On Monday, the world we knew shifted under our feet with 4 simple words-
U.S. sides with Russia.
Eighty years of foreign policy flip flopping gave me whiplash.
I have spent several decades studying, collecting, and creating content about post-war America and the cold war.
The basement in my home is filled with hundreds of cardboard boxes bursting with periodicals, newspapers, and ephemera that document the history of our country over the past 80 years, all attest to America as the Leader of the Free World. The well-worn vintage schoolbooks, and history books that line my bookshelves are filled with evidence of the American Way.
America’s place in the world just changed yesterday.
The seismic shift in U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, abandoning our allies has raised alarms in Kyiv and capitals across Europe.
And it should at home too.
Cold War concerns of Russian aggression are coming out of the deep freeze all across Europe.
Putin has a wandering eye and not just for the ladies. Russian neighbors are rightfully worried, especially Poland, Finland, Sweden, and Estonia. European nations are scrambling, feeling abandoned by their staunchest ally to protect themselves from potential Russian aggression.
If the Cold War is heating up, how did we end up on the wrong side?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is straight out of the old Soviet playbook evoking a time when an expansionist Russia was viewed as a “hungry bear” whose insatiable appetite needed to be controlled.
By the 1950s, it had even infiltrated the minds of suburban baby boomers like me.
Conventional wisdom at the time was that the Communists in Moscow were busy spinning a web of control, hell-bent on forcibly enslaving free people everywhere. It would be up to the United States to contain the Russian bear.
Russia was our arch enemy and as leaders of the free world we would protect the world from the ugly clutches of the evil empire.
Bear Hug
The post-war big chill almost made us forget that only a few years earlier, this big, brutal Russian bear had been our warm and fuzzy teddy bear of a wartime ally
During WWII, no one could hold a candle to those brave Stalingrad sacrificing red, white, and blue Russians.
Led by twinkly eyed pipe smoking “Uncle Joe Stalin they were our comrades in fighting the Nazis.
Songwriters cheered and praised our Soviet comrades as we whistled “You Can’t Brush Off a Russian” and “Stalin Wasn’t Stall’in.” Selling the Soviets to us like a bottle of Pepsi, one ditty went:
“The Soviet Union hits the spot
12 million soldiers, that’s a lot
Timashen and Stalin too
Soviet Union is Red, White, and blue.”
Frenemies
Like so many war-born marriages it turned out our grand alliance with the Soviets was more a marriage of convenience.
Uncle Joe our warm and fuzzy teddy bear quickly turned into a cold-blooded grizzly bear ready to gobble up crippled Europe turning its starving shivering population into godless Communists.
Despite the promises made by Stalin at Yalta to allow free elections, Stalin turned Eastern Europe into a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and Western Europe
As Soviet tanks angrily roamed eastern European streets, our war-born good will faded as quickly as Elizabeth Arden’s vanishing cream.
Russia took over countries in Europe, including Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and East Germany, installing Communist governments, effectively making them satellite states.
They also annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania directly into the Soviet Union.
Choosing Sides
As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazis had been seamlessly and swiftly rerouted to those Godless Russian commies.
As long as the aggression existed in the form of the Evil Empire and “their unrelenting drive to enslave humanity” the threat of an unwanted nuclear war would cast a long shadow.
The Hungry Russian Bear
Everywhere you turned, from school books to magazines to newspapers, were maps depicting the Soviet Union’s aggressive tendencies. With their ominous long tentacles reaching across Eastern Europe splotched in red, they depicted the global pattern of the spread of the Red offensive.
The Reds were on the march casting a dark shadow over the globe.
The long shadow reached quiet suburbia too.
What the immediate danger of Russia and Communism posed to my ordinary Long Island childhood was unclear to me. Yet even as a small child, the mere mention of Nikita Khruschev or the Soviet Union sent a shiver down my spine and was the source of nightmares. While other kids my age checked their closets for Monsters or were terrified of ghosts. Khruschev was my boogeyman.
To help me understand the dangers of this big brutal Russian bear, my father created his own bedtime story to explain the world situation. While other children adored Goldilocks and her antics with the Three Bears, my favorite was a story Dad called “The Hungry Russian Bear.”
The story never varied and I absorbed the message well.
Lying on my small single bed with my flowered comforter pulled up tightly around my shoulders, I clutched my Huckleberry Hound and Teddy the Tiger stuffed animals close to me as I listened intently as Dad would begin the tale.
“Once upon a time, there was a Big Red Bear who was very, very hungry.
“He lumbered through the forest eating everything in sight. His eyes were like saucers. No matter how much he ate, he always wanted more. Tramping through his neighbor’s forests, he gobbled up his neighbor’s portion.
Looking around, he licked his lips. Lo and behold he spied a quiet little mouse.
The Hungry Bear pounced and ate the mouse and all his food. Still hungry, he looked longingly across the big ocean to the other side, where there lay other lands full of all sorts of tempting goodies and treats.
The Big Red Bear would not be happy until he ate everything in sight. The bear just grew and grew.
Communist Russia, Dad explained to me, was like the hungry bear in the story. It was a large and ravenous nation with an insatiable appetite.
Their portion of porridge was never going to be enough for them. Nothing, not even Metrical could curb their appetite.
To avoid ending up in the tummy of a Communist Bear, I, just like America was to be in a constant state of preparedness.
Alert today. Alive tomorrow.
The Bear is still hungry. Today Russia’s appetite might well extend beyond Ukraine.
Fears that Moscow might assault other post Soviet neighbors are real. Countries of the Baltic Sea worried that Putin plans to expand military conflict further into Europe are ramping up preparations for a military conflict.
“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.
The disintegration of our united country was brought about by the historic, strategic mistakes on the part of Bolshevik and Soviet leaders […] the collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR is on their conscience.” Vladamir Putin
The Hungry Bear has spoken. Only this time America will not be there to help.