ABSTRACT
On January 30, 1950 the State Department authorised the distribution to selected members of the United States Foreign Service of what was known as National Security Document 68 (NSC 68), an analysis of how it saw the aims and objectives inspiring the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. It describes the Kremlin’s approach to international affairs as ‘utterly amoral and opportunistic’, and the Soviet Union itself as ‘animated by a fanatical faith which seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world’. 1
In spite of his description of the document, from a stylistic point of view, as ‘the most ponderous expression of elementary ideas’, the American Secretary of State Dean Acheson agreed with the general tenor of its findings. Indeed, he went so far as to say that it showed the foreign policy of the Soviet Union to be ‘singularly like that which Islam had posed centuries before with its combination of ideological zeal and fighting power’. Forty-nine years later this particular comparison was taken up in an article by the British historian Norman Davies in an article written for the special issue of Time magazine published to mark the introduction on January 1, 1999 of the Euro. Before becoming ‘the sick man of Europe’, Professor Davies wrote:
the Ottomans were the major force to be reckoned with. Like the Russian empire, which in many parts supplanted them, they lived on depredation. If the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, had not triumphed before Vienna in 1683 at the head of his winged hussars, the consequences of a Christian defeat are hard to exaggerate. Edward Gibbon once speculated famously about the might-have-beens if the Muslims had not been stopped by Charles Martel a thousand years before on the Loire. The Christian victory of 1683 on the Danube merits the same sort of reflection. Perhaps, Gibbon wrote ‘the pulpits of Oxford might today demonstrate tc a circumcised people the sanctity and proof of the revelations of Mohammed’. 2
The cultural and ideological consequences of a Soviet victory in the Cold War might have been remarkably similar. Literature in Western as well as in Eastern
Europe would have been firmly based upon the principles of Socialist Realism. British athletes would have received the same kind of training which used to enable the representatives of the German Democratic Republic to carry all before them; at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 the GDR won more gold medals than any country bar the Soviet Union, and followed this up with a comparable triumph at Seoul in 1988, when its total of 37 was one more than that of the United States. 3 The Khrushchev Professor of Modern History at Cambridge would have expatiated on the Nature of the Dialectic, demonstrating how inevitably the inner contradictions of capitalism had given rise to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and thus to the classless society predicted by Marx. I should have been out of a job.
