Andre Fontaine, the foreign editor of LE MONDE, attempted to write a history of the relationship between Russia and the capitalist world. The first of two volumes takes us from the October revolution to the Korean war. He is a lucid writer and he gets most of the facts down. This book is well-nigh predestined to be a standard university text in the next few years. This is where several criticisms have to be made. The reason why this book is so peculiarly fitted to be a text is that it strings together a series of facts and refuses to situate them in any recognisable theoretical framework. Why is this so? Fontaine is a fairly orthodox, liberal bourgeois commentator. This school, in the fifties, explained the cold war in terms of Russian imperialist expansion with a "roll-back" counter strategy as an optional extra. Accepting the influence of the present detente, the answer to his "the facts and just the facts" approach lies in the decisive discrediting of the Russian aggression theory of the cold war by Fleming and Horowitz. The extent of their victory is shown by Fontaine's retreat from the area of theory. Read Fontaine, but make certain you have read your Fleming and Horowitz first.
"History of the Cold War", Andre Fontaine, Secker & [illegible].