Archives & Cold War

The book contains, among other subjects, erudite essays on the Sino-Soviet alliance and Gorbachev's East Asia policy during 1985-1991.

INDIAN writers on international affairs have been remiss in their neglect of the stupendous achievements of the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). Established by the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington, DC, in 1991, it actively supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War. It is unlikely to receive the slightest help in this noble enterprise from India, easily the most illiberal state in the entire democratic world in its archives policy. It is abetted by historians who do not wage a campaign for its reversal but content themselves with brave, high-sounding resolutions at the annual History Congress.

The CWIHP publishes a CWIHP Bulletin and Working Papers, all based on archival disclosures in the United States, Russia, China and a few other countries. It is directed by Dr Christian F. Ostermann. Anyone who reads its publications will be struck by the light they throw on China's relations with India, including its Soviet dimension, and the course of the Cold War. That, of course, is a subject in which we are not interested, self-obsessed as we are. Indian writing and thinking view international relations through the prism of perceived Indian interests, exclusively.

The CWIHP organises conferences at which papers based on solid research are read. This volume is the outcome of three conferences and contains erudite essays on the Sino-Soviet alliance; the foreign policies of China, Japan and the two Koreas; Mikhail Gorbachev's East Asia policy during 1985-1991, and much else. Much conventional wisdom lies battered on the wayside. The editor, Dr Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, writes an introductory overview of East Asia, which he aptly calls the Second Significant Front of the Cold War. This new intellectual discipline, if one may call it so with some exaggeration, has thrown up scholars of note whose writings one reads avidly; to name a few: Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Lorenz Luthi, Ilya V. Gaiduk and Vladislav Zubok besides Ostermann and Hasegawa.

American scholars teamed with scholars in Russia and other countries to produce studies that opened new vistas. One essay in this instructive volume deserves particular mention. It is Zubok's contribution on Gorbachev's East Asia policy. He led the country towards a rapprochement with China. The palm goes to leaders who lead, not to the ones who drift along in the comfort of an impasse.