On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the Churchill Archives Centre held its largest conference to date. ‘The Cold War and Its Legacy’ attracted hundreds of international visitors, and was hailed by Mikhail Gorbachev as an “important” event.

Professor David Reynolds called the conference “a very rare chance” to hear eyewitnesses and historians reflect together on the forces and events that have shaped our world.

Among those who spoke at the conference were Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigoriy Karasin; Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Eisenhower; Lord Powell, former foreign affairs advisor to Margaret Thatcher; former American Senator John Warner; and Hugh Lunghi, translator for Winston Churchill at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam summits.

Letters from Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and Nancy Reagan marked the opening of the conference and encouraged reflection on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“Few events cut the fabric of history into ‘before’ and ‘after’”, Gorbachev wrote. “The end of the Cold War is one of them.

“A new world order is replacing the old, twenty years after we are closer to this goal but there is still a long way to go and the road as we feel already will be bumpy.

“To meet new challenges, we need to change our mentality just as we did to end the Cold War; we need to take down the wall that separates us from our future.”

The conference began on Wednesday with a forum in which His Excellency Grigoriy Karasin and Susan Eisenhower shared the stage.

The appearance of Karasin, a senior Russian official, was one of the main drawing points of the conference, since Russian Cold War perspectives of the type that Karasin offered are rarely heard in the West.

Karasin told a packed audience, “We continue to feel [the Cold War’s] implications today. What is needed is a clear and fair assessment of the period.”

At first, he claimed that there are “no simplified unambiguous answers” when it comes to the question of blame for the start of the Cold War.

However, his speech was not entirely devoid of blame for Western powers. After the defeat of fascism in World War II, Karasin said, the USSR’s Western allies resumed the “same old track of ideologically charged policy” he believes they trod before the war. After its major sacrifices in the War, he went on, Moscow was “unable” to begin another major conflict.

He went on to suggest that those who would discover who won and who lost the war were “doomed to failure”, since Russia “simply withdrew”.

Karasin urged Western countries to “open their archives” in order to shed light on the complex realities of the postwar period. He finished on a conciliatory note, expressing his support for the signing of the Lisbon Treaty and calling for “tripartite co-operation” between Russia, the EU, and the United States.

Speaking to Varsity after his presentation, Karasin said it was important for Russia and the West to move beyond the tensions of the past, but at the same time “not to forget” what happened in the Cold War period.

“We have to analyse the past, we have to be critical, but to the extent that it will help us to move ahead together.

“It’s a bit difficult for today’s students to understand [the Cold War] because they didn’t live during those years.

“For yourselves, it’s more a historic essay, a piece of how things were when your parents were young. That was the same with my generation discussing the Second World War; it was the war of our parents.”

Lord Charles Powell, who also spoke in a panel on Wednesday, told Varsity it was essential to boost understanding of the conflict among modern students.

“The Cold War was a pretty defining period, stretching over 40 years of head-to-head confrontation of two vast military alliances, with a constant sense of impending danger and even the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

“To know the recent history of what was the Soviet Union, now Russia, and China and so on, tells you an awful lot about how to deal with them in the future.”

Susan Eisenhower, famous in the US for crossing party lines to support Barack Obama last year, said the conference painted a “very complex picture” of the Cold War and praised the diversity of speakers.

“It’s going to be very hard to explain” the Cold War to modern students, she told Varsity. “How do you explain the fact that everybody continued to [build nuclear weapons] so long after it was necessary?”

She stressed the importance of educational events such as the conference, explaining that boosting understanding of the conflict would help both sides to be more reasonable in the future.

“There was this great silence during the Cold War. Obviously, there were debates going on, some quieter than others, but there was a generalised feeling among the population that the subject was too complicated. At some point it became crazy.”

The Churchill Archives Centre holds the papers of Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Margaret Thatcher, in addition to over 570 other collections of personal papers. The conference was produced in cooperation with the Howard H. Baker Jr Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee.