You’re right, he does expand on this in part 2, and those are valid criticisms even if I wouldn’t agree with the conclusion that the soviets were just a bunch of beurocrats who wanted power for powers sake:

An almost impenetrable thicket of myths and falsehoods surrounds the so-called Cold War, which was anything but cold for the billions of people who live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The dominant narrative is that the war was between the “West”, led by the United States, which was trying to spread capitalism and democracy, and the “East” led by the Soviet Union, which was trying to spread socialism and communism. It is absurd to claim that the installation by the USA and its allies of countless bloodthirsty dictators from the Shah to Saddam to Somoza had anything to do with “spreading democracy”, but the first part of the dominant narrative is correct: the USA and its imperialist allies were indeed fighting a war to spread capitalism and crush any resistance to it. What is false is that the Soviet Union was trying to spread socialism and communism. On the contrary, time and again the fake revolutionaries who ruled the USSR provided crucial assistance to the imperialists. The Stalinist “stages” theory of history held that anti-capitalist revolutions were impossible in nations oppressed by imperialism — because the working class was too small and weak and because the task of the day was to abolish feudal and other pre-capitalist obstacles to the spread of capitalism — and its proponents argued that a protracted period of capitalist development was necessary before class contradictions in these nations could come to approximate those in the imperialist nations, and only then could the struggle for socialism could be put on the agenda. So, instead of leading struggles to bring revolutionary governments of workers and farmers to power, Moscow instructed the communist parties under its control to become junior partners in alliances with the supposedly progressive wing of the national bourgeoisie, leading to countless catastrophic defeats, Iran in 1953 and Indonesia in 1965 being two major examples. As Che Guevara said, “the indigenous bourgeoisies have lost all capacity to oppose imperialism — if they ever had any…. There are no other alternatives. Either a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution.”

It is notable that the only revolutionary victories during the so-called Cold War occurred under the leadership of communist parties that had broken at least partially from subservience to Moscow (Yugoslavia, China, Korea, Vietnam), or of revolutionary movements and parties that had never been in Moscow’s orbit in the first place (e.g. Cuba, Nicaragua, Algeria). Perhaps the most instructive example is that of Vietnam. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the victors — Truman, Churchill (assisted by Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, whose election as Prime Minister of Britain was confirmed mid-conference) and Stalin, met to share out the spoils of victory. Hoping to continue the USSR’s wartime alliance with the supposed to be the antifascist, progressive wing of imperialism, Stalin agreed that France’s Indochinese colonies should be returned to their rightful owner, namely France.

In defiance of this, on September 2 1945, before half a million people gathered in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam — but nothing was done to prepare an appropriate welcome for imperialist troops (including 20,000 soldiers of the 20th Indian Division, part of the Indian army under Britain’s colonial command) sent to enforce the nefarious decision taken at Potsdam. Instead, acting under Moscow’s orders, the ICP leadership greeted the first contingents of British troops to arrive (on 12-13 September) with welcome banners and attempted to shake hands with their commander, General Gracey, but were contemptuously brushed aside. Gracey seized government buildings, declared martial law, freed Japanese prisoners of war, armed them and used them as a temporary police force until French military forces arrived to reinstate their colonial rule. Following this utterly avoidable disaster, the Vietnamese liberation forces resumed their struggle and pledged to never again subordinate their interests to the foreign policy of another power.

Vietnam in 1945 was far from the only time that Stalin acted as an accomplice to imperialism’s crimes. Vietnam’s history has similarities with Korea’s, which Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed should be also divided and placed under military occupation (at their notorious February 1945 meeting in Yalta) — leading to the Korean War, in which the US dropped more bombs than had been used by both sides in the Pacific theatre of World War II. By 1953, two and half million Koreans lay dead, but even this did not crush their resistance to imperialist occupation. Aided by some 300,000 soldiers from China (whose social revolution triumphed in 1949), Korea’s working people, led by Kim Il-Sung and the Korean Workers Party, inflicted the first ever military defeat upon the United States, for which they have never been forgiven and for which they continue to be cruelly punished.

Moscow’s official policy throughout the Cold War was “peaceful coexistence”, code for class collaboration, and can be understood as the continuation of its post-war betrayal of the Korean and Vietnamese outlined above (there are many other nations and peoples on this list, not least the Jews of Europe and the people of Palestine, both of whom were betrayed by Moscow’s anti-Semitism and by its connivance with the establishment of Israel in 1948).

These facts are not widely known, not even among left-wing and progressive forces, because neither liberal nor conservative opinion-formers have any interest in reminding us of these facts, and neither do those left-wing movements who have their origins in the Stalin-led ‘communist movement’.

The dominant mainstream narrative on the Cold War has yet to be seriously challenged; on the contrary, the truth is buried under more and more layers of rubbish. Yet only a moment’s thought is needed to see its absurdity and its deeply reactionary nature. The “East” in the East-West confrontation was Moscow, yet Moscow is, geographically speaking, part of the West, the eastern edge of white Europe. The real East is invisible in this risible, incredibly Eurocentric narrative, and the same fate of invisibility befalls the entire South: the North-South conflict, i.e. the struggle between imperialism and its colonies and neo-colonies, is entirely collapsed into the so-called East-West conflict. Liberation struggles and revolutionary movements from Asia to Africa to Latin America are regarded as mere pawns of Moscow, without grievances of their own, without any agency of their own — this is not only absurd, it is also transparently racist.

Only by exposing the lies that are contained in the term “Cold War” can I answer the question about whether there has been any change in imperialist behavior since it ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Just as the very notion of the Cold War is premised on falsehood, it is also false that the West won the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the partial eclipse of the political forces that looked to Moscow for leadership has severely weakened an important prop of the imperialist world order. Far from inaugurating a unipolar world in which the USA and its imperialist allies could exercise untrammeled power, the post-Cold War world has seen accelerating chaos and disorder. The imperialists convinced themselves that they had won a great victory and celebrated by launching a series of wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, beginning with George Bush senior’s war on Iraq in 1991 in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin wall. But their hubris led to overconfidence, and each and every military adventure they have undertaken since the end of the Cold War has led them into a quagmire of death, division and recrimination, with nothing resembling a victory in sight. Unfortunately, if the imperialists cannot be said to have won the Cold War, neither can it be said that victory belongs to their adversaries, the working class and oppressed peoples of the world. Victory never falls into our lap, it must be fought for. What’s lacking are revolutionary leaders of the caliber of Lenin, Che, Fidel, Grenada’s Maurice Bishop, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and others, and political movements inspired by them, able to take advantage of the imperialists’ growing weakness and disarray.