Netflix’s new documentary series, Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, opens with a captivating premise: Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine has imposed on the West unenviable conditions akin to those that pertained during the Cold War. Indeed, the series posits that Putin’s war cannot be understood without a study of the rivalry between the superpowers. But that pretense is swiftly abandoned. The series’ real purpose is to push a revisionist history that manages to render the Soviet Union a bit player in a Cold War narrative that might as well have been lifted from Howard Zinn’s fevered imagination. Though this could not have been the documentarians’ intention, the series might even convince some viewers that Putin has a point.
Within the first few minutes of episode one, the audience is confronted with the documentary’s true objective. “We were so good. We were the country that finally was so virtuous, in addition to being powerful,” says Overthrow author Stephen Kinzer in a blithe summary of the post-war American ethos. “And it was logical that we would then be threatened by a hostile, evil force that wanted nothing but destruction and nihilism.” The documentary then sets out to prove these two presumptions wrong.
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