Ilinskiy I. М. Cold War: A New Stage

(Moscow University for the Humanities)

Abstract ♦ People tend to imagine the Cold War as a 20th century phenomenon, a period which lasted from 1946 to 1991 and ended with a victory for the West and the USA as its leader. Our thesis is that we are currently witnessing a new stage of the Cold War between Russia and the USA. This article looks at some of its features.

We start with a glance at the past decades, in order to outline the specific features of the 1946–1991 Cold War. At that time, it was elevated to the level of high politics, and the Soviet system was assaulted both from inside and outside. The Soviet Union began losing the Cold War as early as during Stalin’s last years, when the war primarily took the ideological turn. The Khrushchev decade can be seen as playing into the hands of the USSR’s main adversary, consciously or unconsciously. In the 1980s the West (and above all, the USA) tried to win the war as soon as possible by destroying the USSR, and Soviet leadership in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev refused to engage and chose to retreat. Perestroika was indeed conceived as a political plot to destroy the USSR.

To understand the current specifics of the Cold War, we should first realize that, akin to the ‘hot’ war, it is at the same time a political, diplomatic and ideological war, a conflict for the living space, a war of economies and finances, a war for raw materials and sales markets, etc. The Cold War is above all a geopolitical war. With some breaks for ‘hot’ warfare it can last for decades, like its previous iteration in 1946–1991, or even centuries. Its final outcome always remains unpredictable.

USA President Barack Obama has recently listed Russia among the top 3 threats to the existing world order. In February 2015, the USA adopted a new National Security Strategy where the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Russian aggression’ appear on almost every page. ‘The golden billion’ has long wanted to conceal the fact that the global cold war is raging. Its current main feature is precisely this status of a creeping, silent catastrophe, an inconspicuous, latent, inexplicable and incomprehensible for laymen ongoing transformation. War never changes, happening always and everywhere. War of everyone against everyone. War without war.

Keywords: Cold War, USA, Russia, geopolitics, National security strategy, ‘hot’ war, confrontation.

Ilinskiy Igor Mikhailovich, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Rector, Moscow University for the Humanities; President, National Union of Nongovernmental Institutions of Higher Education; President, Union of the Nongovernmental Higher Education Institutions of Moscow and Moscow Region. Postal address: 5 Yunosti St., 111395, Moscow, Russian Federation. Tel.: +7 (499) 374-78-78. E-mail: iilinskiy@mosgu.ru

Citation: Ilinskiy, I. M. (2015) Kholodnaia voina: novyi etap [Cold War: A new stage]. Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, no. 3, pp. 5–17. DOI: 10.17805/zpu.2015.3.1 (In Russ.).

Submission date: 16.06.2015.

RUSSIAN VERSION

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