The Third World War broke like a storm over the fields of central Europe. Moving with ruthless speed, the communist forces smashed through West Germany’s defences and advanced on the Rhine, while Soviet commandos landed in Norway and Turkey. Then the pendulum swung as Nato troops mounted a heroic stand near the German town of Krefeld, while American sailors and pilots began to wrest back control of the seas and the skies.

As the Warsaw Pact’s armies stalled and began to retreat, the hard men in the Kremlin faced an awful decision. With a conventional victory out of reach, perhaps only the ultimate weapon would stave off the spectre of defeat and force their opponents to come to terms. So it was that on August 20, 1985, the masters of the Soviet Union realised the dream of a generation of British town planners. They dropped a nuclear bomb on Birmingham.

Illustration of dominoes falling, representing the Cold War.

Such was the future according to The Third World War, a stark call to arms published by a former British commander in West Germany, General John Hackett, in 1978. We now know the tanks never rolled west and Birmingham survived relatively unscathed, but might things really have been as bad?

Yes, the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok says in his readable short account of the Cold War. In crises like the Cuban missile standoff of 1962, he writes, “humanity was extraordinarily lucky”. With different leadership the world might have faced nuclear Armageddon. Thank goodness, then, that we have such impressive leaders today.

Why are there are so few gripping histories of the Cold War? One explanation is the subject is just so vast, but the fact remains that many standard accounts, such as the one by the American historian John Lewis Gaddis, are sensationally boring. This book is much better: brisk, spiky and unafraid to make provocative judgments.

Born and educated in Moscow with a close knowledge of Soviet sources, Zubok doesn’t blame Stalin for the Cold War. Although he is clear-eyed about the dictator’s atrocities, he thinks he was more cautious and pragmatic than we appreciate and he places the lion’s share of responsibility for the ideological conflict with the US.

He writes that western observers exaggerated the dangers of the exhausted Red Army, overestimated the potential of the sclerotic Soviet economy and dismissed the deep patriotism — or, perhaps, nationalism — of the Russians. Many readers will disagree with him but at least he makes you think.

Atomic cloud rising over Bikini Island during the Baker Day nuclear test.

The Baker nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 1946

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Although Zubok works hard to give equal weight to both sides, it’s clear his interest lies in the Kremlin, not the White House, which is a refreshing change for anybody familiar with the American historiography. Indeed, if his book has a central character, it’s probably Nikita Khrushchev, the vulgar, unscrupulous and emotional peasant who dominated Soviet politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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As early as 1955, just two years after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev hoped for peaceful coexistence with the US but his erratic and touchy personality, as well as growing pressure from Mao’s China, meant he kept being sucked into reckless adventures abroad. His most colourful moment — although not his most dangerous — came at the United Nations in October 1960 when he interrupted a speech by a Philippine delegate by taking off his shoe and banging it on the desk. Most of his Kremlin colleagues, Zubok notes, were mortally embarrassed.

But as Zubok also points out, Khrushchev’s fall in October 1964 was a hugely symbolic moment since he was quietly ushered into retirement rather than executed. In that respect, perhaps, the “evil empire” was not as evil as its critics claimed. Indeed, Khrushchev’s successors, for all their faults, were a long way from the monsters of western propaganda, being more interested in “hunting, drinking and dominoes” than in spreading the gospel of world communism. If their adversaries had only realised how anxious, conservative and cautious they were, perhaps the conflict might have ended much sooner.

Boy chipping away at the Berlin Wall with a hammer and chisel.

A boy chips away at the Berlin Wall, 1989

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Most books on the Cold War fall into two traps. The first is they become an interminable series of summit meetings and missile acronyms, all Salt and Start and SS-20s and ICBMs. Zubok’s book doesn’t entirely avoid this: the chapters on the 1970s, for example, feel formulaic and he sometimes loses sight of the cultural and the social dimensions of the conflict.

The second pitfall is they concentrate overwhelmingly on the two superpowers, treating other nations as puppets, but here Zubok is good at giving countries such as China, West Germany and Cuba plenty of agency. As he shows, there’s even an argument the real turning point came in 1979 — the year Deng Xiaoping began his overhaul of communist China and the Islamic Revolution convulsed Iran. Interestingly, the one country he underplays is the UK, which is rarely mentioned. Perhaps it’s good for us to know we didn’t matter as much as we thought.

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Where Zubok’s book really comes alive, though, is in the final chapters covering the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which he has already discussed in his enormous and brilliant book, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. He insists that, contrary to the triumphalist perception, the US did not win the Cold War by bankrupting the Soviet economy. In fact, Soviet defence spending was perfectly sustainable, while for all its flaws the Soviet system could have limped on for years.

West Berliners watch as East German border guards demolish the Berlin Wall.

East German border guards seen through the fallen Berlin Wall, 1989

GERARD MALIE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

What changed things, he argues, was the elevation in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev, a decent man but a terrible political leader. At some level Zubok likes and even admires Gorbachev, but he believes that power “did not corrupt Gorbachev enough”. His economic and political reforms, born out of commendable idealism, backfired horribly, plunging the Soviet economy into chaos, undermining central authority and handing the initiative to local nationalists.

Crucially, Gorbachev had no military experience and had spent much of his career working on “agriculture and spa resorts”, which meant he was “viscerally averse to any use of force”. So when unrest broke out in the Caucasus and the Baltic at the end of the 1980s, he was slow and half-hearted about sending in the Red Army. That was good news for independence campaigners in Tallinn and Riga but bad news for anybody still attached to the idea of a Soviet empire, which meant the majority of people in Russia.

And even as the Berlin Wall came down, the nations of eastern Europe rushed to embrace democratic capitalism and people across the world breathed a sigh of relief, some observers could see clouds ahead. “Only the well-nourished people in America and Europe,” an assistant to Gorbachev’s foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze noted, “can applaud their liberation from the fear of nuclear apocalypse. This feeling is denied to the country where hunger and misery cloud the light for people” — by which he meant Russia.

We know how that story played out, and for anybody trying to understand why Vladimir Putin smoulders with so much resentment — and why, sad to say, tens of millions of Russians support him — this book is an excellent place to start.

The World of the Cold War, 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok (Pelican £25 pp544). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members