In the early 1980s, Soviet–US relations, which had deteriorated since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, reached a new low under President Ronald Reagan, who imposed sanctions on the USSR and escalated nuclear build-up. This chapter investigates Moscow's growing challenges: a quagmire in Afghanistan, and a crisis in Poland in 1980–81, which very nearly resulted in a Soviet military intervention. The chapter documents internal Soviet debate on the pros and cons of invading Poland to quash the anti-Communist protests. It then recounts the Kremlin's response to Reagan's militant rhetoric: increasing paranoia, fears of a pre-emptive strike, and a renewed interest in better relations with China.

This chapter explores the relationship between Russian nationalism and official war memory during the zenith of nationalist participation in Soviet politics (1968–1980s). It focuses on some of the most explicit nationalist writings and the involvement of nationalist enthusiasts in late-socialist memory politics to determine the war’s place in the pro-regime nationalist imagination. As the chapter argues, Russian nationalists reveled in prerevolutionary Russian themes but largely abstained from claiming the war as an unambiguously Russian achievement. That is to say that at the peak of official support for Russian nationalist expression and activism, the Russocentric paradigm did not extend to official representations of victory, even among this paradigm’s most ardent supporters. In an era defined by the growth of Russian national self-expression, the victory myth retained its role as social leveler and instrument of pan-Soviet identity and mobilization. At the same time, however, several prominent nationalist writers and activists found ways to navigate the Soviet people doctrine by exploiting areas of ambiguity and overlap with the war’s official memory. By the end of the 1970s, among nationalist intellectuals and their supporters, this patriotic parallelism had begun to redefine the nature of victory in subtle but not insignificant ways.