There is a still point in the turning world and at its centre is the historian Norman Stone, who has never stopped tilting at creaky old windmills and fighting the battles of his beloved 1980s—“the most interesting decade of the last century,” he claims in this blunderbuss of a book. It is rare nowadays to read the classic triumphalist narrative of the collapse of communism presented as a victory for the west led by the forces of conservatism, one of whose distinguished high priests was, of course, Stone. But this is a deeply old-fashioned book that might have been written in the first flush of excitement after the fall of the Berlin wall. Only two genuinely heroic figures emerge from these 600 or so pages: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It was they, Stone claims, who slew domestic dragons and brought down the evil empire of the Soviet Union. If it had been left to the Democrats in the US, the wet, consensus-seeking establishment in Britain or, God forbid, the rest of Europe, the communists might still be in the Kremlin. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric inspired Americans anew to battle for freedom, while his economic policies made them rich, the argument runs. He outspent the Soviets. It was Reagan’s multi-trillion dollar arms build up in the early 1980s and in particular, the Star Wars project, his dream of a shield that would protect the west from missiles, which defeated the USSR. This stirring story was the standard version of events for around a decade after the fall of the Soviet empire, predicted by almost nobody. It is well re-told and argued here, though Stone has produced more elegantly written books. He has little time for the idea that “We the People” opposition to communism played any significant part in the east European revolutions in 1989, or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The former—however dramatic to witness and to live through—were, he claims, “staged by the KGB,” though it would be interesting to see the evidence. Stone has clearly steeped himself in the vast amount of material available since the early 1990s from the former USSR and east bloc. Much of it establishes the internal reasons for the collapse of the system—how ready the Soviets were to abandon their empire, how imminent was economic collapse, how embarrassing defeat in Afghanistan created a crisis of confidence. Soviet-style communism destroyed itself—as Stone acknowledges many times, before returning to his own, rather different focus on the importance of external forces. On occasion he gives Reagan credit for the wrong reasons. It was not Reagan the cold warrior who won the conflict, but a more emollient Reagan in his second term, who defied the neocons, started talking to the Soviets and negotiated the deals for which he will be remembered. Stone thinks Gorbachev was hugely overrated. Few of the changes the last Soviet leader attempted were significant, apparently. In an extraordinary sentence to explain epoch-making events in Moscow during the 1980s he says: “There was a new era of [east/west] relations because, quite suddenly, Soviet representatives turned out to be agreeable drinking companions, quite willing to talk freely. This made… a change with the past and a great number of journalists, used to the restrictions of earlier years, allowed a natural Russophilia to emerge.” He offers fuller accounts in the excellent early chapters on the Sovietisation of eastern Europe, describing in grim but fascinating detail the “salami tactics” that communists adopted to seize power in Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and so on. Stone has respect for a few figures who set the tone of the cold war. He praises the foresight of US secretary of state George Marshall, who oversaw the rebuilding of postwar western Europe—undoubtedly, as Stone acknowledges, one of America’s greatest achievements. Yet he barely mentions the president at the time, Harry Truman. Neither is credited as co-author of the policy that Nato and all future US administrations (including Reagan’s) pursued with consistency. It was 40 years of “containment” of the USSR that ultimately won a victory, if victory there was. His greatest venom is reserved for the opponents of his heroes, a predictable gallery of tabloid bogey figures from the 1980s: Thatcher’s soggy patrician cabinet colleagues; almost all trade unionists; Michael Heseltine; Jacques Delors and Eurocrats in general. Stone has always been a fine hater and we are entertained to his views on many of the usual suspects with whom he fought his own cold war: comprehensive school teachers; university lecturers; women who used “the ghastly word Ms” and the “anti-smoking legislation” introduced so unfairly in Europe. A strange target, this one. Has he tried lighting up recently in New York or California? Most loathed of all is Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s predecessor as president, whose do-gooding Stone finds contemptible. “Carter’s regime symbolised the era (1976-1980). It was desperately well meaning; it jogged; it held hands with its scrawny wife; it prayed, Baptist fashion; it sent bossy women to preach human rights…” Carter’s true record has been ignored. It was his administration that deployed cruise missiles to Europe, commissioned a new breed of Trident submarines, doubled the number of nuclear missiles targeted at the USSR and began research on the neutron bomb. A true wet. Billing the book as a “personal history,” Stone emphasises some odd subjects. He makes two passing references to McCarthyism, surely a major cold war phenomenon, while a whole page is devoted to the Westland helicopter affair. There is almost nothing about espionage, an important cold war theme in reality as well as culturally. He barely mentions Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal, while we must read an entire chapter on the Paris student riots in 1968 before he concludes, rightly, that they were “just self importance and holiday-wanting.” This is as much a collection of hobbyhorses flogged close to death as a narrative. And yet in places it is vastly entertaining, perceptive and full of its author’s ebullience of spirit.
