(Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War) is an exhaustive, immensely ambitious nine-part, ten-hour series that covers the Cold War from before the beginning (the Russian Revolution) to after the end (the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Or did it ever end? As national-security journalist Garrett Graff puts it in the series, “If you open the newspaper on any given day, we’re still living with the aftermath of the Cold War.” The original Cold War may have wrapped up with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rise of Perestroika, but it has revived as Russian President Vladimir Putin resuscitated the country’s aggressive nationalist spirit when he was elected Russian president on the last day of 1999.
However you define the Cold War’s parameters, Turning Point is a mighty feat of historical documentary storytelling. (T)he series combines the veracity and thoroughness of a Frontline installment with the style (and, by all appearances, the budget) of a major documentary release.
I’m about 1/2 way through this and it’s an amazing history lesson, chock full of stuff even this 60+ yr old woman had never heard before.
If you’re at all interested in knowing how we all got here, now, this is the show for you.
Netflix hit this one out of the park.
Glasnost and Gorbachev was a thing. So I’d say Putin definitely has reversed a lot of progress.
Western colonialism has never ended, and Russian colonialism only took a dip around perestroika but never ceded completely. China got into the game in the 90s or 2000s, too, and here we are. Humankind never stops exploiting and killing each other and the rest of the biosphere so war in general never ends.
At least until the expanding sun sterilises earth, of course.
