The Cold War did not create a fundamentally different form of politics or a new official political culture because the Soviet system was already designed for the mobilisation of its population for war. Yet this is not to deny that the Cold War dominated the thinking of the Soviet leadership. As the weaker party in the superpower relationship, struggling to keep up economically and militarily and to gain equal status politically, it was inevitable that the Soviet elite should have been obsessed by the conflict, possibly even more so than its American counterpart. And the need to compete with an economically and ideologically powerful West arguably exacerbated the tensions within the elite that had been present before 1945 - over the balance of investment and consumption, and the relationship between ideology and technocracy. By the early 1950s, it was clear to many in the elite that Stalin’s solution to these problems was not working. But neither Beriia nor Malenkov could secure support for their alternatives, and by 1962 Khrushchev’s solutions - filled with ambiguities and contradictions - appeared to have failed.
The influence of the Cold War on popular attitudes is less easy to ascertain. Nonetheless, it appears that, while Soviet citizens often followed the elite’s view of the world as one divided into two camps, many people were less willing to accept cultural isolation and felt that they deserved rewards for their wartime sacrifices. It was not surprising that when, from the later 1960s, elites themselves started to lose faith in the ability of the Soviet system to compete with the West, they found it even harder to encourage popular sacrifices in the interests of superpower supremacy.
World History
