In Red Globalization, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking reinterpretation of Soviet history. Like other scholars in recent years, Sanchez-Sibony is interested in bringing the USSR into a broader global perspective. His approach is fittingly Soviet, with economics (specifically foreign trade) at the center of his historical analysis.
The book's subtitle suggests an exclusive focus on the Cold War era, but the first chapter presents a well-supported interpretation of the rise of the Stalinist economic order as a response to international economic crisis. In this view, the turn to heavy industry and toward autarky was not so much a fulfillment of a long-lived Bolshevik vision as it was a policy forced by the collapse of European trading patterns in the 1920s. A second chapter on World War II and postwar reconstruction similarly argues that the Soviet Union did not so much turn away from Europe (at least in...