86 Books & arts The Economist November 13th 2021
flourishinginthecracksoftheshattered
civilrealm.“Thepillarsofthelandseemto
tremble,”a writerofthetimelamented.
MrGaskill’simmersiveapproachbrings
thefateofhissubjectsmovinglytolife.
Neitherwasconvictedofwitchcraft.Not
thatitdidthemmuchgood:indifferent
waystheirlivesweredestroyedbytheac
cusationsof“fearfulmenandwomen”.By
comparison,hisfinalchapterfeelsbreath
less,dashingfromthetrialtothepost
Enlightenmentsenseofwitchcraftasa fig
mentofmentalillnessandsuperstition.
Moresuccessfulisanuncannyepilogue
inwhichtheauthorrevisitsSpringfield,
dowsingtheghostsofitspastinitsrun
downpresent.Hefindsthatfearofwitch
craftnevertrulyfades.“Iamcountedbutas
adreamer,”saidanotherofSpringfield’s
supposedwitches.“Butwhenthisdreamis
hanged,thenrememberwhatI saidtoyou:
thistownwillnotbefreeyet.”nThecoldwarMethod in the
MADness
O
n april25th 1945 AmericanandSoviet
troops, who had swept through Nazi
Germany from west and east, met at the
Elbe river. A photograph that shows an em
brace between two lieutenants was staged,
but the sense of comradeship was sincere.
“A new atmosphere of friendship and co
operation”, says Martin Sixsmith, “seemed
the inevitable outcome of years of toil and
shared effort.” It did not last.
Josef Stalin’s cynicism and paranoia,
and the tougher line taken by Franklin
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, en
sured that the (relatively) good relations at
the Yalta conference of February 1945 had
soured five months later at Potsdam.
There, mutual suspicion and facts on the
ground paved the way for the carving up of
Europe. The immediate flashpoint was
Berlin, which both sides saw as a proving
ground for their ideologies and a cockpit
for testing the other’s resolve with psycho
logical warfare and dirty tricks. The Soviets
could deploy superior conventional forces,
but it would be four years before they
would have an atom bomb to match Amer
ica’s. The “war of nerves” became the mo-
dus operandiof the cold war.
The term “cold war” was already in
use—to describe a new kind of conflict,involving every instrument short of direct
military confrontation—when, in April
1950, Truman received a document that be
came known as nsc68. Eight months after
the Soviet nuclear detonation, it called for
a big boost in military spending and the de
velopment of the hydrogen bomb. It also
framed the contest with the Soviets in
Manichean terms: a global trial of strength
between slavery and freedom that could be
won only by appealing to hearts and
minds. It became the template for Ameri
ca’s strategy for the next 40 years.
There have been many histories of the
cold war, but the virtue and originality of
Mr Sixsmith’s is to see almost every aspect
of the standoff in psychological terms. De
ranged Stalin, volatile, bombastic Nikita
Khrushchev, plodding, insecure Leonid
Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev’s desperate
optimism—he sketches the leaders’ states
of mind, and the means used to stimulate
fear of “the other”. He chronicles the brink
manship over Berlin and Cuba; the repres
sion of the Hungarian and Czech upris
ings; the propaganda and spying; the ab
surdities of the nuclear arms race and the
effect on populations of living with the
permanent threat of mutual extinction.
At every point the two sides were intent
on demonstrating the superiority of their
systems. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik
satellite sent shockwaves through Wash
ington; an agreement in 1959 to put on ex
hibitions in each other’s countries, show
casing economic and social achievements,
backfired on Khrushchev when Musco
vites were stunned by a gadgetladen
American kitchen. Art, film and music
were enlisted and exploited. The author, a
Russian scholar and journalist who, as the
bbc’s Moscow correspondent, covered Mr
Gorbachev’s presidency and Boris Yelt
sin’s, uses the tools of psychoanalysis to
illuminate events and motivations.
He laments the swift dashing of hopes
that liberal democracy would take root in
postSoviet Russia. In large part he blames
the West (and the elder George Bush in par
ticular) for triumphalism. Trampling over
Russian sensibilities and pride, he thinks,
helped ensure that the chaotic Yeltsin era
gave way to the revanchism of Vladimir Pu
tin and his gang of kleptocratic siloviki. In
Mr Sixsmith’s view, such psychological
factors have once again contributed to a
tragic outcome.
Could the aftermath of the “war of
nerves” have been happier? Mr Sixsmith
also says that contrasting histories and na
tional psyches would anyway have
inclined America and Russia to divergent
paths—one animated by the ideas of sturdy
individualism and the rule of law, the oth
er defined by autocracy and the collective
efforts it demands. For all the differences
in the two rivalries, something similarmay
now be true of America and China. nThe War of Nerves. By Martin Sixsmith.
Wellcome Collection; 592 pages; £25.
To be published in America in July by
Pegasus Books; $35AccesstoartThe mixing pot
T
he newhome for the collection of the
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, a
gorgeous 40metretall mirrored flower
pot that is set to become Rotterdam’s sig
nature building, had its origins in an ex
tremely Dutch emergency. The basement
that held the museum’s undisplayed
art—151,000 objects, among the Nether
lands’ most important collections—was
six metres below sea level, and kept flood
ing. The city had constructed a garage un
der an adjacent park which interfered with
drainage. Sjarel Ex, the museum’s director,
could have built a storage facility in a sub
urb, but wanted a way to keep the trove on
site, and to open it to the public.
Mr Ex asked for ideas from Winy Maas
of mvdrv, a leading Dutch architecture
firm. The first concept was a gigantic table
perched above the park, from which art
works could be lowered for spectators.
This proved impractical, but during a
brainstorming session Mr Maas plopped a
tea cup onto a model of the park, then no
ticed a mirrored kettle nearby. The cup’s
curve gave it a narrow base, which would
leave more room for pedestrians; the re
flective surface of the kettle melded with
the surroundings.
More than a decade after that epiphany,
the building known simply as “Depot”
opened to visitors on November 6th. In
Dutch “de pot” means “the pot” (as in the
flowery kind), a lexical pun reinforced by
the rooftop garden covered in birch trees.R OTTERDAM
A museum opens up its collectionThe cup runs over