Those of you of a certain age will remember when nuclear war with Russia was an inevitability, when people built bomb shelters in their basements, when "duck and cover" drills were de rigeur in schools, as if diving under desks or leaning against the side of the interior hallways would save us from a megaton airburst. The very notion is ludicrous, yet we did it anyway because Civil Defense was everyone's responsibility. My grandparents first faced it during the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations, then my parents throughout the '60s and '70s, and then it was my turn. As a child during the '80s, we thought it was ludicrous that the Soviets would ever launch an attack, so the drills were great fun that served only to take time away from classes, always a winner with schoolkids. Little did we know about Able Archer 83 and the close calls that happened due to mutual mistrust and incompetence.
Europe, on the other hand, wasn't too concerned about nukes. No, they were concerned about a fragmented Germany, particularly the island of democracy known as West Berlin, the perpetual thorn in the side of the Evil Empire. They were concerned about tanks and troops massing in the satellite states of Eastern Europe and pouring through the Fulda Gap.
Then, wonder of wonders, the Soviets came to us hat in hand. Gorbachev met Reagan at Geneva in 1985, later in Reykjavik, and the result was a lessening of tensions. The Soviet Union, with little choice, implemented the famous policies of glasnost and perestroika. It didn't matter what they meant, God knows we had no idea, but in the end we felt like we had won, we made the sinister Communists back down. Later the Berlin Wall fell, Germany was reunited, and the Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord, a rotten shell. One wonders why we were ever afraid. All they had were nukes, and nobody would ever end the world for laughs.
Well, now we remember why we were afraid. The Crimean Peninsula, legally a part of Ukraine, is now in dispute. The government of Ukraine, the second-largest former Soviet republic, is in shambles. And all of this is happening because Vladimir Putin decided that Ukraine should remain in the Russian sphere of influence. It was all I could do not to type "Soviet sphere of influence", because this whole fracas resembles nothing so much as the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the violent end of "Prague Spring" in 1968. Putin, a man who has gone to great lengths to hold on to power through more or less legal means by subverting the intent of Russian elections, resembles the Soviet strongmen of old. And now, with Ukraine mobilizing and Russia occupying land that isn't theirs, albeit with significant ethnic justification, the potential for a reunion between Russia and Ukraine (who doesn't stand a chance if it comes down to a shooting war) is high.
Russia is getting the band back together. Welcome back to the Bad Old Days.
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