ABSTRACT
A striking feature of recent Cold War historiography is its insistence on mobilizing terms of reference that derive precisely from the nuts and bolts of theatrical performance. Cold War analysts, working in a spectrum of disciplines ranging from political and diplomatic history to international relations, have conscripted the terminology of theatre to help apprehend the structure, longevity and underlying dynamics of the evolving global conflict. A fairly random overview of recently published studies clarifies this point. John Elsom, for example, contends that the end of the Cold War was marked by a pronounced ‘theatricality of [. . .] events’.1 Douglas Macdonald comments that the conflict was played out in a discrete ‘theater of operations’ populated, according to Richard Ned Lebow, by erstwhile ‘actors’.2
