Introduction Excerpt for Our Comrades in Havana
Introduction
Revolutionary Cuba and the Special Mission of Socialist Diplomacy
The reasons behind Cuba’s turn to the Soviet Union in 1960 have provoked considerable debate among students of the Caribbean nation’s most recent history.1 The complex ideological underpinnings of the Cuban revolution, which mixed nationalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-capitalism and repudiated colonial domination, domestic inequality, and oppression, prompted Cuba to see itself as the “new Mecca of revolution in the Americas and as a more faithful defender of international revolutionary interests than the Soviet Union” and its Eastern European allies.2 Cuba’s foreign revolutionary exploits in the 1960s and the 1970s further preoccupied the students of Cuban politics. The notions of internationalism and international solidarity and the growing rift between China and the Soviet Union gave Cuba a new opportunity to experiment with its socialist model at home and in its relations with other socialist countries.3 Consequently, Havana promoted internationalism as a national ideology, projecting influence on a scale unprecedented in its history as it attempted to make the “world safe for revolution.”4 The Soviets grew increasingly unimpressed with Fidel Castro’s experimentation with classical Communism in the mid-1960s, which, in their eyes, would jeopardize the Cuban economy. Later, Castro claimed that the erroneous attempt to develop pure communism, which skipped the preparatory socialist stage, was justified by the need to obtain additional external support for the island’s development.5
The voluminous scholarship on Cuba’s most recent history concedes that the Cuban revolution was not imported from or imposed by the Soviet Union, but it also admits that the radical Cuban path to socialism would have been impossible without Moscow’s moral, economic, and military support.6 Throughout the 1970s, the Soviet Union built hegemony over Cuba on the basis of consensus rather than mere imposition of power, and it shared the burden of the island’s economic development with the European members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA).7 Still, as Richard Fagen noted in the late 1970s, despite the important economic and technical support provided by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, “the human resources, the key decisions, the style, the outcomes—and the errors—have been predominantly Cuban.”8 Taking cues from Fagen’s observation, this book traces the problems encountered by the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies, and Cuba in the course of their political, economic, military, and intelligence relations spanning three decades. Thus, the narrative focuses on the myriad hard power exchanges between Havana and the Soviet bloc. This does not mean the soft power elements of diplomacy, such as educational, scientific, and cultural agreements, were unimportant in the context of Cuba-East relations, but in their multiplicity they deserve special attention. They may form the basis of another study altogether.9
Although the secondary literature abounds with accounts examining Cuba’s political and economic relations with Washington and Moscow throughout the Cold War, Havana’s relations with the Eastern European states received considerably less attention. During the Cold War, Cuba’s relations with Eastern Europe have always been overshadowed by the ties between Havana and Moscow and thus deemed unimportant or functional only in the larger Cuba-East context. Despite our access to primary materials from the formerly hermetically sealed Eastern European archives and the drive to decentralize the Cold War narrative, this multifaceted topic seems to have been overlooked by the academic community. The several scholarly articles10 that stand out focus only on the economic aspects. This book not only greatly expands on these articles but also endeavors to present a more comprehensive overview of Havana’s economic, political, military, and intelligence relations with the Soviet Union’s junior partners spanning the entire Cold War period from the victory of the Cuban revolution until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Numerous articles and books published during and after the Cold War include casual and contextual references to Cuban–Eastern European ties in the shadow of Cuban-Soviet relations. In general, these books, too, tend to discuss Eastern European relations with Cuba in the Soviet shadow, paying little or no attention to individual Eastern European states’ political and economic interests, subjecting their relations to the doctrine of limited sovereignty.11 Although Eastern Europe does appear in Jorge I. Domínguez’s seminal study of Cuba’s foreign policy To Make a World Safe for Revolution and in Piero Gleijeses’s Conflicting Missions,12 it is never afforded more than a casual mention in the context of Cuban-Soviet relations. Mervyn Bain, for his part, has written extensively on Cuban-Soviet relations from a broad historical perspective. For example, his Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991 traced the momentous foreign policy changes under Mikhail Gorbachev in Kremlin relations with Cuba, and more recently, he followed the ties between Moscow and Havana from 1917 to the present. In both cases, however, the Eastern European dynamics are a mere contextual sideshow.13
Other notable examples treating Cuban-Soviet relations that only touch on Cuban–Eastern European ties are W. Raymond Duncan’s The Soviet Union and Cuba: Interests and Influence and his “Cuba’s Impact on Soviet Behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Brezhnev to Gorbachev” and Yuri Pavlov’s Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 1959–1991. Those accounts not only hint at the existing gap in literature but also suggest the scholarly potential of the topic. They and other such general accounts perceive Cuban-Eastern European ties as replicating those of the Soviet Union without paying due regard to the tacit pursuit of those states’ economic interests balanced against Cuba’s demands and Moscow’s overarching political objectives. Furthermore, although the authoritative collective volume edited by Roger Kanet on Soviet and Eastern European relations with the Third World saw Cuba as an equal partner to the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, Cuban–Eastern European relations again fell outside its focus and objectives.14
Using the Soviet-Cuban economic, political, military, and intelligence ties as a basis for analysis, this book aims to break new ground by more prominently factoring in Havana’s relations with Moscow’s Eastern European allies. The book uses an extensive range of material obtained from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, MINREX) and party, security, and foreign ministry archives of the Soviet Union’s five core Eastern European allies—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Poland—and Albania, Romania, and Yugoslavia.15 By examining Havana’s interactions with the Eastern Europeans, this account sheds new light on Cuba’s place and role in the Cold War through the original interpretative lenses of socialist states’ diplomatic personnel. The book contributes to the ongoing decentralization of the Cold War narrative by taking fuller account of actors’ voices previously considered unimportant in East-West rivalry. Its framework of analysis is applied chronologically, starting with the initial stages of Soviet bloc relations with Cuba, from the arrival of the revolutionary army in January 1959 until the disbanding of the Soviet Union and the CMEA in 1991.
This account informs contemporary scholarly debates on the so-called Latin American Cold War and East-South relations that broadly fit the globalized Cold War narrative and seeks to go beyond the bifocal Moscow-Washington lens. Regarding the former scholarly focus, although study of the Cold War across Latin America initially trailed study of the East-West conflict in Africa and South East Asia,16 several studies helped Latin America get out of the “eagle’s shadow” after finding local and regional themes that escaped the superpowers, vesting more agency in regional actors.17 This body of literature explored how regional governments, groups, companies, organizations, and individuals promoted their interests and perspectives, centering the analyses on the grassroots, or “where conflicts actually brewed.”18 This led to views of Latin America’s Cold War as a multidimensional struggle “involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere.”19 Thus, although Odd Arne Westad correctly observed that the Cold War in Latin America was more internal than external,20 the narrative developed in this book suggests that one of Cuba’s lasting legacies was its ability to help Latin America’s Cold War transcend the region’s borders by its constant advocacy for the continent within the bloc. For its part, the East, as we see in the following chapters, trusted, respected, and sought Havana’s opinion and experience on regional matters, particularly after the tumultuous 1960s, from which Cuba emerged stronger in the bloc’s eyes, showing its ability to learn from its past mistakes. In the process, Havana broadened the Cold War theater, helping link Eastern European socialists with the Latin American Left.
The other major scholarly debate the book aims to contribute to is the growing East-South literature, which David Engerman once aptly called “the Second World’s Third World.”21 In the past few years, numerous noteworthy studies offered sweeping syntheses detailing economic, political, and intelligence relations between the Soviet bloc and the Third World, or the so-called Global South.22 As analytically penetrating as those studies are, however, they suffer from the same inherent limitation—namely, trying to build compelling arguments based on temporally and spatially fragmented cases. Such broad efforts push the boundaries of a nascent field of study by posing novel questions and hypotheses, but ultimately, it is up to the well-tried and traditional longue durée approach offered by histoire événementielle, which provides the fundamental event-laden narrative as a major building block in re-creating the intricacies of our most recent but not yet fully unveiled past. Eastern European archives, with their abundance of newly accessible materials that allow us to dive deeply into a region and a country far, far away, enrich our vistas with the original small-state optics but also, in their plurality, let us attain a more saturated and fact-rich narrative. This methodological premise underpins this book, which offers a fine-grain view into Eastern European relations with Cuba. Importantly, Eastern European diplomatic reports also present candid vignettes into Havana-Moscow relations and offer views of Cuba’s global reach, thus weaving an intricate interpretative metanarrative, a cross-view reportage diplomatique, amalgamating the insights of diplomats of various levels and countries across three decades.
Unlike many East-South debates that aim to philosophically recast the Third World’s socialist transformations in lofty civilizational terms, this book takes the opposite route by focusing on the mundane, day-to-day, operational aspects of this would-be transformation, documenting the ups and downs in the relations between those directly involved in presenting the change and those tasked with implementing it. Using a wide range of newly available Eastern European archives, this book reconstructs the thinking of numerous Eastern European diplomats and specialists in their dealings with Cuba over these three decades. The new material demonstrates the nuanced tactics and strategies the bloc states employed to help Cuba and highlights their disagreement with Cuba’s obstinacy and hard-pressed approach in pursuing its domestic, foreign, and trade relations. This contradiction might seem entirely theoretical at first, but on second reading, its practical dimensions capture the essence of Cuba-East relations caught between the different interpretations of the priorities ruling the socialist bloc’s support for Cuba. For Havana, much as for Moscow until the mid-1980s, objective economic laws and principles had less influence than Marxist ideology, socialist solidarity, and Cold War geopolitics. The calculus was far more complex to the Eastern European states, caught between their national interest and internationalist obligations. They had to contend with their own economic deficits by conceding to Moscow’s overreach and Cuba’s pushy tactics.
The literature abounds with high politics discussions, but it seldom gives us an idea of the points of view of those directly involved in dealing with Cuba’s economic issues. Those diplomats, in their tasks to meet Cuba’s economic demands, Moscow’s political objectives, and the abilities of their own countries, painted a picture mixing faith and promise with criticism and unmitigated disappointment. As heterogeneous as Cuba’s socialist partners from Berlin to Sofia were, they were unanimous in their advice, numerous bilateral and multilateral meetings, trade preferences, and subsidies in supporting the Cuban revolution. The intertwining of economic realities with high politics caused continual friction between Cuba and its Eastern European trading partners. In their dealings, the Cubans not only capitalized on their limited economic potential but also closely followed and even pushed to the extreme José Martí’s understanding that economics cannot be separated from politics.23 This formula repeatedly tested the East’s resolve to materially support the Cuban revolution as Havana sought to extract the highest benefit from its trade with the East.
The detailed chronological account of Cuba’s postrevolutionary development based on the assessment of dozens of Eastern European diplomats in Cuba shows that they, while playing traditional diplomatic roles as intermediaries between Havana and the states they represented, were entrusted with a broader range of responsibilities. They had to “educate” the local leadership in the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism, steer Cuba’s leaders into the “correct” path of development, help them eradicate “erroneous” ideas of economic development, and show them the validity of socialist “morals and ideology.” In this way, the East’s diplomats were fulfilling the primary representational task as described by Georgy Chicherin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, on Lenin’s advice in August 1923:
As far as the content of our plenipotentiaries’ informational work is concerned, it must go far beyond the simple transmission of daily events. It must comprehensively analyze the historical forces at work with a precise specification of every moment’s political and economic factors. It must expose and fix the forces standing behind the curtains that influence political events, analyze the economic factors of political life, the role of the capitalist leaders working in every country, the parliamentary leaders, representing groups, and their influence on political events. The information of the plenipotentiaries must enable the further course of political developments to be foreseen. The plenipotentiaries must command the only weapon of Marxist methods and use them when meeting the surrounding reality.24
This book also argues that, because of the Eastern European states’ smaller size, equal dependence on the Soviet Union, and animosity toward the United States, those countries’ diplomats were the ideal candidates to act as educators. Their usual role required tact to avoid offending the sensitive local leadership, whereas the Soviets were seen by the Cubans as superiors, and their advice was treated as an instruction rather than a comradely suggestion. This “special mission” of the Eastern European envoys challenges previous assumptions that the Eastern European contribution to the socialist march into the Third World was an insignificant sideshow.25 Although the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria did not have the economic resources of the Soviet Union, they still managed to carve a niche for themselves. They explicitly volunteered to educate their Cuban comrades, which went beyond their official task of representing and protecting their nations’ interests. As this book details, the Eastern European diplomats’ work in Cuba was far from easy. They had to deal with the idiosyncrasies of Cuban comrades, whose education in Marxist praxis taxed their abilities as socialist diplomats.
As a result, this account brings to the fore foreign policy practitioners. Still, focus on high politics in the secondary literature seldom gives us an idea of the arduous tasks undertaken by those directly involved in dealing with Cuba’s ever-growing problems. In Havana, as in every other far-flung outpost, Eastern European diplomats’ primary mission was to provide their superiors with impartial, direct assessments to help them shape foreign economic policy in line with the ideological, political, and security objectives of the socialist commonwealth as prescribed by Moscow. The documents from Eastern European archives reveal, however, that they had to contend with additional challenges when dealing with their Cuban comrades. Although these challenges existed across the Third World during the Cold War, they were more present in the Island of Freedom, as Cuba was known in the Soviet Union. In their daily routines, bloc diplomats had to carefully balance, on one side, impulsive and ambitious Cuban officials, led by Castro, who focused impatiently on Cuba’s economic matters and pressed Eastern envoys with never-ending demands. On the other side was Moscow, which paid much closer attention to political and ideological issues and looked for ways to defuse Cuba-bloc economic tensions to benefit the socialist commonwealth’s political imperatives. In addition, the diplomats had their own countries’ interests to keep in mind, with their respective interests and limitations. Thus, educating their comrades in Cuba, as they sought to do across the Third World, in Africa and Asia, was the way to go. But as this book shows, this didactic exercise by the end of the 1980s probably was not the one the Soviet diplomats and their Eastern European counterparts imagined or planned and catered for in the early 1960s.
It would be an oversimplification of the deep and multifaceted relations Cuba and the Soviet bloc developed throughout the Cold War to zero in on the latter’s desire to educate the former. As the story unfolded, the Cuban comrades took their revolutionary visions and project far beyond the confines of their island. In the myriad conversations, meetings, and interviews traced in this book, with its narrative based on primary material, we see that Cuba’s interests, plans, and aspirations often transcended Moscow’s horizons, pushing the bloc more deeply into the Western Hemisphere, venturing into a region previously considered taboo in Kremlin planners’ eyes. Thus, as this story shows, as decades rolled on and as Havana’s internationalist creed materialized across the globe, the Cubans, once mentees, became mentors in places like Africa and Latin America.
Moreover, by providing an analysis that makes full use of firsthand Eastern European accounts of their dealings with Havana, this book reveals the complex, judgmental, and crucial views that helped shape Eastern European and, ultimately, Soviet policies toward Cuba during the Cold War. It shows how Eastern European diplomats uniformly refrained from offering simple explanations of the complex phenomena on the ground in their assessments. The experiences presented in this book of Eastern European diplomats in Cuba may well resonate with representatives of minor powers who contend with competing centers of power in today’s multipolar world. Thus, this account also contributes to another important debate in international history concerning small states’ ability to pull larger ones into engagements they would have otherwise not joined on their own, what Winston Churchill once referred to as the “tyranny of the weak.”26
Building on those converging strands of scholarship and drawing on hundreds of Soviet bloc reports from the island, this book sees Cuba at a crossroads of ideas, ideologies, trade, and policies in East-West, North-South, East-South, and South-South geopolitical axes. Before the eyes of the East’s diplomats, Cuba morphed from an exotic, unknown variable in the calculus of global politics into a beacon of hope for the socialist project in the Western Hemisphere in the early 1960s. Moscow’s curiosity and expectation whetted the appetites of the leader of the socialist world and its Eastern European junior partners. However, it was Cuba’s location that justified Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s argument that the “Socialist commonwealth” was not confined by geography but was instead bound by invisible ideological ties.27 Thus, Moscow and its Eastern European allies found it beneficial for the socialist idea to embark on a long journey into Cuba’s unknown. But after the surprising and seemingly overnight dissolution of the political superstructure, the basis of socialist multilateralism, Cuba’s Eastern backers abruptly withdrew from Cuba, ending their bittersweet camaraderie and allowing the leaders of the revolution to proclaim the island as the last refuge of socialism.
The Eastern European diplomats’ reports illuminate the complex history of the island, from the ouster of its strongman, Fulgencio Batista, to the dissolution of the Soviet bloc that led to the catastrophic crisis that came to be known as the Special Period in Time of Peace. The declassified documents reveal that, as Cuba’s relations with its Eastern European partners deepened, Moscow’s junior partners showed marked unity in their attitudes toward their ambitious Cuban counterparts. Moscow’s essentially political and ideologically motivated criticism of Castro in the 1960s and the 1980s resonated with Eastern European assessments. This unity was also reflected in the Eastern European states’ limited abilities to provide the economic assistance the Cubans pleaded for, which prompted them, after tense deliberations with Havana and Moscow, to go beyond the purely pragmatic considerations introduced by Moscow’s consistent search for bloc cohesion and unity, and certain bloc members openly voiced their disagreement with Havana’s trading demands and tactics. In this sense, in their efforts to reconcile Cuba’s economic demands, Moscow’s political objectives, and their own economic realities, Eastern European reporting bore witness to the uneasy compromises their respective countries had to contend with in helping their Cuban comrades, seldom meeting the expectations of the Cubans and further complicating their diplomatic work in the United States’ backyard.
Another important set of primary material consulted for this book is official memoranda of conversations between Cuban leaders and their Eastern European counterparts. These transcripts provide us with a look from above, complementing the diplomats’ analyses on the ground. Cuban Foreign Ministry papers are also featured in the research, although less so because of the uneven archival access that impedes a thorough overview. Additionally, the narrative benefits from numerous US State Department and Central Intelligence Agency reports. The use of US primary documents in a story on Cuba-East relations is valuable in showing that Soviet and Eastern European economic, political, security, and military relations with the Caribbean nation did not exist in a vacuum—the bloc’s actions were closely watched, analyzed, and put in policy perspective by Washington and Langley. Crucially, the US reports augment the overall picture, often confirming the observations made by their socialist counterparts.
Notes
1. See Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 34–100; and Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations, 49–62.
2. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 70. See also Halperin, “Peking and the Latin American Communists,” 125; Valdés, Ideological Roots; Kapcia, “Ideology and the Cuban Revolution,” 83–105; Mujal-León and Busby, “Much Ado about Something?,” 494; and Chomsky et al., The Cuba Reader, 333.
3. Moreno and Lardas, “Integrating International Revolution and Détente,” 46; Hatzky, “Cuba’s Concept of Internationalist Solidarity,” 143–174; Valdés and Peña, “Cuba y Angola,” 601–68; Eckstein, “Structural and Ideological Bases of Cuba’s Overseas Programs,” 95–121.
4. Domínguez, “Cuban Foreign Policy and the International System,” 185; George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 274; Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions. For more recent treatment of the Cuban internationalism, see Randall, Exporting Revolution.
5. See Duncan, “National Communism in the Global Setting,” 161–162; Yaffe, “Che Guevara’s Enduring Legacy,” 49; and Szulc, “Fidelismo,” 89.
6. Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 70, Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 63–64; Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution, 138.
7. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 78.
8. Fagen, “Cuba and the Soviet Union,” 78.
9. Soft power diplomacy during the Cold War received scholarly interest investigating both Soviet bloc and Western approaches. See, among others, Gould-Davies, “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy”; Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order; and Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War. For more recent work, see Burton, “Decolonization, the Cold War”; Domdey et al., AnOther Africa?; and Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin.
10. Pérez-López, “Swimming against the Tide,” 81–139; Meléndez Bachs, “Relaciones económicas de Cuba con el CAME” [Cuba’s economic relations with CMEA, 95–96; Bekarevich, “Cuba y el CAME” [Cuba and CAME]; Blasier, “COMECON in Cuban Development,” 225–256. For more recent work, see Richter, “A Complicated Political-Ideological Situation”; Koura and Waters, “‘Africanos’ versus ‘Africanitos’”; and Yordanov, “Bittersweet Solidarity” and “The Long Misunderstanding.”
11. Gati, The International Politics of Eastern Europe.
12. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution; Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions.
13. Bain, Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991; Bain, Moscow and Havana 1917 to the Present. Similarly, Mesa-Lago’s “The Economic Effects on Cuba,” and Radu’s Collapse or Decay? provide important accounts in comparing Cuba and Eastern European reforms in the late 1980s but offer little insight into the transatlantic socialist debates guiding their diverging approaches.
14. Kanet, The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Third World. For a similar approach, see Radu, Eastern Europe and the Third World.
15. All translations in the book are my own.
16. On the Cold War in Africa, see Shubin, The Hot “Cold War”; Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War; Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa; Byrne, Mecca of Revolution; Muehlenbeck, Czechoslovakia in Africa; Yordanov, The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa; Telepneva, Cold War Liberation; and Iandolo, Arrested Development. Numerous studies trace the Cold War in Asia and the Middle East, including Hasegawa, The Cold War in East Asia; Hershberg, Marigold; Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries; Hiro, Cold War in the Islamic World; and Lüthi, Cold Wars. On Sino-Soviet competition, see Westad, Brothers in Arms; Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens; and Friedman, Shadow Cold War.
17. Among the notable examples offering novel interpretations of Latin America’s Cold War are Garrard-Burnett et al., Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow; Brands, Latin America’s Cold War; Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War; Stites Mor, Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity; Darnton, Rivalry and Alliance Politics; Field et al., Latin America and the Global Cold War; Williams, “Revisiting the Cold War in Latin America”; and Pettinà, “The Shadows of Cold War over Latin America.” For Soviet bloc–Latin America relations, see Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin; and Zourek, Checoslovaquia y el Cono Sur 1945–1989.
18. Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold, back cover; and see Garrard-Burnett et al., Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow.
19. Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, back cover.
20. Westad, The Cold War, 335.
21. See his influential eponymous paper.
22. See Calori et al., Between East and South; Mark et al., Alternative Globalizations; Burton et al., Navigating Socialist Encounters; and Mark and Betts, Socialism Goes Global. See three special journal volumes dedicated to East-South relations: Dragostinova and Fidelis, “Introduction”; Richterova and Telepneva, “An Introduction: The Secret Struggle for the Global South—Espionage, Military Assistance and State Security in the Cold War”; and Verhoeven, “What Is to Be Done?” On socialist building in the Third World, see Verhoeven, Marx and Lenin in Africa and Asia; and Friedman, Ripe for Revolution. On Warsaw Pact states’ involvement, see Muehlenbeck and Telepneva, Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World.
23. See Che Guevara’s speech at the Organization of American States conference at Punta del Este on August 8, 1961, in Guevara, Che Guevara Reader, 246.
24. Cited in Joachim Naumann’s [head of Latin America department at GDR’s foreign ministry] circular letter from January 4, 1977, PAAA, MfAA, ZR 1855/81, pp. 4–5.
25. Korbonski, “Eastern Europe and the Third World.”
26. Laron, “Stepping Back from the Third World,” 99. In addition to Laron, other studies investigating dominant-subordinate state dynamics during the Cold War from historic and theoretical perspectives are Westad, Global Cold War; Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall; Morrow, “Alliances and Asymmetry”; Johnson, “The Subordinate States and Their Strategy”; Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers; Olson and Zeckhauser, “An Economic Theory of Alliances”; and Baker Fox, The Power of Small States.
27. See memorandum of conversation (memcon), Charles E. Bohlen–Andrei Gromyko, October 7, 1968, NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 1511.