"There was nothing new in Putin's protestation. Throughout the cold war, the Soviets craved recognition from the Americans and were hypersensitive to perceived slights.
Putin infamously described the dissolution of the USSR as the "greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century".
By this he meant the end of the Russian imperium, not Soviet communism. If America could not freely give the respect that Russia so yearned for, it would have to be won by force of arms.
As Sergey Radchenko shows in To Run The World, his masterful new history of the cold war, Putin's psychology is very much in keeping with that of his Soviet predecessors. This psychology includes injured pride and an unquenchable sense of insecurity."
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"The result is a revisionist history of the cold war that downplays ideology as Moscow's guiding motive.
This marks quite a departure from most cold war histories, which pay more attention to that than national character.
"Marxist-Leninism itself does not get us very far in understanding Soviet behavior," Radchenko writes.
"It was an ill-fitting cloth that never adequately draped the incongruent outlines of Moscow's ambitions."
excerpts
It was always about Empire, not Ideology.
