The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, March, 2004

The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts. Jussi Hanhimaki and Odd Arne Westad, editors. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]75.00. xvii 694 pages. ISBN 0-19-820862-6. This valuable and original collection reflects the changing nature of Cold War studies based, in large part, on historians' new access to Communist material.

The editors have drawn on archives and deposit libraries, on the Internet and on published sources including newspapers, and magazines as well as books. The material has been gathered from a very wide field, including fiction (to show how the 'war' was seen at various times), which gives readers an idea how it was understood by different people in different parts of the world at different times. The selections are divided into nineteen sections, each of which is prefaced by a short introduction. The format is basically chronological, beginning with the Bolshevik coup d'etat and moving on to the collapse of the Communist empire. There are also sections devoted to movements and developments that affected the 'war' including: technologies weapons and the arms race; the integration of western Europe; cultures and mindsets; and spies and covert operations. The final group of documents is on the 'legacies' of the Cold War among which were NATO, the continuing debate over the limitation of nuclear weapons and the future of the EU. At the end of each chapter there is a list of questions designed for students. The aim throughout is to enable readers to 'grasp what motivated the actors' rather than to 'judge them for their aims'.