Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Cold War ended ten years ago, but the debate over how the West won continues unabated. Did the Soviet Union collapse from its own internal stresses and strains, giving the West its victory more or less by default? Or did pressures from the West, chiefly the United States, bring about the Soviet regime’s demise? Until recently attention has focused on how economic, military, and diplomatic competition between East and West brought the Soviet Union down. Now, with a growing abundance of reliable documentation on the murkier aspects of the Cold War – the political warfare and covert propaganda side –reassessments are starting to emerge. Three new books, each with a distinct point of view, explore these issues and come up in some cases with engaging findings. Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union by Scott Lucas, head of American and Canadian studies at the University of Birmingham, England, is by far the most ambitious of the three, but also the most disappointing. Despite the book’s title, it treats a limited period of less than ten years (1947–1956) and deals only with the development of what the author calls U.S. “ideological” warfare. The definition he applies, as it emerges from the text, seems to be something akin to a Kulturkampf, although the focus of Lucas’s inquiry is policy and its implementation rather than the history of ideas.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".