Soviet and American identities

As the preceding paragraph indicates, identities are like stereotypes in being over-generalizations. With this in mind, I think it is fair to say that characteristics of the American identity during the Cold War included democracy; individualism and voluntarism as contrasted to strong direction - let alone compulsion - from the government; opposition to concentrated power, especially when wielded by the government; the belief in a supreme being that supplies meaning to life; and a faith that this model or "way of life" can, should, and eventually will be adopted by others as well. To say that the United States saw its model as potentially universal is not to say that it was viewed by Americans as yet widely shared. Quite the contrary: the idea of American exceptionalism is not merely an academic construct but has deep roots in American society. The United States was founded to be different from the rest of the world (meaning Europe), and it would or at least could remain uncorrupted. As Thomas Paine explained, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."11 Much of this can be traced back to the fact that the thirteen colonies were dominated by a middle-class fragment which, as Louis Hartz argued, meant that unlike Europe the United States never had a bourgeois revolution or a strong socialist movement, and this in turn helps explain why the United States feared and failed to understand revolutions and radicalism abroad.12

The Soviet identity also held out its system as one that would eventually spread throughout the world, but its content was very different in being built around the proletariat, the centrality of class conflict, and the transformation of individuals and societies. As Stephen Kotkinputs it: "From its inception, the Soviet Union had claimed to be an experiment in socialism, a superior alternative to capitalism, for the entire world. If socialism was not superior to capitalism, its existence could not be justified."13

An additional aspect of Soviet identity, one about which Soviet leaders were ambivalent, came from interaction with the United States. This is the Soviet Union as a superpower, equal in status and rights to its rival. The ambivalence stemmed from the fact that at least some Soviets associated being a great power with behaving like a "normal" state - i. e., seeking narrow advantage and exploiting others rather than behaving in accord with socialist principles. But as Soviet power grew and a global reach became possible, the sense ofthe Soviet Union as being an equal of the United States became much more important. It increasingly rankled Soviet leaders that the United States consistently upheld a double standard and denied them the right to do things that the United States did routinely - for example, intervene in the Third World, establish bases all over, and play a central role in the Middle East. The Soviets then bent their efforts less to restricting American activities than to establishing the right for them to behave in the same way. Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues placed great store in the Basic Principles Agreement of 1972 because it seemed to ratify their equality (Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not take the agreement seriously and signed it just to humor the Soviets); detente broke down in part because of disagreements over whether the Soviets could emulate American behavior in the Third World. Status as well as specific privileges were involved. As Kissinger put it in a memo to prepare Nixon for a possible meeting with Aleksei Kosygin: "It has always been one of the paradoxes of Bolshevik behavior that their leaders have yearned to be treated as equals by the people they consider doomed. "14