Containing History - by Stephen P Friot (Hardcover)

About the Book

Amid the wreckage of the high hopes that accompanied the end of the Cold War, and as faith in a rules-based international order wanes, Friot's work provides a historical, cultural, and political framework for understanding the geopolitics of the moment and, arguably, for navigating a way forward.

Book Synopsis

In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with U.S.-Russia relations approaching a breaking point, this book provides a key to understanding how we got here. Specifically, Stephen P. Friot asks, how do Russians and Americans think about each other, and why do they see the world so differently? The answers, Friot suggests, lie in the historical events surrounding the Cold War and their divergent influence on politics and popular consciousness.

Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in its scope, Containing History employs the tools and insights of history, political science, and international relations to explain how twenty-first-century public attitudes in Russia are the product of a thousand years of history, including searing experiences in the twentieth century that have no counterparts in U.S. history. At the same time, Friot explores how--in ways incomprehensible to Russians--U.S. politics are driven by American society's ethnic and religious diversity and by the robust political competition that often, for better or worse, puts international issues to work in the service of domestic political gain. Looking at history, culture, and politics in both the United States and Russia, Friot shows how the forty-five years of the Cold War and the seventy years of the Soviet era have shaped both the Russia we know in the twenty-first century and American attitudes toward Russia--in ways that drive social and political behavior, with profound consequences for the post-Cold War world.

Amid the wreckage of the high hopes that accompanied the end of the Cold War, and as faith in a rules-based international order wanes, Friot's work provides a historical, cultural, and political framework for understanding the geopolitics of the moment and, arguably, for navigating a way forward.

Review Quotes

"For those who lived through the second half of the 20th century, Containing History is a great recapitulation of the Cold War and how the events of those memorable days continue to reverberate. For younger readers, it is a relatively short way to catch up on recent history that continues to reverberate. This is a highly readable review of recent history, which shows the past as prologue."--Tulsa World


"Stephen Friot is a master storyteller with an archivist's grip on Cold War history. The world is now 30 years on from the end of the Soviet Union and while the dilettanti may not remember the burden of that ceaseless threat, the gray feeling, the drag on life that was the missile gap, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, or the Soviet support to nasty little wars around the world, Friot remembers. The reader can now too."--Marine Corps History


"Whether we like it or not, Friot fruitfully reminds us - even if just obliquely - that we cannot cancel history for any given reason or whim; the serious study of the past allows indeed for a better understanding of the present and richer, fuller perspective as well as preparedness for what is to come in the human sphere."--The Cipher Brief


"At a time when the US-Russia relationship has deteriorated considerably, Stephen Friot provides a fresh, updated analysis of Cold War history and its subsequent impact that enables a better understanding of the factors on both sides that have resulted in the current tensions."--Nikolas K. Gvosdev, author of Decision Making in American Foreign Policy


"Fascinating and original. Stephen Friot arrives at a set of provocative conclusions about U.S.-Russian relations, conclusions he prepares the reader well for in this vividly written and substantially researched history of the Cold War."--Michael Kimmage, author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

"Stephen Friot connects the profiles of the key leaders to the decisions they and others made during the Cold War, and, rather than assume that the American interpretation is the default for understanding events, he also presents the Russian perspective."--Michael J. Sulick, author of Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War