 I was a child when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in November 1956. I only noticed because our parents helped host Hungarian refugees who fled to Pittsburgh, seventy miles north of our home. A student protest had grown into a Hungary-wide uprising against Russian control. Brutal repression by the USSR left thousands dead.
Twelve years later, troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, another Soviet satellite. I had fallen in love with Prague while researching a term paper on medieval Bohemia. A visit deepened my affection. Czech culture flourished in the “Prague Spring” of 1968, with an end to censorship and travel restrictions. I grieved at the Russian-led invasion that August and the clampdown that followed. This year in Ukraine, it’s déjà vu all over again. Did we misread the Cold War so badly that we thought its end meant an end to Russian aggression? Did we imagine the biggest Russian fault lay in its economic system, abandoned after 1991? Russia’s main threat to the rest of us was an authoritarian, totalitarian regime that used blatant violence to repress dissent and to impose its power over supposedly independent countries. Little of that has changed. Image: Soviet tank in Prague's Wenceslas Square, August 21, 1968. (AP Photo/Peter Winterbach)
2 Comments
Dennis Doren
3/14/2022 09:30:37 am
Reports indicate that Putin was actively considering invading all Ukraine back in 2014. He only went as far as Crimea, a test of the Ukrainian and Western resolve. But no, I don't think we passively misread the Cold War. I think we were actively led to think of what happens in Europe as not important enough to concern us - from Obama's lack of leadership in addressing the annexation of Crimea to Trump's active attacks of NATO and support of Putin. The Obama administration just offered loans to Ukraine, as if that was going to do anything meaningful in response to the invasion of their borders. Later, then-President Trump attacked NATO as "obsolete" and the like, over and over. Our ex-President's repetitively stated negative comments about NATO were eventually reflected by Germany's President's statement that Europe needs to go alone without depending on the USA. In contrast to Trump's attacks on NATO, he actively supported Putin's stated world view, right up to calling him "savvy" just prior to the Ukrainian invasion. These actions by our leaders represented deliberate policy approaches. 3/14/2022 10:27:51 am
Fair points, Dennis. Yes, we did move back toward a degree of isolationism, or perhaps a shift of attention from Europe to Asia. I do wonder, though, if that shift could have happened if we hadn't believed the two-great-powers contest ended with the fall of Communism and the breakup of the USSR. The heat of present-day rhetoric about socialism vs capitalism rests (on the right) in part, I believe, on equating socialism with the evils of Stalinism and subsequent Soviet Communism, To me, it's both/and. Could Trump have supported Putin as actively if Putin's regime were still the old USSR? Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin.
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