Welcome to Russian History Retold. Episode 299, an interview with Professor Simon Miles, author of engaging the evil empire.

Our guest today is assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies and history in the Sanford

School of Public Policy at Duke University, Simon Miles, his first book, Engaging the Evil

Empire, Washington, Moscow, and the beginning of the Cold War

explores the root causes of cooperation between two adversarial states, the United States and the Soviet Union in order to

situate the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War in a broader international context.

Welcome to the podcast, Professor Miles.

Thanks for having me, Mark.

As my listeners know, my family had a very deep history and kind of an anti-communist

of thought process and you know my first visit to East Germany was in 1970

when my family my father and I went to East Berlin to visit some relatives who were on the other side of the wall.

We saw the difference between West Berlin where my grandfather lived and my other relatives in East Berlin and we saw the kind of a as my father would put it it was trist very, kind of depressing and I noticed there were still bullet holes in the walls of East Berlin, but that no longer exists today.

And what we saw also, they also know that my history professor, Dr. Paul Averich, in

1976 told our class that the Soviet Union had less than 20 years left before they would dissolve.

We thought he was crazy, you know, come on, this is the Soviet Union, the big two power and that's unrealistic. And also I came across a book a few years ago from my brother.

They called the coming Soviet crash by Judy Shelton and she laid out in 1989 how the Soviet Union

would collapse because of economic issues. But you have a little bit of a different take on this.

And in your book you tracked key events in the US Soviet relationships between 1980 and 1985 and can you comment on why that five year period was so crucial in diffusing the Cold War?

Yeah, I was drawn to that period really because there was this puzzle for me when I thought about the history of the Cold War.

And the basic puzzle was how did we get from the collapse of US Soviet detente, right?

Definitely sort of definitively dead in Afghanistan

and when the Soviet Union invades in late 1979, but probably, you know, in its palliative care for the preceding few years as well during the Carter administration.

...