Episode 42: The Other Side Of the Iron Curtain

The 18th Airborne Corps Podcast

18th Airborne Corps podcast host Joe Buccino generally spends a lot of time talking about the Cold War, a subject with which he's fascinated. Nixon, LBJ, Kennedy. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Chernobyl.

He generally talks about these things from the American perspective. The way the American military and government reacted to these events. The American public's view of the world from these moments.

Not on this episode.

Serhii Plokhy, an American historian born in Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia who grew up in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, joins the show by phone from his Burlington, Massachusetts home. Serhii, one of the most prolific historians in the U.S. on the Cold War, tells story after story about the Cold War.

Serhii discusses the WWII origins of the Cold War, the role of the Chernobyl disaster in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the events leading up to the end of the Cold War. He describes these things from the perspective of the Soviet leadership and the Soviet commoner. His is a fascinating purview on critical world events.

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and the director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute. He's the author of literally dozens of books on the Cold War. He and Joe discuss, in particular his 2014 book The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union, which received the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations, 2018's Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, which was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, and the 2019 Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen Behind Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance, about how the American-Soviet alliance began to fray toward the end of WWII.

This is an episode rich with insights on the Soviet Union and the Cold War.