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Gorbachev resisted reactionary elements in the Soviet administration, challenged the unrepresentative nature of the public franchise, countered corruption in State enterprises and popularised a view of coexistence eschewing nuclear arsenals. This was a supersession of a world view; a seismic shift in a historical paradigm. In his final speech as President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev described the world he inherited “ The society was suffocating in the vice of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race. It had reached the limit of its possibilities.”¹³ This was the last gasp of the Cold War. A renunciation of an ideology. Gorbachev blended realpolitik executive authority with considerations of simple social right. This leavening so contradicted the language of the Cold War, that its transcendence provided an alternative view of history which largely persists in international relations today.

Endnotes

¹ Alexis de Toqueville: “Democracy in America”, pp.412–413, 1835.

² Miller Centre of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Multimedia Archive, First Speech to Congress (April 16, 1945)

³ Address to the People, May 9th, 1945. On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1946

⁴ Miller Centre of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Multimedia Archive. President Truman’s address to the U.N. San Francisco: April 25th, 1945.

⁵ “The Fifty Years War: the United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941–1991”, Richard Crockatt. Routledge, London, 1995. ISBN 0-415-13554-0. See page 87 for references to Stalin’s ambivalence towards a united Germany and the Eastern Bloc in the years before his death in 1953.

⁶ “Airbridge to Berlin. The Berlin Crisis of 1948, its Origins and Aftermath” D.M. Giangreco and Robert E. Griffin, Presidion Press. USA. 1988. ISBN 0-89141-329-4

⁷ For a discussion of William Fox’s notions of the peaceful use of power between “superpowers” and the emergence of the USA and the USSR as the principal agents, see pages 12 to 15 “The Evolution of Theory in International Relations”. Robert Rothstein, Ed. University of South Carolina, 1992. ISBN 0-87249-862-X

⁸ TranscriptofrecordedconversationincludingJFK,RFK, Johnson,Bundy andMacNamara. October 16th 1962 http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset+Tree/Asset+Viewers/Audio+Video+Asset+Viewer. htm?guid= {16E3 A48F-B1EF-4447-8D97-C1F0006B3F29 } &type=Audio