By Michael Dobbs,
a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace who is writing a book about the Cuban missile crisis
Thursday, February 1, 2007

KHRUSHCHEV'S COLD WAR

The Inside Story of an American Adversary

By Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

Norton. 670 pp. $35

One of the offshoots of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 was the opening of its archives. Almost overnight, some of the Kremlin's darkest secrets -- the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the murder of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn during World War II, the workings of the gulag -- came spilling out into the open. It was a wonderful time for historians.

But within a couple of years, the doors had begun to slam shut again. Russia's post-communist leaders wanted to regain control of Soviet history. The apparatchiks who physically controlled the archives -- from former KGB officials to well-connected historians -- wanted to make money. The flood of revelations turned into a trickle, and the finds often came with political or financial strings attached that raised questions about their scholarly value.

Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali's "Khrushchev's Cold War" is the latest example of a literary collaboration that became possible only with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fursenko is a prominent Russian historian and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has been able to parlay his connections into privileged access to various archives in Moscow, including those of the Soviet military intelligence services. In the mid-1990s he teamed up with Naftali, an American scholar, to research "One Hell of a Gamble," a well-received book about the Cuban missile crisis. Other books in the same genre include "The Haunted Wood" by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, on Soviet espionage against the United States, and "Battleground Berlin," about the KGB and the CIA's Cold War tussles there, by David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev and George Bailey. For the most part, these books have been good for the reputations of the American coauthors; Weinstein, for instance, is now the director of the National Archives, and Naftali, who used to run the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia, was recently appointed director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.

But there are pitfalls as well as opportunities in gaining access to closed archives, and they are clearly on display in "Khrushchev's Cold War." On the one hand, as with "One Hell of a Gamble," the authors have unearthed many interesting details about the Soviet side of the Cold War. On the other, both books are marred by sloppy research, including mistranslations of Russian documents. The errors are so numerous that it becomes difficult to have much confidence in the authors' uncheckable citations from Soviet archival documents that remain closed to other scholars.

The wealth of new material in "Khrushchev's Cold War" includes previously unpublished minutes from important Kremlin meetings, including the session of the Soviet Presidium on Oct. 22-23, 1962, at the start of the Cuban missile crisis. The book contains the first detailed account from the Soviet side of the arrest and interrogation of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 spy plane pilot shot down over Siberia in May 1960. It provides fresh details about other Cold War crises in Berlin and Southeast Asia, as well as the succession of coups in Iraq that paved the way for the rise of Saddam Hussein. It shows that Khrushchev was looking for a grand bargain with the United States even as he was pounding his shoe at the United Nations and boasting, "We will bury you."

But the revelations are accompanied by glaring mistakes. Some are the result of poor fact-checking. For example, "One Hell of a Gamble" lists four Soviet ships carrying R-14 missiles to Cuba on Oct. 22, 1962: the Almeteevsk, Nicolaeev, Dubna and Divnogorsk. According to "Khrushchev's Cold War," there were only two ships carrying R-14 missiles, now listed as the Kasimov and the Krasnodar. (Neither version is accurate.) In the first book, Rudolf Anderson, a U-2 pilot shot down over Cuba during the crisis, is identified as a captain. In the second, he becomes a colonel. (In fact, he was a major.) The authors have mixed up Soviet submarines and misstated the date of an American diplomatic note to Moscow about submarine-identification procedures. And so on.

More significantly, the authors have also misquoted from Presidium records in a way that affects our understanding of what took place. For example, they recount a debate involving Khrushchev and his closest ally on the Presidium, Anastas Mikoyan, over whether to authorize Soviet commanders on Cuba to use nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S. invasion. By Fursenko and Naftali's account, Khrushchev is initially prepared to use the weapons, but Mikoyan restrains him. "Doesn't using these missiles mean the start of a thermonuclear war?" they quote Mikoyan as saying, based on unpublished notes by Mikoyan himself. Without independent access to these notes, it would normally be impossible to check the accuracy of this quote. In this case, however, a transcript of the Mikoyan notes recently was published by Mikoyan's son, Sergo. Among other differences, it is Khrushchev, not Mikoyan, who expresses concern about the possible "start of a thermonuclear war."

Because such errors raise questions about the authors' research methods, I got permission from Marie Arana, the editor of Book World, to ask for their response. (Normally, The Post asks reviewers not to have any contact with authors.) They admitted some mistakes and contested others. Naftali said he was responsible for any errors involving the interception of Soviet submarines by the U.S. Navy. Fursenko (who handled the Russian end of the research) was more defensive. He said that some of the Presidium records were still classified and added that he had not shared his notes even with his co-author. Naftali told me he wished he had seen the Mikoyan notes before writing the book. On the specific question of the "thermonuclear war" quote, Fursenko wrote me that it was up to other researchers "to find out what is true and what is not." He defended the general thrust of "Khrushchev's Cold War" as fully consistent with the unpublished Mikoyan notes. I disagree. The details are all-important. One version is accurate, while the other never happened.