Why East Europe Mattered: A New History of the Cold War
Was the Cold War only about the rivalry of the US and the USSR? Did the Soviet Union oppress East European states or did these states wield agency to shape their foreign policies? Who profited from the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe? This episode of the Evolution of Capitalism podcast seeks an answer to these questions with historian Csaba Békés, whose recent book Détente and Emancipation argues that we need to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, centered too much on Moscow and Washington. Instead, he shows why the satellite states of the Stalinist era gradually 'emancipated' themselves into veritable allies of the USSR and played an important role in accelerating the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s.