John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Changes in historical accounts are driven mainly by developments, if not fashions, within the historical profession, by current political concerns, by the availability of new sources of information, and by the way in which the events being explored turned out. Although the first two factors are not to be dismissed, I believe the second two are of greater importance in our current efforts to understand the Cold War. Most obviously, recent years have seen the release of major documents from Russia's archives, and the rise of a new generation of Russian historians to help analyze them. In some cases these documents have at least temporarily settled previous debates and in others have surprised us all--the most obvious example of the latter being the revelation that the Soviets deployed large ground forces armed with tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba in 1962. But although these gifts are certainly welcome, they have been limited in number and quality, and it appears that much of what we would like to know was never written down. Indeed, even if all documents were open (and none had been destroyed), there would still be much to argue about, just as we still argue about the causes of the First World War.
