The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict ed. by Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko (review)

One of the important ways that knowledge in the social sciences expands is by contemporary scholars reacting to and building on the work of their predecessors. It is most unfortunate that the editors and most of the authors of The End of the Cold War and the Third World have almost totally ignored the fact that generations of scholars, in both the former USSR and the West, examined in great detail the issue of Soviet involvement in the Third World. The readers of this volume will never know that Vernon Aspaturian, Robert Donaldson, Alvin Rubinstein, and Jerry Hough—four of the dozens of Western scholars who toiled in this field—ever existed or wrote on the topics under discussion here. Moreover, with the exception of a few of the chapters, almost all reference is missing to the analysts who were tracking the changes in Soviet policy during the Gorbachev years that are the focus of the present volume. Did any of them get the story right? We do not learn the answer to this question because the question itself is never posed, and they and their scholarly work are not mentioned. It is almost as though relevant information and analysis pertaining to the impact on the developing countries of "new thinking" in Soviet foreign policy and of the end of the Cold War become available only after the opening of archives and the publication of memoirs.

To be fair to the authors and editors, what they have written is interesting, exceptionally well-documented, and, de facto, expands, but does not overturn, the assessments of earlier analysts—despite the overall failure to relate the current discussions to the work of those earlier analysts. What is most impressive across almost all the chapters is the wealth of documentary evidence on which the authors have been able to draw.

The volume begins with an introduction by the coeditors and a chapter on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Third World by Svetlana Savranskaya that only partly set the stage for the empirical chapters to follow. The memoir and documentary materials that Savranskaya cites add reality to her discussion of Soviet policy. However, a greater effort by the editors to examine both Soviet and Western analyses of changing Soviet policy in the 1980s and the presentation of a framework within which the following materials could be placed would have provided a stronger introduction to the rest of the book.

The one chapter that does not suffer from the failure to tie documentary material to earlier analyses of Soviet policy is that on Soviet arms transfers to developing countries by Mark Kramer. Kramer does an especially good job of relating the "new thinking" of Gorbachev to the broad changes in Soviet policy that flowed from that thinking and provides the link that I find missing in other chapters.

The chapters on changes in Chinese policy (mainly before the 1980s), by Chien Jian, and the impact of the end of the Cold War on the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Dima Adamsky, are not well integrated into the overall structure of the book, although they provide interesting assessments and insights concerning these two sets of events. The remainder of the volume includes specific case studies that examine the relevance and impact of the end of the Cold War between the superpowers on the ongoing confrontation in Afghanistan (by Artemy Kalinovsky), on the winding down of conflict in Indochina (by Balázs Szalontai), on India's foreign policy and its place in the world (by Sergey Radchenko), and on developments in Nicaragua and Chile (by Victor Figueroa Clark). All of these brief essays examine how the resolution of the global competition for domination between the Soviet Union and the United States played out in the policies of the countries examined. The authors draw on available documentary materials to tell individual...