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From Wondry, I'm Lindsey Graham and this is American Scan. In October of 1962, the U.S. and Soviet Union found themselves on the brink of nuclear war. For over a decade, the two countries have been sparring publicly in competition for global influence and power. And although political leaders traded heated rhetoric and even launched proxy battles across the world, by the early 1960s, the two countries had not confronted each other directly on the battlefield. But the Cold War would take a dramatic turn when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered his military to sneak nuclear weapons onto Cuban soil, just 90 miles from the coast of Florida. Khrushchev believed the covert operation would restore the balance of power with America after the U.S. pulled ahead in the nuclear arms race. But when American intelligence caught wind of the operation, the two countries were plunged into crisis, one that threatened the future of human civilization. America and the Soviet Union managed to avert a nightmare scenario. But decades later, the specter of nuclear war has reemerged. In the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled his willingness to launch a nuclear attack. And with tensions mounting, President Joe Biden has issued a stern warning, adding, we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. My guest today is Norman Neymark, a professor of history at Stanford University. Neymark is a scholar of the Cold War and the author of the book Stalin and the fate of Europe and genocide, a world history. In our conversation, we'll discuss how the war in Ukraine resembles and is different from the long-standing feud between the U.S. and Soviet Union. We'll also examine how the Cold War is still with us today and look at how political leaders today can learn from the Cuban Missile Crisis and avoid a nuclear exchange in Ukraine. Our conversation is next. Okay, the kids are already asking, what's for dinner? But breaking news, empty fridge. That's okay, I'll instant cart. Let's add some organic asparagus and some farm fresh chicken. Easy. Wait, is the oldest vegetarian this week or was it gluten-free? Gluten-free pasta. Covered either way. Carred it. And finally, some vegetarian gluten-free olives from my well-earned cocktail. When your family shopping list has more footnotes than groceries, the world is your cart. Visit Instacart.com or download the app and get free delivery on your first order. Offer valid for a limited time, minimum order $10. Delivery subject to availability. Additional terms apply. Say beep on some fat Amazon stuff. Norman Neymarck, welcome to American scandal. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So right now, we are in a charged moment. Russia is locked in a bitter conflict in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has made veiled and not so veiled threats about the use of nuclear weapons. The U.S. is shipping arms to the Ukraine and mobilizing support across Europe. And many have commented that these dynamics look and feel like they belong to the Cold War. So I suppose to start with, can we discuss whether what we're seeing is a renewal of Cold War hostilities or is this something new with a different dynamic? So, you know, there are certainly what you might call a carryover from the Cold War involved in this present conflict. I mean, it's almost too obvious for words, right? It's Russia, Moscow, United States, Washington, and Europe confronting each other, the nuclear threats that you mentioned. I mean, this all has the kind of ring of the Cold War to it. But I would suggest that we really need to think of this as something different and something new. First of all, and most importantly, it's a hot war. That is to say, thousands of people, even tens of thousands, have lost their lives in this conflict. And not only that, many thousands more may die, or tens of thousands before it's over. I mean, the other thing to say is that it's a war again between Ukraine and Russia, not between the United States and Russia. And none of our boys are losing their lives, no airmen, you know, are dying. You know, there are no boots on the ground. We've promised that. I mean, we have advisors obviously and things like that involved. But Americans are not dying. Ukrainians are dying. And as our Russians. And so that makes it very different than from the Cold War. Obviously Americans died in Vietnam. They died in Korea. They died as a consequence of the Cold War. They're not dying. But finally, I would say, it's not an ideological conflict. There is something you might call Putinism. But it's not really related all that much to Marxism, Leninism. When we were involved in a worldwide ideological and geostrategic conflict during the Cold War, we're not anymore. The other thing is the power between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was relatively equal in the sense of nuclear weapons and arms and real kind of physical military power that could be exerted in Europe and around the world. And you know, one of the reasons it became a Cold War is that both neither side wanted to go to war with one another because of the relatively equal status, which they held militarily. You know, this had to do with nuclear weapons as well. I mean, it would be an asymmetrical conflict. If the United States were to go to war, we're to go to war with Russia. And we're not at war, Russia, right? We would be far the greater power. We would be far the stronger power. Not only that, we have allies, you know, who are part of this equation as well. And Russia has very few. So I don't think this is a Cold War of the sort that we experienced, you know, after World War II. I was thinking further about the difference between that Cold War and this hot war. I kind of imagine that many people would think that Putin is surprised that it has turned into the hot war that it has, that it was much more intended to be a quick blitzkrieg of overwhelming force and very few shots actually fired. Additionally, without the ideological basis for whatever conflict it is, what are Putin's motivations, especially, why is he clinging to them in the face of Ukrainian resistance? Well, I think you're exactly right. I think Putin did not expect this invasion to go so bad, so quickly. There were a lot of things he didn't expect. He didn't expect the Ukrainians to hold together. He didn't expect Europe to hold together. He didn't expect the US and Europe to hold together. He didn't expect the Ukrainians to be as successful as they are in the battlefield. So, yeah, I think it was a terrible miscalculation, a tragic miscalculation on his part, and he's not been able to find a way to back out of it. So instead intensifies. What is he after? I mean, he's really after neo-imperial control of Ukraine, which he does not recognize, even before the war, you know, a year ago last July, he issued a document basically saying, historical, terrible historical document historians really hate it, which says that, you know, Ukraine and Ukrainians are not a distinct people or a distinct nation. And don't have a distinct history, you know, to look back on that separate from Russia, which is simply wrong headed. But also a kind of classic move on the part of an imperial power, which says, you know, you don't deserve your independence. You don't deserve sovereignty. You are in a appendage of us, meaning Moscow. And that's what he's really trying to do. You know, he hoped, as you noted, you know, to kind of decapitate Ukraine and make it into a dependency of Moscow and of Russia. And that just didn't happen. Not only did it not happen, but one of the most interesting things about the war is that Ukraine itself has become more Ukraine has become more attached to its sovereignty and to its independence than before the war. Whatever historical claims Russia has on Ukraine, certainly go back to Ukraine's involvement or rather inclusion in the Soviet Union. And it seems that Putin has designs to recreate that imperialist empire. And some of his biggest conquests have been reaching west into Ukraine, especially with Crimea. So let's go back to the origin of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. First, where did the phrase Cold War come from? And what does the term encompass globally, I suppose? Well, the term started being used almost immediately after the Second World War. I think the journalist Walter Lippman was the first person to actually use a phrase like the Cold War in his writing. I think it was 1946. And what happens essentially is that the real, what I would call geosprategic conflicts and ambitions of the two great victors in World War II, that is to say the Soviet Union and the United States began to conflict. And our interests conflicted with theirs. And in the process of those interests conflicting with one another, an ideological overtone quickly came within it. So that ideology, meaning communism versus capitalism, not just United States versus Soviet Union, became part in parcel of how we thought about them and how they thought about us. So I would argue that in, you know, 45, but especially 46 and 47 and by 48 with the Berlin blockade, there was an accelerating dynamic involved in US Soviet relations that brought about what we know as the Cold War. And the Cold War didn't really end, you know, until the end of the 80s with Gorbachev and the fall of Eastern Europe and so on. But, you know, Churchill was talking in 1946 about an iron trip. Truman was talking, you know, in 19, in his containment policies in 47 about, you know, threats to democracies. You know, the Marshall plan, which was announced in June 1947 by George Marshall that the Harvard graduation was about getting Europe back on its feet for the purposes of defeating communist. So a colleague of mine 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and they Adam Lula wrote a series of books about the Cold War in which he defined it as the time when ideology replaced, you know, kind of real geo strategic conflicts and that ideology influenced these conflicts in such a way that they became almost impossible to resolve. It's interesting that you put emphasis on the ideological aspect of the conflicts and how they supplant regular strategic geo politics, because I'd like to go back even further than World War II to a period in which most people have forgotten that the US and its allies immediately following World War I engaged in a hot war against what would become the Soviet Union in the Bolshevik Revolution. Is that the beginning of this ideological difference that we were so against communism that we would fight against it on on Russian soil? Yes, I mean, I think that's correct. I mean, there was a US intervention along with the British and the French in the Russian Civil War. I mean, we were in Siberia, but there wasn't much fighting. I mean, fighting was absolutely minimal. We claimed, and you know, it was mostly true that we were protecting the weapons that we had, you know, delivered to the Russian Empire to fight in World War I. The British did a little bit more fighting in the French too intervened, you know, in the Civil War, but on the whole it was very lackluster, and that's why, you know, the intervention didn't work at all, and we got out, you know, within a few years. I mean, American boys saw no reason to be there. Now, it is true that we didn't like communist, and we thought about it as a terrible threat to our way of life. And certainly they didn't like capitalism. That was the whole idea of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, you know, was to overthrow World Capitalism. But on both sides, one of the things you need to remember is, first of all, the United States was a very weak country. I mean, it had an infinitesimal military, and not, and neither the capability, nor the will, seriously, fight anybody, much less, I mean, a serious, with a serious army, much less in a, you know, a Eurasian continent. On that many times zones, right? So the United States was not in any position, you know, to really threaten the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was in no position to threaten the United States. We didn't recognize them. You know, we had a few, a capitalists like Armand Hammer, the most famous who went into Russia in the 20s and helped them develop their industry. And we had some engineers go in in the 30s, you know, some lefties who decided this was the future who went to help them. But on the whole, I mean, we need to remember in this context, the United States was fundamentally an isolationist power. Meaning it had a lot of economic power, but almost no military power, no ability, you know, to really intervene seriously anywhere. So, so, you know, most of went on in the 20s and 30s was, you know, we didn't like them, they didn't like us. But so what? You know, we continued on our way, and they continued on their way. But then that all changes after World War II. And that all changes after World War II and the ambitions change. I mean, it's important that the ambitions change. I mean, we didn't have the ambition in the 30s to be all around the world with our armies, right? But after World War II, we became a huge military power. We thought, I mean, Roosevelt said, you know, troops are coming home. We're leaving Europe. We're going back to, you know, what we were before, but there was no going back to where we were before. And there were forces in Washington and that convinced, you know, the polity as it were to become a world power. And we became as serious world power as you know, these serious world power after World War II. And so the union similarly, you know, began serious expansion into Eastern Europe and began to have wider ambitions than in that, you know, in the Christchurch period in the 60s and in the 70s around the world. So they became a world power as well. And it was in these other areas, not on the main fronts, but around the world that the Cold War turned hot. You've mentioned Korea and Vietnam. Where else might have this war gotten a bit warm? Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, that was not only warm, but, you know, we could have burned in a nuclear conflagration, right? So, you know, places like Cuba. The war got hot, you know, in Latin America with American, you know, determination to try to keep communism out of Latin America. The war got hot in Africa, you know, where the Soviet Union and the United States competed, you know, for influence and for governmental control. The war got hot in Vietnam. I mean, that was, you know, a defining moment. I have to say in my own life, you know, as a student and a graduate student during Vietnam. And certainly recall the trauma and the horror at the United States being involved in that essentially civil war between the North and South Vietnamese, in communism, pro democracy in quotes, Vietnamese. The war got hot in a lot of places and we were involved. Afghanistan. I mean, even when the Soviets went to Afghanistan, we were supporting the Mujahideen, you know, with sending them stingers that have now become so prevalent in Ukraine as well, you know, they can stay air rockets that can bring down, they can be handled by a single person and bring down helicopters and airplanes. So, you know, the hotness of the war, the victims of the Cold War were substantial. But the Soviet Union and the United States never came directly to close. We never had a World War III and many people were predicting it. War III would have been nuclear and would have been catastrophic. With my schedule and how I'm always on the go, I don't have a ton of time to do the things I want to do, like reading. 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Super busy, it doesn't matter if you have five minutes or an hour. If you're an early riser or a fan of the evening burn, there's a Peloton class that fits into your day. Peloton is where you'll find what works for you on your schedule wherever you happen to be. At home, at the gym, or even outdoors. Motivation that moves you, anytime, anywhere. Try the Peloton bike or tread risk free for 30 days. Learn more at 1peloton.com. New members only, terms apply. You mentioned that the Cold War evolved into a more of an ideological conflict rather than a geopolitical one. And the question pops up in my head, though, about how that can be the case. How can all these proxy wars and conflicts across the globe be important to these countries? There is the thought that there was a domino effect that if one nation fell to communism, all the others around them would, but to what injury to the United States? What were the real costs, the real fears? Domino theory, I think, which basically I think was articulated by the right-dated Eisenhower, was that we would be out in the newvert that the world essentially would go communist, which was something we worried about in the 30s as well, but we didn't have any ability to do anything about it. The world would go communist and without flank us. And therefore, we would be under pressure to alter who we were and what we wanted because of a communist world. And we had communism in Cuba. The Cubans were right off the shore of Florida. The Cubans were aiding the spread of communism in Latin America, doing what they could. You take somebody like Cheg Bavara at his word, all of Latin America would have gone communist. Cheg was just one person in the Cuban hierarchy and there were different Castro, Fidel thought. There were differences of opinion. But in a certain part of the United States political elite, really worried, seriously, about Latin America being taken out of our zone of influence. Well, you know, that goes, that hits the United States right in the gut when it comes to things like the Monroe doctrine, which says basically Latin Americans out of America belong to our sphere of influence. Direct sphere of influence and no one can come in. So they have communist taking over, you know, for some people. Again, I'm not going to say this is right or wrong. You know, was this serious threat? Well, in their efforts to increase their influence, both the Americans and the Soviets sponsored some spectacular regime changes. And I was wondering if you could give us a tour of the highlights. Well, we tend to forget that Eastern Europe was manipulated in various ways by the Soviet Union that it tried regime changes several times that worked. But it tried regime changes, for example, could be an example where it didn't work in Yugoslavia in 1948, you know, during the Soviet Yugoslav split or Stalin, Tito's. Where Tito basically said, you know, you can't keep ordering us around like this and Stalin said, oh, yes, we can. And, you know, I mean, supposedly he said I'll wiggle my little finger and Tito will fall. Well, he will was little finger. He put a lot of pressure on the Yugoslavs. He threatened the invasion. He expelled them from what was called the common form, which was an organization of communist countries and Tito stood up to him. But in other places like Poland or Czechoslovakia or Hungary, Stalinists emerged and anti-Stylnists were removed. And these in, you know, they weren't quite as noisy coos as the Americans tended to do. They were behind the scenes, but, you know, the leaders of even the Communist parties, you know, were removed at the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s by Stalin. So that was their side. Our side, you know, we did the same thing. I mean, you know, in Vietnam, I'm thinking about the coup against Diem. And the Kennedy basically approved of, you know, when he was removed from power and kill and we were replaced, you know, by people from the army who we put in. So there's a case where our own allies, you know, we're replacing in the early 1950s. It was a guy in Guatemala named our Benz, who was a left wing, you know, kind of anti-capitalist. He wasn't really a communist. But a socialist, you know, who won an election in Guatemala. Well, what do we do? See, IA over through him. United fruit. He wanted to seize the assets of United Fruit. United Fruit was a powerful American company. And so we overthrew. And by the way, and doing so, ended up really causing a terrible mess in Guatemala that lasted all the way into the Reagan in Chile. Salvador, IA and his, you know, Marxist. And they were Marxist frequently or leftist allies, not necessarily communist. You know, we're voted yet. And, you know, we didn't like what they were doing. We feared that he would become more and more communist, sort of like Castro had become more and more communist. And so, you know, and we Kissinger in the American government and others supported essentially a counter revolutionary coup by Pina Shea and the military. I mean, some people have called him that he said that Kissinger committed war crimes. I don't think that was the case. But certainly the Americans were involved in overthrowing. I end a and replacing him with Pina Shea was a right wing dictator. And then, by the way, many, many leftists were forced to flee the country. I mean, Chileans are all over the world, you know, in Europe and United States. And eventually, most of them could go back if they wanted to, you know, because they were persecuted by the Pina Shea regime. So, all of these cases, you know, are cases where the Americans, you know, got involved and replaced, you know, sometimes duly elected governments. The shocking true crime podcast The Devil Within is back for a second season with a story about love, exorcism, and a murder that's haunted the town of West Yorkshire for decades. In 1974, Michael Taylor was a doding father of five, but after joining a local church and falling in love with its young beautiful preacher, Michael changed. His new church determined that he was possessed by no fewer than 48 demons and would require an exorcism to save his soul and protect his young family from evil. But the supposed remedy would come at a very steep price. The terrifying series The Devil Within is available on Amazon Music Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. If you'd like to binge the entire series early and add free, subscribe to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. We've been talking at length about how this ideological conflict was contemplated and acted upon pretty much at the top at the governmental leader level. But how did these ideologies in opposition affect the cultures of the two sides, the everyday United States and Soviet citizens? Clearly, there's ideological differences in the political role and the development of societies, not just the cultures, but societies, the societies, the societies in both the Soviet Union and the United States. If you take the Soviet Union, you know, a develop where I lived for, I won't say out there in a long time, but I did a lot of research there, a lot of friends there. It was quite clear that this became a society and culture based on anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. And that inculcated a lot of what they did and who they were. The propaganda was terribly powerful. And if you imagine a case where there's not an alternative view able to be presented, I mean, there were some radios from the West and some people who were dissidents who were able to see what was going on in the world. Well, the Soviets really had a very deep antipathy towards the fear of the United States. And, you know, in the early Reagan period, I can remember being in Leningrad at that point. And people desperately worried that the United States was going to attack the Soviet Union because of Reagan's rhetoric. This was very deep into the fabric of society and culture. So movies, books, talk shows, everything in the Soviet Union was very extremely anti-American. And by the way, this spills over, you know, this goes back to your initial questions. This spills over into the poop period. You know, it spills over into the present. There's no question. You know, that it's a kind of knee jerk reaction on their part on our part, you know, very similar kinds of things, even though I think it's important to recognize we had a much more and still have an open society where people can, you know, fight about in public about what's really going on and what's not you can't do that in Putin's Russia or in Soviet Union. And in the United States, and the important to recognize we can present different points of view. But still, the anti-communist rhetoric became very deeply embedded in our own culture and society. Again, the Phil's, you know, the literature, you know, the talk, the way we thought about Russia or the Soviet Union, you know, became part and parcel of who we were. And so once again, there is a kind of anti-Russian ethos, and that may not be the right word, kind of anti-Russian prejudice, you know, which runs deep in our society. So it's not hard at all right now, you know, to turn from what was anti-Soviet and anti-communist to now being anti-Russian and anti-Pupin. And while it's unquestionably true that Putin is the bad guy and he's responsible for this horrible war that's going on now, you know, I still think, you know, this infuses how we think about Russia and the Kremlin. I mean, just say the Kremlin, right? And it brings out all kinds of associations that we had during the Cold War period. Well, certainly one person who was deeply formed by the Cold War would be Vladimir Putin himself. And still sees today as some sort of reflection of that era, he has accused the U.S. and its allies of waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. I wonder how valid that argument is. So this argument comes up a lot, not just on Putin's part, but on others, you know, in the West, who talked about a proxy war. I don't like that argument at all. I mean, it doesn't mean we're not helping the Ukrainians. But let me emphasize again, as I did in the beginning, this is a war between Ukraine and Russia. And we are supporting Ukraine with arms and we have made serious efforts to mobilize our allies, but the allies themselves in Europe, I think, understand themselves. How important this war is to them. And then even without the United States, they might be doing a lot of this themselves. And we know there's a big meeting going on in Brock, you know, of the Europeans without us, where there's a broader European consensus about resisting the Russian efforts in Ukraine. But it's not a proxy war. They're fighting each other. If we would say no more weapons, Ukraine, they'd be really angry and really upset and say you've sold out your values, but they would keep fighting. So my point then is that this is about Ukraine. This is about their desire for sovereignty, you know, to have a democratic and open society versus being subservient to Moscow and to Putin. So it's not a proxy. Well, if the current conflict in Ukraine is so fundamentally different from any one of the conflicts in the Cold War and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is certainly one similarity and that is the specter of nuclear weapons, the types and sorts and a vintage of these weapons and who will be using them may be different. But the threat is still real, but in your estimation, how real is this threat? We had in the Cuban Missile Crisis and even in my own childhood, drills preparing us to survive a nuclear attack. Those aren't the sorts of missiles pointed at us right now. But the use of a nuclear weapon would be outrageous and unprecedented since World War II. How real the threat is that? I think the threat is real in the sense that, you know, you can rattle the nuclear weapon threat as Putin has done, but it's too serious, you know, not to take measures on our part and for the Ukrainians to be prepared, you know, for the potential use, especially a battlefield, nuclear weapons. I mean, in the strategic nuclear arena, meaning, you know, big missiles, right, that can stretch continents, you know, we are more or less a parody with Russia. And it would mean, as it has always meant, or has meant since the, you know, since the Cuban Missile Crisis and before, you know, the destruction of the world. And I think that is in no one's interest, not in the Russians interest, not in our interests. People are talking about it in Washington and they're talking about it here at Stanford, just like they're talking about it everywhere. You know, what would happen if Putin would use, you know, a battlefield nuclear weapon? And, you know, most of the answers, by the way, are that we would need to respond, we would have to respond. In other words, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, you cannot back down if he launches a new battlefield nuclear weapon, but that you would respond conventionally. In other words, that you would destroy that area or that piece of the Russian military establishment that launched that weapon, and we're capable of doing that. And the Russians know we're capable of doing that. I mean, there are a couple of questions here, right? Would he do it? People have various answers. Some people are talking about a demonstration, you know, that they might fire something over the black sea, or he might fire something over the Arctic sea, that would show that it got nuclear weapons and they're thinking about using it. I honestly don't think he would do that. Now, it's true. I didn't think he would invade Ukraine either. So, you know, you have to be very careful as some historians may be a little bit more careful about prediction than others, but, you know, you have to be very, very careful about predicting. Would he do that? Use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. I think we would get involved in countering that usage, and that would be a serious danger to him and to Moscow. It could also escalate. I mean, that's part of the problem, into using more serious nuclear weapons. And that was, of course, you know, the danger that you would missle crisis, you know, that both sides would launch. And that would be catastrophic. So, I think my sense of it is that this will not evolve into a nuclear exchange. Well, a lesson of Cuba, the Cuba muscle crisis is, first of all, you have to stay in touch with them, and you have to keep talking. And my hope is, and I trust that we are talking to the Russians on one level or another, you know, whether it's military to military levels or whether it's diplomatic levels. And hopefully, you know, we have those channels open because one, again, one of the lessons of the Cuban muscle crisis is where there were channels that could be used to communicate with the Russians. The second lesson, you know, again, is you have to stand up to them. You can't allow them to use an attachable nuclear weapon on the Ukrainians. I mean, that would be breaking all kinds of norms. And then you can't just bring it somehow justifiable to use them. And so we would have to respond. There would be no sitting that one out. Norman Neymarck, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal. You're welcome. It's a pleasure. That was my conversation with Norman Neymarck, a professor of history at Stanford University, and the author of the book Stalin and the Fate of Europe and Genocide, a world history. From Wondery, this is episode six of the Cuban Missile Crisis from American Scandal. In our next series, we look at the story of media-era's Patricia Hurst, who was kidnapped by a group of radical activists. The crime was a national sensation, especially as Hurst would eventually join her kidnapper prompting to bathe about whether Hurst was a victim or a hardened criminal. If you like our show, please give us a five star rating and leave a review and be sure to tell your friends. I also have two other podcasts you might like, American History Tellers and Business Movers. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. Or you can listen to new episodes early and add free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or in the Wondery app. You'll also find some links and offers from our sponsors in the episode notes. Supporting them helps us keep offering our shows for free. Another way you can support the show is by filling out a small survey at Wondery.com slash survey to tell us what topics we might come next. You can also find us and me on Twitter. Follow me at Lindsay A. Graham, Lindsay with an A, Middle and Initially. And thank you. 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