Soviet Leader most likely to trigger World War Three ?

[Athelstane]

LeMay was on record that the outcome of the Crisis was a terrific loss for the US, leaving Castro there.

Castro may have been the biggest winner, because of Kennedy's guarante not to invade.

But the popular perception was the the US won, and the USSR lost, the Cuban Missile Crisis, even if perception did not exactly accord with reality. It gave Kennedy a big leg up, deserved or not, and basically doomed Khrushchev. Getting 15 obsolete Jupiter missiles out of Turkey a year or so before they actually would have been yanked is not much of a consolation for the destruction of his political career and much of his reform program.

 

[Athelstane]

Yeah. I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people from the former communist bloc. Something that struck me was how many people still believed in communism or who professed that they were strong believers in their youth. They might have hated the union and the oppressive state it had become, but I don't think the western narrative of communism failing really holds up.

Well, that sure wasn't my experience when I lived in Eastern Europe; but we all know the dangers of anecdotal evidence.

On the other hand, my barber is a Georgian emigre. She quite emphatically misses the old days before 1991. Life was not affluent by any means, she said, but it was orderly and predictable. And as we all know, there is a strong element of that mindset in parts of Russia.

Perhaps what I would say is that the experience of communism varied by how it came to be. In Eastern Europe and the Baltics, it was imposed at the end of Soviet bayonets, and that taste never went away. The Warsaw Pact countries all fell like dominos in just several weeks not because of CIA or MI6 machinations but because it had become apparent that the Soviets were not going to use force to keep these regimes in place, a la Hungary or Czechoslovakia. (The stuation was a little different in Romania, where Soviet power was much more attenuated, but that didn't save Ceaucescu from the preference cascade.) These regimes never shook the sense in most of the population's eyes of being imperial impositions. (Something similar on a smaller scale operated in Yugoslavia, where the grievance post-Tito was increasingly that the whole thing was a Serb imperial project.)

This is not to say you couldn't find convicted communists in these countries. It wasn't just Machiavellian lackeys who staffed these regimes. You can't tell me Ulbricht and Zhivkov were not true believers, and Ulbricht particularly had an extensive rolodex of old communists (the ones who survived the concentration camps) to call on in erecting the GDR. Unfortunately, the regime he built ended up with a far bigger rolodex of agents and informers.