Soviet Union
Communist successor state to the Russian Empire, 1922–1991
Also known as: Soviet Union, USSR, Soviet Russia, Russia, Soviet, Russians, Russian, Russia's
The Communist successor state to the Russian Empire — founded 1922, dissolved 1991 (post-Quigley) — anchors one pole of the The Cold War in Tragedy and Hope. Quigley uses 'Soviet Union,' 'USSR,' and (often) 'Russia' as variant pointers to the same analytical unit (T&H 15).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley treats the USSR as a peripheral civilizational unit — neither Western nor Eastern in his typology, but inheriting the historic Russian role of mediator between Europe and Inner Asia. The Bolshevik project is read as a forced industrialization wrapped in Marxist-Leninist ideology: a brutal, partially successful attempt to compress two centuries of Western development into a generation. T&H's Soviet chapters track the Leninist foundation, the Stalinist terror, the Nazi-Soviet war, and the post-Stalin Khrushchev thaw with characteristic attention to the interaction between ideology and structural constraint.
Strategic Role
Quigley reads the Cold War less as a global ideological struggle than as a great-power contest in which both sides used ideology as mobilization rhetoric. The USSR's strategic advantages — interior lines, Eurasian land mass, a large continental army — are balanced against its economic backwardness and the political fragility of its East European glacis. He is unusual among Cold War-era American historians in granting the Soviet leadership a basically rational calculus, and in arguing that the Cuban crisis was resolved on terms more favorable to Moscow than the public narrative admitted.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 15 Quigley
The Soviet Union, peripheral power whose Eurasian land mass and Marxist-Leninist political system anchored one pole of the Cold War.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1145 Quigley
The Bolshevik project was a forced industrialization wrapped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.