From A Brief History of the Cold War. John Hughes. 2019. Kindle online sample. Section 1.

From introduction:
The Cold War was an undeclared war, fought silently and carefully between ideological opponents armed with the most fearsome weapons mankind has ever seen.
Hughes-Wilson takes a cool look at this war, from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR thereafter.
HE EXAMINES THE SUSPICION AND PARANOIA -- ON BOTH SIDES -- OF THE GREATEST STAND-OFF IN HISTORY.
Written by one of Britain's leading, popular, military historians, this book makes accessible for the first time one of the key periods to shape our world.
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From book sample:
As the Cold War fades and memory gradually turns into history, what was at one time taken for granted – what was even a way of life for many – becomes a curiosity to others, and particularly to those born after 1980.
For those who lived through the Cold War THE INVISIBLE IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST BECAME THE CONSTANT BACKGROUND TO THEIR LIVES, like some disagreeable wallpaper.
Most ordinary folk managed to avoid thinking about it as they went about the everyday realities of their day-to-day existence: going to work, raising their families, running their homes.
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Occasionally some crisis would erupt and intrude into the newspapers or news bulletins to make people think, before fading away.
Very occasionally a real crisis would explode into the headlines to threaten their very existence.
Frightened people would then become aware nuclear Armageddon and the death of everything they held dear really was only a heartbeat away.
AT TIMES LIKE THE CUBAN MISSILE OR BERLIN CRISES, THE WORLD HELD ITS BREATH.
The threat of a nuclear shooting war was always out there, somewhere.
For those who actually fought the Cold War it meant living with a constant state of war.
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Like George Orwell’s perceptive comment in Nineteen Eighty-Four – ‘war is peace’ – that is exactly what the Cold War became.
NUCLEAR BOMBER CREWS WERE ON WARTIME ALERT, and bombers and tanks stood at readiness, for decades.
Aggressive submarines roamed the sea lanes of the world and generations of young men prepared their guns and missiles for the battle that could come at any moment.
For the intelligence collectors the Cold War was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
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To the combatants on both sides the Cold War was a constant – if usually bloodless – battle.
For these warriors-in-waiting the Cold War meant a state of war became a fact of life.
THE COLD WAR DID NOT ONLY DEFORM LIVES, IT DEFORMED WHOLE SOCIETIES, AS WELL AS COSTING A FORTUNE.
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The Cold War started much earlier than most people realize.
As far as communist Russia was concerned it really began on 25 October 1917, the day the Bolsheviks mounted their coup at St Petersburg and seized power in Russia, long before Churchill made his famous ‘Iron Curtain across Europe’ speech in 1946.
TO SAY THE BOLSHEVIKS WERE SURPRISED BY THEIR NEW-FOUND ELEVATION TO SUPREME POWER IN RUSSIA IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT.
Reared on theorizing, arguing and dreaming of the wondrous day of the Revolution yet to come, this tiny handful of fanatical revolutionaries were astonished to find themselves suddenly in charge of a huge empire spanning eleven time zones.
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Not everyone shared the Bolsheviks’ delight.
From the very start the ‘Red’ conspirators found themselves surrounded by hostile forces both within and without their ruined and fragmented nation. It was a challenge to which they rose without hesitation.
For these professional revolutionaries, raised on that HALF-BAKED MIXTURE OF HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY, DICKENSIAN SOCIAL OBSERVATION AND DATED MID-VICTORIAN ECONOMIC THEORY WE KNOW AS MARXISM, this elemental struggle against the ‘dark forces of imperialism and capitalism’ was their very life.
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The Bolsheviks not only expected trouble with foreign governments; as good Communists, they positively encouraged it.
The reason was simple: as lifelong students of Marx and Engels, Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries were class warriors to their very core.
They therefore ‘knew’ that foreign governments would automatically oppose their new regime, because every foreign government was dominated by the ruling class, the bourgeoisie.
REVOLUTIONARY MARXISTS EVERYWHERE UNDERSTOOD THEY WERE ENGAGED IN A WAR BETWEEN THE CLASSES, FROM WHATEVER COUNTRY.
The bourgeoisie was their class enemy at home and abroad.
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The result was, on the day they seized power, Lenin and his Bolsheviks automatically declared a de facto ideological war on the imperialist and capitalist ‘bourgeois scum’ who ran every foreign government.
To them, this class conflict was pre-ordained and inevitable, making any deed against the bourgeoisie permissible in the sacred name of the Revolution. Spreading the Revolution to the ‘oppressed peasants and workers of all lands’ justified any action on their part, however immoral.
Anyway, Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks argued, morality and ‘NORMAL DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS’ WITH FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS DOMINATED BY THEIR HATED ‘CLASS ENEMIES’ WAS A BOURGEOIS CONCEPT.
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The Party played by different rules.
For example, the BOLSHEVIKS DEALT WITH AN ATTEMPTED BRITISH BANKING COUP to buy up all the Russian banks and their assets in the confusion of the Revolution by the simple expedient of nationalizing the banks and all their assets without compensation.
The British were stunned at this simple act of robbery – or ‘expropriation for the good of the Russian people’, as the Bolsheviks called it – but there was very little they could do about it.
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The British fought back as only they knew how.
The British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) supported and mounted an undercover sabotage network among the Bolsheviks, especially the Navy, from early 1918 onwards.
Russians were well bribed with British gold to report on their Party overlords’ plans, to flood coal mines and scuttle ships to prevent them leaving port.
ANY WORTHWHILE CENTER OF OPPOSITION TO THE BOLSHEVIK USURPERS WAS SUPPORTED AND ENCOURAGED BY THE BRITISH: ANYTHING TO BRING THE REDS DOWN.
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At the heart of this secret anti-Bolshevik crusade was a Captain Cromie, the naval attaché in Petrograd, armed with a fighting fund of £1,000,000 in gold coins and clear orders from Manfield Cumming, the original ‘C’ of British intelligence, to destabilize the Reds’ revolution by any means.
On 1 July 1918, A BRITISH SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCE RAIDED THE HOUSE IN EKATERINBURG BEING USED AS A PRISON TO HOUSE THE IMPERIAL FAMILY IN AN ATTEMPT TO RESCUE THE CZAR.
The plot failed and only one daughter, Tatiana, was spirited away to England.
A vengeful Lenin ordered his Baltic Praetorian Guards to ‘dispose’ of the original guard force and then, on 25 July, to kill the Czar and all his family.
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The British struck back in this undercover war.
Their Consul in Moscow was Robert Bruce Lockhart, in reality an undercover intelligence officer of the British Secret Service (MI6/SIS).
He was ordered by London to raise the stakes.
Helped by an adventurous spy called Sidney Reilly, code-named ‘ST 1’ by MI6, the British now backed a plot to kill Lenin.
On 31 August 1918, just a month after the murder of the Czar, A WOMAN CALLED DORA KAPLAN, A MEMBER OF THE SOCIALIST RESISTANCE TO THE BOLSHEVIKS, FIRED TWO SHOTS AT LENIN, HITTING HIM IN THE LUNG AND NECK.
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In retaliation, a few hours later, Bolshevik guards burst into the British Embassy in Petrograd.
CROMIE RESISTED AND SHOT THREE OF THE INVADING REDS BEFORE BEING GUNNED DOWN AND KILLED.
The Bolsheviks rifled the Embassy looking for evidence of British Secret Service plots.
The British government protested, demanding an investigation and apology.
Should none be forthcoming, the British ‘threatened reprisals’.
The Bolsheviks ignored the threat and arrested Bruce Lockhart as a British agent and spy.
The other undercover MI6 agents in Moscow and Petrograd went into hiding.
Reilly escaped and fled back to England.
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The British retaliated by seizing Maxim Litvinov, the Bolsheviks’ official representative in London, and the new regime’s first major overseas spy, as a hostage.
A stand-off ensued.
In the end Litvinov was exchanged for Bruce Lockhart.
What this bitter little secret ‘war of the envoys’ did was to confirm to the Communists the west was not only an implacable enemy but would stop at nothing to attack and overthrow them.
‘WHAT WE ARE FACING,’ DECLARED LENIN, ‘IS A SYSTEMATIC, METHODICAL AND LONG PLANNED COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE SOVIET REPUBLIC.’
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The Soviets in their turn swiftly nailed their own colors to the mast.
The first Communist International – or ‘Comintern’ – met in Moscow in the spring of 1919 to declare its intention to carry the revolution to the four corners of the world and to overthrow the bourgeoisie everywhere.
THE MOLD OF A BITTER COLD WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST WAS FIRMLY CAST AS EARLY AS THE BEGINNING OF 1920.
(end of section 1)
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(own comments)
“The Cold War did not only deform lives, it deformed whole societies, as well as costing a fortune.”
Substantially lowering taxes and allowing imports to freely come into the U.S., as with among U.S. states, would enrich Americans so much other countries would soon follow our model.
THAT Libertarian Real Republican dominance would force less federal dependence and power and more state independence and power.
THAT independence would induce All countries to follow and join in the U.S.A.-led All countries reformation into the U.S. of World.
Since All countries would be like post-HATrs’ turn round squares reformed U.S. states there would be no more felt need to spend a fortune on militaries.
Certainty having defeated doubt, general interests having defeated special interests, instability of justice having defeated stability of injustice, positive happy having defeated negative misery, with reformed lives and societies We’ll All go together to becoming in-there millionaires and billionaires, and will have plenty of money to spread tHAT verse throughout universe.
(Byrds song Wild Mountain Thyme)