ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE COLD WAR

By

Nader Elhefnawy

One point of divergence virtually ignored by writers of alternate history is the Cold War, and in particular the way that the five-decade global conflict came to an end. No one ever seems to ask "what if 1991 did not see an American victory in the Cold War, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet system?" let alone, "What if it happened the other way around, with the Soviet Union not only surviving but somehow emerging triumphant?"¹

There are many possible explanations as to why these questions have received so little attention. One may be that it all happened a mere fifteen years ago. Alternate history tends to require a certain amount of distance, so that science fiction writers simply haven't had much of a chance to work with Cold War themes yet. It should be noted, though, that notable stories about "other" World War IIs, like Cyril Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" and Philip K. Dick's classic The Man In The High Castle had already begun to appear by the late 1950s and early 1960s--closer in time to that event than we are to the Cold War.

Another possible explanation is the difficulty of developing a sequence of events that could have led to a clear-cut Soviet victory over the West, certainly by the last decade of the twenty-first century. After all, despite the fears of alarmists throughout the period, the Soviet Union could not have won by military means in a nuclear age.² (The vast genre of post-apocalyptic fiction set after World War III testifies to the more likely result.) This means the Soviet Union would have needed to utilize other instruments, like its economic power, political appeal and diplomatic adroitness to strengthen its position--resources which seem far less impressive than the Soviet Union's dearly purchased military might. However, a great deal of excellent alternate history about World War II (like the stories produced by Kornbluth and Dick) are short on realistic explanations for how history went another way. Instead what the reader usually sees is a perfunctory set-up for the world they describe, the "how" of it far less important than in a scholarly counterfactual.³

A more likely reason is that the triumphalism that accompanied the event was so intense. Far more so than World War II, the Cold War was a contest of systems, in which everything from who won more Olympic medals to whose rockets put out more pounds of thrust was seen as a judgment on a whole ideology and way of life. Not surprisingly the victory of the U.S. over the Soviet Union is widely regarded as having been not only inevitable, but also the ultimate validation of many traditionally cherished American beliefs: that free markets and freedom are synonymous with one another, and that as a blessed nation with a special destiny, the United States embodies both. To question the inevitability of things happening as they did is to question the belief in American exceptionalism, and perhaps, the idea of America itself.

As historian J.C.D. Clark notes in his essay "British America: What If There Had Been No American Revolution?" such concerns inhibit academic research as well as speculative writing. This makes it all the more crucial for alternate historians to ask, "What if?"

I did just that, and my mind turned to the early 1970s, a time of crisis for the United States--the end of the post-war economic boom and a prolonged downturn in the world economy; the embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), skyrocketing oil prices and dark talk of an energy crisis; the defeat of the United States in Vietnam.

At the same time the Soviet Union was widely expected not only to persist indefinitely but to continue advancing economically, technologically and militarily. In his widely read The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty Years, futurist Herman Kahn's calculations put it entirely within the realm of the possible for the Soviet economy to catch up to America's by the twenty-first century.

One reason often given as to why this didn't come to pass is that the Western economies capitalized on the revolution in information technology while the Soviet Union failed to do so. While this assertion is questionable, given the ambiguity surrounding just how much, in what ways and even when computers actually started contributing to economic growth (it may not have happened in a serious way until after the Soviet Union's collapse), true believers consider this to have been inevitable. The computer is often characterized as an inherently libertarian technology (another questionable assertion, as Gene Rochlin demonstrates)--but it should be acknowledged that socialism has its libertarian variants, too. Might the libertarian technology have had the potential to become an "anarchist technology" in Soviet hands?

And so one "what if" led to another: what if three or four decades ago the Soviet Union made the same kind of commitment to developing information technology that it did to space or weapons technology, for instance? What if as a result the information revolution happened in the Soviet Union instead, producing a reformed, decentralized and technologically upgraded economy while the U.S. stumbled? What if the result was that the Soviets ended up creating not only a freer society than they had before, but the more dynamic economy, with all that implied for victory and defeat in the international arena?

The idea of a liberalized, more vigorous Soviet Union is certainly not without historical precedent. Rather than the dismantling of the U.S.S.R., this was Mikhail Gorbachev's goal during the years of glasnost and perestroika. His effort ended in total failure, which would appear to discredit the notion, but Nikita Khrushchev was trying something similar twenty years earlier, when the Soviet economy was still vital enough to be growing briskly, and the regime still enjoyed relatively widespread popular support.

The outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis crippled him politically, however, and ended these efforts. Instead of reformers who might have continued his initiatives he was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev and his clique, who turned back the clock. The Soviet government clamped back down on the freedoms it had begun to allow, the economy stagnated and runaway defense spending strangled the country's resources, ultimately dooming the Soviet Union. And so Khrushchev's decision to place strategic forces in Cuba emerges as a critical point of divergence for a reason besides the familiar one that it might have started a nuclear war: it may have destroyed the last chance of the Soviet Union to build a society viable in the long run.

Had Khrushchev refrained from putting missiles in Cuba and remained in a position to continue his reforms, the history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War might have gone in a number of other directions, one of which may well have been a much more formidable opponent to the U.S.. Writers have generally avoided serious extrapolation from this or any other comparable point (for instance, what if the Soviet Union didn't suffer the trauma of Stalin?), however, even as a way of offering a new version of World War II, or creating a superpower opponent for the U.S. to battle in technothrillers. The taboo against even appearing to depict a partial success for the Soviet Union has just been too strong, though this may be starting to change. Christian Gossett's brilliant Red Star comics offer the story of a "Mythic Russia" in which the heroes struggle to undo the tyranny of the wicked sorceror Imbohl (Stalin?), and set Soviet history aright. Whether or not one is sympathetic to the idea that the Soviet Union could have been rescued in this way, it may be a sign that audiences are finally ready for counterfactuals which seriously consider the "what ifs?" of Soviet history.