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April 11, 2005

On the Cold War

When a student asked me for takes on the Cold War, I found myself in position to write a dang book.

OK, here's the thing:

I have no strong early memories of the Cold War. I mean, it was an ever-present and stuff - I grew up knowing nuclear weapons existed and Very Bad Things had been threatened before I was born. But I grew up in the 80's, in small town Florida, and everything was very self-consumed. I felt sometimes like I was the only kid around who knew who Leonid Brezhnev WAS, and stuff.

I think I had a convo with Mama on my way to church one evening (I'm pretty sure this would be around '87, I was 15 or 16) saying I was damned tired of all the church crap if we were going to hear the same Jesus-loves-us tripe all the time. I wanted deeper stuff, like what God would think about nuclear weapons or whether it would be a good idea to pray for the conversion of Communists and all that. I got pretty much brushed off, and this fed into my personal bitterness towards the church.

So, at least in my little part of the world, I felt like the cold war was met with a measure of complacency. The Russkies were always the bad guys, the Russkies were always going to be the bad guys, might as well enjoy the other stuff life had to offer, it's not like we ever really would have to face them down anyway.

The Berlin Wall came down during my freshman year of college. I was trying to survive my freshman year at Rose-Hulman, and that wasn't a mean feat, so I can't say it was as earth-shattering as actually pulling my B out of Calculus I was. But it was a rather neat thing to have happen during one's college life, and it got me a bit interested in studying the history of Soviet Russia and the Eastern Bloc - much more so than I ever was in high school, or rather, than I was encouraged to be.

One of the requirements I had as a student at Rose-Hulman was that I had to take a course on the "non-Western" world, about something outside of the Americas or Western Europe. Russia in the 20th Century qualified. I signed up for that course before I left school as a sophomore, to take it Fall term of my junior year.

That would be Fall 1991.

The attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev happened on August 18, 1991, and Boris Yeltsin effectively took over Russia in the days that followed. I got to watch that play out on CNN over the end of that summer. THAT was the thing that had me glued to the TV, way more than the Berlin Wall coming down did. That's what really felt like the end of an era, for me.

(How did the media affect my opinions? I thought Wolf Blitzer was a blowhard then, just like I think he's a blowhard now. I listened to them, but I was deciding on my own LONG before Fox News suggested I should.)

And that fall term, I got to sit in Bill Pickett's Russia in the 20th Century course and have Dr. Pickett say excitedly "Gentlemen, it's not often you get to teach a course whose curriculum is guaranteed to change as the term is going forward because of current events. This is will be one of the most exciting courses you ever take, period."

And it was.

Now, it wasn't Pickett's style to teach the course directly, to tell you what you had to learn for exams. You had to read books. Devour them. But he would always phrase introductory questions like: "Affirm or deny: The collapse of Nicholas II's monarchy was inevitable because of the dissatisfaction of the proletariat, regardless of the corruption Nicholas II surrounded himself with." And Pickett forced you to develop your own ideas, and defend them. And he NEVER let you off the hook, regardless of which side you took. It was very difficult to discern his own views in the classroom, he was so interested in picking apart what YOU thought.

So I really developed a lot of my own opinions of the Cold War after the fact, based on the heavy-duty reading I had to do for the Russia class. I think, for the most part, the Cold Warriors up to Reagan and Gorbachev were stubborn SOB's who probably could have avoided a ton of grief had they just talked to one another (excepting Stalin, who was a genuinely evil man). I think Reagan (for all his faults) and Gorbachev (for even more of his) were fundamentally decent men who saw a chance to make things a little better, were a little bit more honest with one another than anyone had been before, were a little more creative in their thinking about their own goverments and the relationship between their countries, made a little more effort to affect change in the relationship, and were completely unprepared for the avalanche of change that accompanied that effort.

And honestly, we're still trying to find our way as a nation without that major ever-present adversary, and Russia is trying to find their way period.

Posted by Chuck at April 11, 2005 09:57 PM

Comments

a science professor talking about history? i like it

i can't really say much about the actual topic however other than what you already said, so this comment is pointless...enjoy :)

Posted by: Celestia at April 11, 2005 10:10 PM

Let's put it this way:

I'm trying to make sure the schedule is arranged so that I can find my way into Morris' History and Philosophy of Science course in the fall. I've NEVER formally studied the history of science, and I need to.

And every now and again, in weaker moments, I consider chunking all the science teaching stuff and going back to grad school to get a PhD in Western Civilization, if such things exist.

Of my three favorite and most influential professors as an undergrad, two were history professors. That sounds strange for a physics major at a science and engineering school to say, but it was true.

Posted by: Dr Chuck at April 12, 2005 07:38 AM

Personally, I don't think you should leave teaching science ever. While you might make a great history teacher, great science teachers are much harder to come by. :)

I think you're kind of lucky that you had events like the end of the Cold War happen during your college years. Mine have been filled with the beginning of wars. Kinda puts a damper on things. I mean when my kids will ask me where I was during 9/11, my response will be "I just got back from a Calc 2 test and then had two more exams to take that same day. (One of which was yours...)" Thats not really how one wants to spend one of those days.

Posted by: Nancy at April 12, 2005 10:59 AM

Yes. Oh my word, that's right.

"Well, I was talking to Mrs. Davis earlier, and she said that she'd think the worst thing that could possibly happen today has already happened..."
"Um, no. One of those planes could crash into downtown Atlanta and all my friends could die."

I mean, Nancy, I don't know if you could tell, but you REALLY caught me out with that comment. Enough so that I was wondering how horrible a human being I was for the rest of that day.

Yeah, that whole semester pretty much sucked, and we were all fighting uphill.

Posted by: Dr Chuck at April 12, 2005 08:33 PM

Well yes I always try to think about the worst case scenario. And you're not a horrible person, certainly not in my eyes. And yeah it wasnt a fun semester. I still don't think I deserved my A but I'm not complaining either :) And at least you weren't the only other prof that still gave a test that day. You were my last of three (of course the first was before the fact).

Posted by: Nancy at April 12, 2005 10:53 PM