Peeter Kaldre: The last summer of peace?
Say what you will about the Soviet Communist Party leaders — they were no saints, but they weren't suicidal and they fully understood the catastrophic consequences of war. Their successor, Vladimir Putin, lacks such restraints, writes Peeter Kaldre.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently warned that this past summer may have been the last time of peace. In Foreign Affairs, Graham Allison and James A. Winnefeld, Jr. ask whether the longest period of peace in world history since the Roman Empire is coming to an end. They are referring to the fact that no major wars have occurred between great powers in the 80 years since 1945.
Such questions are prompted by the reality that war is already underway in Europe — Russia's war against Ukraine — which could escalate into an attack on a NATO or European Union member state. Nor can China's ambitions toward Taiwan be ignored, as they could lead to a conflict between China and the United States.
The Helsinki effect
ETV recently aired the documentary "The Helsinki Effect," a joint production by filmmakers from Finland, Norway and Germany. The film tells the story of how 600 diplomats from Europe, the United States and Canada spent three years preparing one of the Cold War's most significant documents: the Helsinki Final Act, adopted in 1975 at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The principles approved in Helsinki laid the groundwork for several major developments in the years to come.
The film vividly illustrates the constant refrain of then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev: We need a document! Moscow's main fear was that someone might try to alter the state borders established in Europe after the war. One of the Kremlin's key concerns was that the Western powers were planning a scenario in which West Germany would somehow absorb the German Democratic Republic. That is why Brezhnev was so intent on securing a document that guaranteed Europe's borders would remain unchanged. In the end, he got his document, but it included one notable nuance: borders could be changed, provided it was done "peacefully and by mutual agreement."
This issue of inviolable borders stirred up strong criticism from those who felt that the clause effectively consigned Eastern Europe to perpetual Soviet control. But time proved otherwise: history swept those fears into the dustbin and today's European borders look very different from those of 1975.
One of the most important "baskets" in the Helsinki documents was the one concerning freedom of speech and human rights. Moscow was adamantly opposed to what it saw as the West's attempt to interfere in its "internal affairs," but in the end, it had no choice but to agree — after all, Brezhnev needed that document.
The human rights section of the Helsinki Final Act sparked a wave of freedom movements, the most significant of which was Poland's Solidarity. Ultimately, it was that very "basket" of human rights that helped bring about the collapse of the entire so-called socialist bloc.
Cold War nostalgia
It's still worth remembering that in 1975, the Cold War was ongoing — and as the creators of "The Helsinki Effect" nostalgically point out, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we returned to long, tedious negotiations like those that gave birth to the Helsinki Final Act. All of that is preferable to the hot phase of war.
No one denies that the Cold War was an extremely dangerous time for the world. Both sides of the Iron Curtain lived in fear of a nuclear attack. The world came perilously close to such a catastrophe more than once. Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 or the Berlin Crisis of 1961, which reached its peak when Soviet and American tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie — an episode that eventually led to the construction of the Berlin Wall. In 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov single-handedly prevented a nuclear war when his computer system falsely reported the launch of five ballistic missiles from the United States. Petrov had the clarity of mind not to report the incident to his superiors, which would have triggered a retaliatory strike. It was later confirmed that the alert had been a technical malfunction.
In the early 1980s, Europe faced the intermediate-range missile crisis, when the Soviet Union deployed SS-20 missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The U.S. responded by stationing Pershing missiles and cruise missiles in West Germany and the United Kingdom. Eventually, in 1987, both sides reached an agreement to ban short- and intermediate-range missiles.
Of course, both the Soviet Union and the United States acted unilaterally in their respective "backyards" during the Cold War. The Soviet Union crushed uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The United States, for its part, launched an invasion of Grenada in 1983 and of Panama in 1989. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was a different matter altogether and brought relations to a deep freeze.
But a full-scale war between the great powers was successfully avoided — primarily thanks to nuclear deterrence. And for all their faults, the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party were not suicidal; they fully grasped the catastrophic consequences of war.
Their successor, Vladimir Putin, lacks such restraints. It was he who effectively tore up the Helsinki "document" that Brezhnev had worked so hard to secure — the one affirming the inviolability of European borders — by annexing Crimea in 2014, after already redrawing Georgia's borders in 2008. It is precisely because of Putin that Boris Pistorius is now warning that the summer of 2025 could be the last peaceful one.
It may well be that one day, people will look back on the Cold War with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia as a time when war was widely discussed but the worst was always avoided.
--
Editor: Marcus Turovski
