic political miseries and the infirmities of old age prevented his taking leadership of the anticommunism crusade he had itched to lead since the Bolshevik revolution.

Lichenstein says that one even could raise questions about including Churchill on such a list. "He was a great man but, ultimately, people didn't see him as a great Cold War leader," Lichenstein claims. Some conservatives have been quick to claim a superior anti-communist role for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Shattan, on the other hand, contends that Reagan should be viewed as Churchill's intellectual heir. "Churchill advocated engaging the Soviet Union, and that's what Reagan did. Reagan wasn't a great intellectual, but he did understand the basic ideas that Churchill had."

Establishment historians no doubt will fault Shattan for omitting George F. Kennan, State Department chief of postwar planning and author of the "containment" policy published anonymously in Foreign Affairs in 1947 as a strategy to counteract postwar Soviet expansion by countermeasures aimed at preserving the status quo. The idea was that eventually the Soviets would come to their senses and withdraw. Kennan, whom Maddox sees as one of the foremost heroes of the Cold War, doesn't play at all well with conservatives such as Shattan and Lichenstein, who blame him for a policy that tolerated the intolerable for 45 years. "Containment let the Soviets have a specific area of influence, and it wasn't until Reagan decided to take on the Soviets that things really started to change" argues Shattan.

Not everyone who helped win the Cold War held pro-Western attitudes. Charles Fairbanks, a professor at Johns Hopkins' Nitze School in Washington, offers a selection of heroes including vociferously anti-American Islamic fundamentalists such as Egypt's Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maudodi of Pakistan. "They almost certainly were more anti-American than the Russians ever were and were probably more anti-American than anticommunist" he says. "Still, it's impossible to deny that Islamic fundamentalism had a lot to do with the downfall of communism. The West won, but we had some help."