The other and complementary explanation was the absence of creative destruction in the Soviet economy. It did not have a steady supply of recycled management and labour, capital and space liberated by the decline or outright bankruptcy of less efficient firms, because, in the absence of market competition, old and inefficient firms continued merrily along instead of releasing resources for those newer and more efficient: in the last days of the Soviet Union, it was concurrently producing automobiles of 1950, 60 and 70 technology and design, in plants three decades apart in their degree of automation. Creative destruction is the true secret of capitalism that the KGB never discovered.

With its two birth defects, the Soviet system could still be efficient enough as a war economy in producing so many rifles or so many tanks by fiat, but it was decreasingly efficient in civilian reconstruction as it moved beyond the crudest necessities of food and shelter, and finally went through phases of increasing inefficiency to become actually destructive by the late 1970s. Perfectly good Uzbek cotton which had real value as raw material – it could be sold for hard currency on the world market – was made into shirts so poorly cut and of such ugly colours that not even Soviet consumers would buy them. Hence all the spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting and sewing actually removed value from the raw material, turning virgin cotton into rags fit only for paper-making. The same was true of much of the leather, wool, synthetic fibres, wood, plastics, and of all sorts of other inputs that went into Soviet light industry.

Likewise, steel and cement not reserved for military use that ended up in Soviet building projects were, in effect, lost for several years because the pace of construction was so extra

ordinarily slow. Quite a lot was lost for ever, as unsheltered cement bags solidified and steel rods rusted away.

Above all, by the 1980s Soviet agriculture had become a more costly luxury than even the armed forces. While the Soviet army at least kept its tanks in service for twenty years or so, Soviet state and collective farms ruined many tractors, reapers and combine harvesters of near-Western quality in less than one year, because of the lack of maintenance, or simply because they were left out to rust in the open all winter long. Likewise, truck-loads of fertilizer simply dumped on fields actually reduced their output.

By its final years, the system had become so counter-productive that theft and trafficking could be positively beneficial. Cotton illegally diverted from official channels could be made into useful products by domestic or illegal craft-work. Construction materials stolen from interminable official projects before they were ruined by exposure could allow houses and dachas to be built with illegal or do-it-yourself labour. Petrol stolen from state trucks driving about uselessly (or destructively if carrying Uzbek cotton to ugly-shirt factories) could provide fuel for the errands or excursions of private car owners. And it was with stolen fertilizer and farm tools that the tiny private plots produced so much of the Soviet Union’s food supply. To be sure, illegality was cumulatively demoralizing, and besides it could only rescue a fraction of the resources that the Soviet economic system was ruining each day.

But what destroyed the Soviet Union in the end was not degeneration – there was still a lot of ruination left over for looting when it ended – but rather the attempt to reform the system in what turned out to be its final years. What happened next triumphantly vindicated the Marxist principle that the individual character, personality and will of political leaders cannot affect systemic change, for the reformist leaders had all the right qualities and priorities yet failed utterly in their purposes. When they started to clean up the Soviet system by scraping away at the accumulated dirt, they inadvertently dislodged what had kept everything going – namely that very same accumulated dirt in every form, from the complicit cohesion of conjointly corrupt cadres and the supply of illegally diverted goods and services, to the sedative of abundant, cheap vodka for all (the reformists were distinctly Stalinist in dealing with vodka: they did not impose gradual price increases to discourage demand nor did they launch a long-term anti-alcohol educational campaign – they simply ordered the abrupt closure of vodka distilleries all over the place. The inevitable result was the proportionate expansion of trafficking and illegal distillation, so that samogon replaced vodka to maintain the same level of drunkenness but with the added evils of home-brew contamination and methyl alcohol poisoning). Had somnolent conservatives continued to rule it, the Soviet Union would still be with us today, even if that much more decrepit, just as the sinister buffoonery of Saudi Arabia persists year after year. Instead there was a false dawn of hugely celebrated reformism followed by complete collapse. By contrast, had the promise of Soviet central planning been fulfilled to yield a universal and unprecedented prosperity – an impossibility, even theoretically – the Soviet Union would have been an irresistible model even with the KGB and all the other permanent indignities of subjection to dictatorship, just as Saudi Arabia, for all its grinding oppression, is a land of eager immigration, not emigration.

It was therefore the competition between the processes of market-driven and centrally planned economic systems that decided the outcome of the Cold War, but you would hardly know it from The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, but for a line or two at the end, for its pages are filled with the calculations, lucubrations, declarations and actions of individuals of all sorts, chiefly US Presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George H. W. Bush (with especial attention perhaps to Truman and the new, thoroughly re-evaluated Eisenhower of well-hidden surpassing wisdom, and proportionately less for flash-in-the pan Kennedy), and Secretary Generals of the Communist Party of the USSR from Josef Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev (with especial attention in between to Nikita Khrushchev), but also all manner of other individuals, from John Paul II and Lech Walesa to Ngo Dinh Diem and Anwar Sadat, as well as the likes of Dean Acheson and Anastas Mikoyan.

It is not that Professor Gaddis belongs below stairs, while gentlemen above talk about things, but rather, as he tells us, that his purpose was to write a one-volume history for the fortunate undergraduates he teaches, who apparently relate to the Cold War as distantly as to the War of the Roses (nobody ever finds the Peloponnesian War truly remote) and, given the need for compression, processes are best mediated through personalities. So why should grown-ups be interested in such a book? The author disclaims any original scholarship, any attempt at the phenomenological study of globalization, terrorism, the IT revolution, any contribution to international relations theory (“a field that has troubles enough of its own without my adding to them”), merely expressing the hope that by observing the whole in a brief compass (266 pages of text in not-small type) some new understanding as to the parts might be gained. Only very loosely chronological, composed as a series of short and shorter essays on such themes as alliances and defections, armament and arms control, ideology and diplomacy, always represented through the sayings and deeds of the aforementioned personalities, the book exactly fulfils the author’s hope, though each grown-up reader will find his own novel insights in its pages.

Even though Professor Gaddis covers so much ground, I found only one error in his entire book: “In April, 1956, one of the most successful of [CIA operations] was, quite literally, exposed when the Russians invited reporters to tour a tunnel the Agency had constructed, extending . . . a third of a mile into East Berlin, by which it had intercepted Soviet . . . communications”. Actually, it is now known with a degree of certainty and precision more unique than rare in the historiography of espionage that the tunnel was known to Soviet intelligence more than a year before it came into operation, because, with habitual fecklessness, on October 22, 1953, CIA officers briefed a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) audience (forget about “need to know”) that included the KGB mole George Blake, lately released from North Korean imprisonment (oh well, the film had not come out yet), who duly reported what he learned, so that Moscow was informed of the exact location of the tunnel by February 12, 1954. By the time the line-tapping started in March 1955, the Soviet side was ready with its security measures, complemented by deception to turn the tunnel to its own advantage.

This otherwise trivial episode is worth recalling because one not entirely insignificant aspect of the Cold War was the congenital incapacity of the entire espionage and covert-operations side of the CIA – which most unfortunately persists to this day, and with much greater consequence, because today’s enemies are covert rather than clandestine, and therefore cannot be detected by overhead satellites. Because the United States and the West were so open, there was much less need for espionage on the Soviet side – but they did much of it, and rather well. Because the other side was so closed, the West needed espionage much more, yet did little of it, badly.

Throughout the Cold War, as now still, with only a handful of exceptions, there have been only two kinds of CIA secret operations: the ones that are widely known to have failed – usually because of almost unbelievably crude errors – and the ones that are not yet widely known to have failed. That was true of espionage, of counter-espionage and of political operations as well, except for such things as the financing of Encounter magazine, which could have been, and should have been, done overtly, and which certainly required no secret skills (the “tradecraft” of spy novels).

The strangest aspect of this sustained failure is that it is managerial failure: in the country of “management science”, the CIA was and is no good at recruiting, motivating, directing and sustaining, that is, managing people, so as to generate good information, and have them do useful things. Self-indulgence, explains much: instead of benefiting from a reassuring continuity, agents are abruptly assigned new controllers because the “career management” of the latter comes first; defectors (“ralliers”) are abandoned to their own devices in sparsely furnished suburban apartments until they re-defect or just give up, because CIA officers must first of all attend to their own busy social life, family life, play golf and go fishing with their buddies; when assigned specific tasks – even for years on end – CIA officers do not learn the requisite languages because they must attend to their own busy social life, family life etc, and their superiors very culpably do not impose the choice on them of learning the languages or finding themselves another job in the parking or office-cleaning industries (in both of which the Arabic-less Michael Scheuer might have excelled, instead of failing at his CIA job of finding Osama bin Laden, before writing his grotesque screed on the same).

Even the fragmentary documentation available so far is sufficient to show that the NKVD, later NKGB, later MGB, later KI, later MVD and finally (till the Russian FSB) KGB was effective not only in obtaining and denying secret information, but also in operating agents in the political sphere, both media people and actual politicians. Christopher Andrew, who has done much in other ways as well to extract for scholarship well-documented evidence from the confusions, legends and lies of espionage and such, was the author with Vasili Mitrokhin of the first volume of the eponymous Archive on Europe and the West, which was full of names of journalists and politicians who had said and done what the KGB wanted them to say and do, many of them still alive and up to no good. In Italy, that led to the formation of a parliamentary Mitrokhin commission, to no great consequence, however, because Catholics believe in forgiveness, especially for sins against the despised State rather than the hallowed Church, so that those who dedicated themselves to making a Romania out of Italy have never been called to account. Now there is the second volume of the Mitrokhin Archive, on Latin America, Iran, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, China, Japan, India, other Asian countries, and Africa.

By now there have been many publications by former KGB authors, or written with their collaboration, some discreet or even persisting in deception, others revealing of what the author could reveal, which could never be very much beyond the personal recollection of personally conducted operations because the KGB, unlike you-know-who, never deviated from the golden rule of compartmentalization. The one, huge exception is Mitrokhin, because, until 1984, he had an incomparably wider access to the entire KGB archive while supervising its transfer from the Lubyanka headquarters of sinister fame to new office space, and with astonishingly persistent courage he smuggled out day after day, for some twelve years, both hand-written summaries and verbatim extracts of the papers that most attracted his attention. It is on the basis of this material, set in the wider context of circumstances and events, that this book has been written, to add an unsuspected missing dimension to our understanding of events.

For example, we now know exactly why Indira Gandhi, otherwise not a fool, believed that almost any untoward event around her, from Sikh secessionism to opposition to her own arbitrary ways, was the result of CIA conspiracies: paid KGB agents in her inner circle told her that, often citing newspaper reports planted by the KGB via bribed journalists and editors. In India, too, as in Europe, there were physiological anti-Americans who were willing to side with the Soviet Union purely because it was the enemy of the United States, but there was also, as there still is, the ready corruptibility of a still very poor country in which even small amounts of money can loom very large.