Battle of Wills

Mark White commends a wide-ranging investigation into the psychological dimensions of the Cold War and the crucial role fear played in shaping American and Soviet strategies

- By Mark White. Photographs by Alamay

Sound and fury

Russian musician Mstislav Rostropovich conducts in London, 1988. Two decades earlier his decision to play Czech composer Antonín DvoÅ™ák's Cello Concerto at the Proms expressed his anger at the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring

The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind by Martin Sixsmith Profile, 592 pages, £25

With this impressively ambitious and wide-ranging study, Martin Sixsmith former BBC correspondent in Moscow and author of such works as Philomena and Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East - adds a fascinating chapter to Cold War scholarship.

Sixsmith does a good job of presenting the essential narrative of the Cold War. He covers its post-Second World War inception in the Truman-Stalin years, as well as other key events including the Cuban missile crisis the 1962 military standoff that brought the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict - and the Vietnam War. The improvement in relations between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s is also explored, as well as the ending of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

Rather than provide a traditional diplomatic history of the Cold War years, though, Sixsmith develops a thematically rich and diverse work that explores, in particular, the psychological dimension of the Soviet-American contest.

The author delves into many instances of the psychological aspect of the conflict. For example, he discusses the work of Freud when considering how individuals replaced a sense of self with loyalty to an authoritarian leader such as Stalin. And he examines in detail the use of psychological warfare by the CIA, established by Harry Truman in 1947.