There was certainly a perception of one.
In reality…not so much. There was no real chance of the USSR directly attacking the USA except in self-defence.
Both sides got up to plenty of bastardry during the Cold War, but framing it as “the USSR threatening the USA” is misleading at best. The Soviet missiles in Cuba were a response to the American missiles in Turkey, and the Russians had reason to fear American attack:
I know and understand all that. But still, the Soviets had a shitload of nukes, and they weren’t aimed at the moon.
I’ve known a few govvies who had done time at FBI, CIA, NASA (some other lesser known ones). I’ve heard the pay is there, but they don’t pay market rate starting, you gotta work your way up doing your time. The only way you make a big jump is like in the private industry where you jump to another contractor, preferably after doing something to kind of make a name for yourself (which is hard to do when your day to day stuff is unpublishable).
So the pay is there eventually. The govvies I know who did their time ended up well into the 6 figure range, and if you end up living in BFE (as you sometimes do) that money is worth a lot more with cost of living.
Every single one was a contractor. Hiring techies as direct hires is very out of vogue, so I don’t claim to know what salaries are like for direct hires.
Broadly speaking, if you’re clean enough to get TSSI clearance, you’ll eventually do very well. This system works well for the dim bulbs, and not as well for the hot messes you sometimes get with brilliant people.
But I still think it is a real problem when people present the Cold War as a mere nationalist “us (or indeed US) vs. them” issue with two arbitrary sides of equal virtue/lack thereof. The collapse of Communism (in its Stalin-inspired form) in 1989-1991 wasn’t just a win for the US anymore than the collapse of Fascism in 1945 was. They both were wins for humanity.
There’s a long and detailed debate to be had on that question [I], but a few framing points:
Stalin died shortly after WWII. Stalinism was fading throughout the Cold War, and was thoroughly dead by 1989.
The collapse of Gorbachev’s reformist USSR and the rise of the modern Russian gangster state was of very debatable benefit to the Russian people. Which is why the majority of them consistently say that they regret the fall of the USSR:
…and why many of them still remember this:
.
[1] For my extremely shorthand version: yes, the fall of the Soviet empire was a mostly good thing, but that’s primarily because all empires are bad.
The USSR didn’t exist yet in 1918. The Allied powers (including the US, Britain, and France), did send forces to Russia during its civil war in a doomed attempt to defeat the Red insurgency, but that’s not quite the same thing as a US invasion of the USSR.
For my extremely shorthand version: yes, the fall of the Soviet empire was a mostly good thing, but that’s primarily because all empires are bad
And that’s the key thing. You might find Russians who bemoan the death of the Soviet Union (but not as many as per stereotype), but that’s like Britains who mourn the death of the Empire. But you won’t find many Estonians, Poles, Czechs, etc. who mourn the puppet governments that Stalin set up in their countries.
I will stipulate that you can be for God and country without necessarily being a fanatic. I think you would be self- evidently a nationalist.
Whether one thinks that is a necessarily a bad thing is of course a question of opinion.
But anyone who actually uses the phrase ‘for God and country’ (especially as a reason for doing something) is almost certainly either a nationalist fanatic or wants to give the impression that they are one.
It’s not exactly a phrase that can be used in any other context.
Well, like I said in a later comment, in this context I believe that his point was people taking a lower paying job as a sense of duty, (i.e. serving your country.)
By your logic, anyone who has a job a the NSA, or EPA, or Department of Labor, or any other department who would have better prospects elsewhere but stick around as a way to serve their country would be labeled as “nationalistic” which seems rather broad and not really fitting.
Nationalism is a degree of patriotism where one places ones country above all others. Serving or promoting one’s country doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of excluding or holding it above all others.
I think my unease is really triggered by the combination.
Someone who is religious and chooses to work in a lower paid job because they want to help their fellow citizens and consider that more important than earning a higher salary - fine.
Someone who will say that they did (and urges others to) accept a lower salary “for the good of their country” gets me twitchy but ok, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Someone who will actually come out with “Für Gott und Vaterland” as a recruiting slogan?
Huge great ringing alarm bells.
Admittedly, he did drop the Kaiser so I suppose that’s progress.
This is an area where the US obsession with religion jars against western European distrust of what we (some of us at least) would consider excessive displays of religious fervour (i.e. any display of religion 
(slight sarcasm)).
Or the “American Dream”, for that matter.
When the state is responsible for defending a late-stage capitalist system one would expect that the guard labour it employs would be more mercenary and less idealistic than it was when the state was defending a system that wasn’t actively and obviously decimating the middle class, destroying the environment and otherwise selling out the future to maintain the comforts and illusions of Boomers.
If I was a bright and educated Millenial right now I’d be focused on making enough money as soon as possible to get into the 20% or less of the population that two decades from now will still be able to consider things like owning a home in a desirable city, retiring at some point before age 75, paying off student debt before age 75, having health insurance, and indeed having a job at all. If I could further do that without being subjected to (chickenshit) rules that come with a big government bureaucracy the decision would be even easier.
The Russians I’ve talked with since the turn of the century don’t really regret the Soviet collapse in and of itself. They knew that the USSR was a dysfunctional mess run by a bunch of corrupt old men.
What they really miss from those days is a sense of a minimal level of economic certainty that any modern nation-state operating with a sense of responsibility accords to its citizens, no matter its ideological underpinnings. Americans (especially Millenials) are now discovering that uneasy feeling, too.
I would suspect that since the appeal of working for a big government bureaucracy is the health insurance, pension and job security (whether that is actually real or not), the “sensible” choice is to work for the bureaucracy unless you already have the level of wealth you refer to.
Rich people have always needed underlings to deal with the tedious day-to-day minutiae. If you can’t be the god-king, you can at least aspire to be his vizier or chief scribe or at least a tax collector and have a reasonable living - at least so far…
I find it interesting that I’ve come across a few relatively recent films reviving that old trope about the rich isolating themselves off from the plebs and getting the tedious stuff done by robots with the twist that they are now plunging the middle-class down into poverty with everyone else.
Elysium is the first one that springs to mind.
There’s the rub. I think bright and politically aware young people now understand that those things can and (if things continue as they are, will) be pulled out from under them in an American government job just as they can in an American corporate job. Understanding that guaranteed benefits are no longer real, they go for the larger salary and the chance to become a god-king or one of his senior retainers.
Which is of course also an illusion.
I think both the US and the Soviets did a masterful propaganda job of hyping the threat that did exist. There is no question that the Cuban Missile crisis was an actual crisis, as was the arms race… but I think the threat was overhyped to a large extent on both sides.
As for now… There might be genuine threats to our safety, BUT it’s even more overplayed by people wishing to maintain the status quo, no doubt. I’d also say that there was also an internal threat during the CW, too.
Also, I’m not sure if your realize, but my historical era is the CW era… just so you know.
I don’t think I’m being arbitrary about it. The topic was generally on US actions during the CW, so it makes no sense to bring up Stalin in this case. It’s not like we were always on the right side of history with our actions, as we seemed to not mind dictators as long as they weren’t lefties. As Odd Arne Westad showed in his book, our actions helped to create the current war on terror. And we’re clearly marching into a more authoritarian/fascist world without the looming threat of communism as represented by a whole bloc of nations. If it was a win for humanity, we quickly started to lose as soon as the smoke cleared. Many of the countries we “freed” from red domination are now seeing the rise of fascist/authoritarian governments unleashed by dissatisfaction with the neoliberal global economy.
We’re not living in some democratic paradise around the world I’m afraid.
Actual LOL.
Somewhat more than half, according to polling.
Which is unsurprising, as those nations had been fighting for independence (from the Russians, from the Prussians, from the Austrians…) for centuries. Stalin was just the latest of many foreign oppressors.
Regarding the events of 1918-1920 and the relatively brief presence of Stalin in the Cold War…my point there is that the timing demonstrates that Western opposition to the USSR was not primarily motivated by opposition to Stalinism.
Stalin provided a very useful enemy demon, but he was not the cause of the Cold War. The ruling class of the West were not afraid of the Stalinist betrayal of communism; they were afraid that communism might succeed.
The Cold War (in the sense of the post WWII-1991 conflict) was very much a result of Stalin’s actions. He had promised at Yalta that there would be free elections in the Soviet occupied territories, but of course there weren’t, which doomed the wartime alliance he had with the other WWII Allied powers. And you can’t understand the absurd pseudo-religious personality cults of later Communist dictators like Ceaușescu or Hoxha (or the North Korean Kims even to this day) without understanding that these pathetic tinpot dictators were trying to copy Stalin, so his influence extended well beyond his lifetime.
You (or you know, people who are historians who have studied this period through primary source documents) could say that the US and British not holding up the bargains made at Yalta by FDR also played a role… also, it couldn’t possibly be due to literal several centuries of western Europeans powers invading Russia making Russians paranoid? No… must but those crafty, despotic easterners…
Promises were made by BOTH sides at Yalta, and Churchill STILL gave that iron curtain speech… not imagining that Stalin was old and would die soon.
