The War of Nerves

Inside the Cold War Mind

By: Martin Sixsmith

Narrated by: Kris Dyer

More than any other conflict, the Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. And, nearly 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its legacy still endures - not only in our politics, but in our own thoughts and fears.

Drawing on a vast array of untapped archives and unseen sources, Martin Sixsmith vividly recreates the tensions and paranoia of the Cold War, framing it for the first time from a psychological perspective. Revisiting towering personalities like Khrushchev, Kennedy and Nixon, as well as the lives of the unknown millions who were caught up in the conflict, this is a gripping account of fear itself - and in today's uncertain times, it is more resonant than ever.

©2021 Martin Sixsmith (P)2021 Hachette Audio UK

25 hours and 2 minutes of drivel

Who knew that Joseph Stalin was a liberal democrat, trapped by Franklin Roosevelt and George Kennan into a chrysalis of totalitarian frustrations? And that they, not Stalin and his fellow thugs, led the world into the Cold War and its “war of nerves”.

Or perhaps Osip Mandelstam got it right:

“We live, deaf to the land beneath us/ Ten steps away no one hears our speeches/
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,/
The soul-corrupter and peasant-slayer /
His fingers are fat as grubs/
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips/
His cockroach whiskers leer/
And his boot tops gleam.”