Basically I am trying to give the Russian's blame for using brinkmanship in the Cuban Missile crisis. I know they did some reckless stuff, like having a nuclear torpedo submarine along the fleet of vessels that approached the blockade, or stationing 42,000 troops in Cuba with Captains that have they authority to launch tactical nuclear weapons.
I have sufficient argument to blame the USA, but for the USSR I am drawing blanks. I have access to JSTOR, I really need help as this essay is due Friday January 9th Monday and really need help.
Extra: I cannot recall if it was sheldon stern or ted sorenson who made this comment, but there was speculation that there had been a power shift in Moscow between the Friday and Sunday proposal. I never followed up, or knew where to find anything, does anyone have an idea?
Do you have access to a library with actual books in it? (This isn't a shot or a joke, the University I am studying at has a library but most books take at least one full day to be transported from a warehouse, and it quite often simply does not have the books to begin with).
I'd recommend Naftali and Fursenko's One Hell of a Gamble although far from a perfect book, it will give you some solid evidence. The very fact that the Soviets thought Castro wasn't eager to launch an attack, and that they could easily control Fidel shows significant misjudgement on their part. To grossly oversimplify (and again I think this is where Naftali and Fursenko's book really should have either avoided dealing with Castro or admitted the bias in their sources) the Soviets put themselves in a situation where they'd terrified and infuriated the Americans, but also where they had to act more aggressively than they both wanted to or were able to back up.
Basically I recommend looking at this from the top-level; look at Khrushchev not just during the Crisis but leading up to it. Khrushchev very often misread or misunderstood American leaders. It's not that he couldn't push Kennedy around, it's that he completely ignored and misread the consequences of doing so. The main consequence of embarrassing a Kennedy is typically that they try to destroy you, either figuratively or literally - Kennedy knew he couldn't destroy Khrushchev, but he was simply not going to be pushed around or embarrassed by communist leaders again.
So Khrushchev thought he could play chicken with a train, a train he kept shovelling coal into. Andrei Gromyko's memoirs back this up in that he has no praise for Khrushchev but takes a moment to praise Kennedy during the crisis. You should also consider that the act of placing nuclear weapons that close to the U.S., in secret, when conventional forces would have more than adequately served Cuban security concerns, was itself an act of idiotic brinksmanship.
I could go on, but generally if you look at brinksmanship in the way JFD would have understood it, the U.S.S.R. just leading up to and during the Crisis was very clearly the aggressor.