Disciplinary boundaries can be tricky things, particularly for historians of the recent past. Where does social or political science end and history start? Simon Miles, trained as a historian of US foreign policy and by experience an expert in Soviet and Eastern European diplomacy, is here to tell you how he’s navigated that slipperiness while researching the history of Cold War relations between the US and the USSR. As his analysis of the 1964 palace coup that ousted Nikita Khrushchev and the Johnson administration’s response to said coup demonstrates, superpower relations present research challenges: their most critical developments can be difficult to see, even in hindsight, masked as they might be by more obvious world crises such as the Vietnam War. And sometimes, though the conversation seems to be about the US and the USSR, it’s not just superpowers that were determining (inter)national fates. In his assessment of the dissolution of Warsaw pact, for instance, Miles observes that smaller nations exercised their agency to back away from their commitment to the Soviet Union and realign with Western Europe. In this case, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania affected not just Soviet policy but that of the European Union and NATO as well.
Miles’s first book, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2020) focuses on the 1980s, highlighting the entangled strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union during the late Cold War, a period within living memory for many but distant enough that global perspectives have shifted to allow for new investigations and interpretations. He is also is co-editor of The Reagan Moment: America in the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021), a collection that has been described as “opening a new era in historical scholarship on the Reagan administration.”
What’s something most people don’t know about your field?
A tough question because at this point in my career I’m not entirely sure what field I’m in…
I started out as a historian of US foreign policy, but then my first book (which was my dissertation) really became a work equally about the Soviet Union as it was the United States during the late Cold War. And in order to do that, overcoming the challenges to archival access I encountered in Moscow at the time (back when you could go to the archives in Moscow, that is) meant I had to spend a lot of time in Eastern Europe. And I was just floored by how much great archival material was available there, so I turned for my next project to writing a history of the Warsaw Pact—after being hired at Duke in a line for US foreign relations.
So I’ll answer at the most basic level, which is as a historian: I think a lot of people, and this includes my colleagues at the Sanford School of Public Policy here at Duke who are social scientists, don’t fully appreciate how much of the work of history is about serendipity, accident, and plain old luck in the archives. Rather than having meticulous plans to find exact pieces of evidence, a lot of us are just trying to figure it out as we go and sometimes hitting pay dirt.
What’s the best discovery you’ve made in your research?
Maybe a runner-up to what most people don’t know about my field of history is that archival “smoking guns” are exceedingly rare. Most arguments are meticulously and painstakingly woven together with small pieces of supporting evidence; it’s not a common thing to find one document, for example, that just proves your basic point in and of itself.
More to Explore
What Is Serendipity?
That did happen to me once, and it was a complete chance. I was in the East German communist party archive in the Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde and running out of materials to look at but, having made the trek down from central Berlin, wanted to make the most of the day (and, as I recall, it was a rainy, prematurely dark day in late-fall Berlin, so I wasn’t in a rush to brave the elements and head for the S-Bahn). So I ordered a file that promised some contents on US–Soviet relations but implied that this was all to do with Nazi looting and similar claims, which I could get in a matter of minutes because it was only accessible in the dreaded microfiche format.
At it happened, the file contained the Soviet records, translated into German and shared with the DDR, of a series of secret back-channel meetings between the US ambassador to West Germany and the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, who routinely met on Berlin- and German-occupation business throughout the Cold War and used that routine forum as a back-channel during the early Reagan administration. I had come across allusions to some sort of back channel during this period of the early 1980s when many people claim the Cold War was at its hottest at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and now I had found the proof while I was just trying to kill some time.
Do you have a favorite classroom moment?
All the moments when you can see something “click” for a student are my favorites, and among those the ones which really mean the most are when a student “gets it” about something bigger than just the topic of that day’s lecture or seminar. I love it when a student realizes they have something to offer the world beyond being a management consultant, mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, or investment banker and wants to apply for a summer internship in the intelligence community, for example. Or when a student who suffered through four years of high school thinking history is about rote memorization unlocks its enormous analytical power to help better understand our present and think about the future, too.
What’s the next big thing in your field?
I’m the wrong person to ask about this! I’m acutely aware that the things I study—hard power; guns-and-bombs security; diplomatic, military, and intelligence history—are very unfashionable. I’d like to see those things come back into fashion, and I’d like to see the field be less fashion-conscious and faddish, but just like I’m not making predictions, I’m not holding my breath.
Weekly Newsletter
What’s on your bedside table? What’s your next read?
A lamp, a (hopefully fresh) glass of water, a Kindle which is on its last legs, and the latest Economist and Atlantic. Ideally, not my iPhone.
I probably should name-check some great works of recently published history that I have in the queue, and I am looking forward to reading all of them…eventually. But the honest answer is that I’m most looking forward to reading the latest installment in Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon thriller series.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
