| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Markku Ruotsila. British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War. (CASS Series: Cold War History, number 3.) Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass. 2001. Pp. xiv, 274. Cloth $57.50, paper $26.50.

The author of this book, Markku Ruotsila, advances two basic propositions. The more general one is that ideas, as a factor in British and American political life, are crucially important but have been greatly undervalued. This will command widespread assent. The other, more specific notion, elaborated here with much detail from archives, memoirs, and other sources, is that, contrary to conventional Cold War historiographical practice, which gives great explanatory prominence to ideology as a primary impulse in Soviet policy but very little to the ideas that lay behind Western actions, there was a crucially significant but neglected Anglo-American ideology of anticommunism. This is rather more problematic. 1

Most strikingly, Ruotsila presents a bold explanation of the Cold War. "The fundamental thesis of the book," he writes, "is that the Cold War was not primarily about opposition to the foreign expansionism of the Soviet Union or, even, to the communism practised in the Soviet Union. It was just as much about the competition between conservatism and modern liberalism and socialism for the right to shape the direction of the twentieth century" (p. xiii). . . .

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