Documentary Review: 'Cold War'

DVD Cover Art (C) 2012 Cable News Network, Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. CNN Presents: Cold War (C) 1998 Turner Original Productions, Inc.  

In 1998, seven years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, CNN and Britain's BBC Two network aired Cold War, a 24-part miniseries co-produced by Turner Original Productions and Jeremy Isaacs, a British producer who is best known for his 1970s series about World War II, The World at War.  

The idea of the series originated with Jeremy Isaacs Productions and was financed by CNN founder Ted Turner. Isaacs then put together a team of writers and producers to make 24 46-minute-long episodes that are presented in the same style and format of The World at War. Many of Isaacs' collaborators, including co-producer Pat Mitchell, writers Neal Ascherson and Jerome Kuehl, and composer Carl Davis, had worked on the earlier series. Thus, Cold War can be considered to be a sequel to The World at War. 

As you might expect, Cold War covers a longer period than its better-known forerunner, starting with the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and ending with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991. Each episode covers a specific period of the Cold War, including the conflict's complex roots in the aftermath of the Second World War, the last years of the Stalinist terror, the rise of Nikita Khrushchev and his unsuccessful attempts to achieve his twin goals of easing tensions with the West and advancing the spread of Communism, the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's long reign as a dictator, the Vietnam War, Soviet interventionism in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, and the roles played by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in ending the Cold War. 

Each episode is narrated by Kenneth Branagh and follows the same formula of The World at War; producers Isaacs and Mitchell blend interviews with participants who were either minor players (one of Stalin's surviving interpreters) or were involved in the Big Leagues at the highest levels of government (Clark Clifford, John Kenneth Galbraith, Castro, and Mikhail Gorbachev) from 1945 to 1991. 

The episodes are: 

1. Comrades (1917-1945)
2. Iron Curtain (1945-1947)
3. Marshall Plan (1947-1952)
4. Berlin (1948-1949)
5. Korea (1950-1953)
6. Reds (1947-1953)
7. After Stalin (1953-1956)
8. Sputnik (1949-1961)
9. The Wall (1958-1963)
10. Cuba (1959-1962)
11. Vietnam (1954-1968)
12. MAD (1960-1972)
13. Make Love Not War (The 1960s)
14. Red Spring (The 1960s)
15. China (1949-1972)
16. Détente (1969-1975)
17. Good Guys, Bad Guys (1967-1978)
18. Backyard (1954-1990)
19. Freeze (1977-1981)
20. Soldiers of God (1975-1988)
21. Spies (1944-1994)
22. Star Wars (1980-1988)
23. The Wall Comes Down (1989)
24. Conclusions (1989-1991)

My Take

I was born in the early 1960s. I was spared from the Red Scare of the McCarthy era by virtue of being born several years afterwards. I didn't have to sit in my grade school classroom and watch black-and-white footage of nuclear bombs going off or participate in "duck and cover" drills. My grade school teachers in the mid-Sixties and early Seventies did not lecture us about the evils of Communism or try to sell us on the idea that American intervention in Vietnam was morally correct and necessary for our national survival. In my experience, the Cold War was only palpable by the presence of Cuban exiles in my home town of Miami and a vague but ever-present fear that World War III could happen if either Washington or Moscow allowed a crisis to get out of hand and escalate beyond human control. 

I was, and still remain, anti-Communist in my political world-view. I spent much of my adolescence and early adult years worrying about the possibility of a war between the U.S.-led Free World and the Soviet-led Communist bloc. To this day (2018 as I write this), I distrust the Russian government, especially its current President, Vladimir Putin. Putin, after all, is not only an autocratic strongman who has ruled the core of what was the Soviet empire for nearly 20 years; he is also a former KGB officer who served during the last two decades of the Cold War. 

As a result of both the times in which I have lived and my interest in history, I have read quite a few books about the Cold War and some of the "hot" conflicts waged by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991. I've also watched many films and documentaries with the Cold War as either a setting or main theme, including Ken Burns' recent PBS series The Vietnam War.

I missed watching Cold War when it aired on CNN 20 years ago because it aired at the same time as one of my favorite shows of the time, so when I found out that Amazon was selling the series six-disc DVD set, I decided to buy it. I am a fan of Jeremy Isaacs' The World at War, after all, so I wanted to see how he had covered the vastly more complicated tale of the rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. 

In many ways, Cold War feels like a continuation of The World at War, both thematically and in its approach.

Like the landmark 1970s exploration of World War II, Cold War is a Big Picture look at a series of events that took place in various areas of the globe over a period of 74 years. That means that although Isaacs, Mitchell, and their team of writer-producers cover all of the landmark events that took place and tried to get as many participants as possible to tell their stories, it is still a story that is told in broad strokes. 

So although events such as the arms race, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Soviet support for "wars of national liberation" in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and the collision of East and West in the Middle East are covered, others are, sadly, not even mentioned. (The documentary is infamously silent about the fate of South Vietnam and Laos after the Communist victories of 1975. Likewise, the 1965 American intervention in the Dominican Republic is omitted from Cold War's narrative. I don't think that it was a deliberate decision to "whitewash history" for either side of the conflict; there is, of course, only so much coverage that can be given to a TV audience in a 46-minute episode.)   

If you watch this 24-part series expecting to learn everything about the Cold War in detail, you're bound to be disappointed. The topic is, like the Second World War, too vast and involved far too many countries for any producer to tell the complete story in 1122 minutes' worth of running time. 

However, if you approach Cold War as a broad overview that includes select personal recollections from the interviewees, you'll have at least a general understanding of what happened and why. The writing, which includes contributions from intellectuals such as Germaine Greer and historian Max Hastings, is excellent, and Kenneth Branagh's narration is delivered smartly and with a certain gravitas that reminds viewers of Laurence Olivier's great performance in a similar role in The World at War.