Into an Unmapped Ocean

For over half a century the world has accepted at face value the description of that vast land mass stretching from Eastern Europe to the Far East as “a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” This has been in spite of the exceptional variety of ethnic, cultural and climatic diversity within that presumed monolith. A unitary view of the Soviet Union has its roots in the long development of Tsarist Russian colonial-style empire followed, after 1917, by its brutal integration and consolidation under Lenin and Stalin – and the almost equally brutal extension of that empire into Europe after World War II.

Despite the appalling damage the Soviet Union suffered during the war, it emerged as a looming menace and awesome power - one which soon included nuclear power. Its vast resources were coupled with clearly stated malevolence towards the West. We knew Khrushchev was wrong when he proclaimed in 1961 that the Soviet Union would “bury” the West economically. But his arrogant claim had a certain plausibility to the so-called non-aligned world, which itself included countries slowly emerging from the West's own colonial rule. It carried conviction too within the Soviet Union, where claims of that sort were most needed to reassure peoples still forced to accept hopelessly a minimal standard of living.