Who won the Cold War for the West?

Just who won the Cold War? Many have people claimed the credit for what came close to being a pyrrhic victory.


Certainly the American military like to think they did. They were certainly right when they kept bamboozling the American people for yet more and more money because the Russians were close behind. And the fact remains the Russians were never that far behind. They didn’t have the electronics and the miniaturisation, but they had overwhelming numbers on their side and a population who would have taken the punishment.


The Jeans Genie



So who might you ask finally brought Russia to its knees? A good as claim as any might be made by a Bavarian-born dry goods merchant called Levi Strauss. He certainly wasn’t alone when consumerism won the Cold War and Russian people clamoured to have all the things that people in the West took for granted, but if there was one thing that Russians seemed to covet more than colour televisions and microwaves it was genuine American jeans.


The Russians tried hard to replicate them. And certainly the technology to make them was hardly complex but they always failed miserably. It remains perhaps the greatest mystery of the Cold War why the Worker’s Paradise proved incapable of making a decent pair of jeans.


It was back in 1873 when Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis secured the patent for using copper rivets so strengthen the pockets on miner’s overalls. And for a long time after that blue jeans were the uniform of the labouring man. They were cheap to make, easy to clean, hard to ruin and comfortable to wear.


They would stayed as working mans trousers too if it wasn’t for two of the twentieth century’s most successful industries – movies and marketing. By the time John Wayne abandoned chaps for jeans in Stagecoach in 1939, they already had a following outside of working men.


In 1944 Life magazine caused a storm by publishing a photograph of two Wellesley College women in jeans and preachers up and down the country were denouncing them as fornication pants. They were soon followed by Marlon Brando’s jeans and leathers in Wild Ones 1953, James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause 1955,along with Elvis and Marlborough man. Soon Lee Cooper got in the act with zips and young people everywhere wanted to be seen in jeans. Oddly the addition of zips made jeans even more wicked in the eyes of the Bible thumpers. Strange when you compare the ease of access afforded by tight jeans compared with skirts and conventional trousers. By the end of the Sixties they had become a youthful badge of identity and a protest against conformity. They were the de rigueur uniform of Rock n’ Roll.


The Russians never had American missiles launched against them and yet Levi Strauss fired off millions of his Cold war Winners. Such was the desirability of jeans in Russia, that Soviet law enforcement brought in ‘jeans crimes’, a law violation arraigned against anyone caught trying to smuggle in denim items.



Oddly it took a French philosopher and one time friend of Che Guevara who would be the first to see who would win the Cold War. When he remarked: ‘There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than the entire Soviet Army’

We all owe Levis Strauss a great deal.