Explaining the GDR's economic strategy

1986 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Baylis
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Price Shocks ◽  
Economic Strategy ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
The Face

The GDR's fundamental economic strategy since 1971, as reflected in but also modified by its response to the “price shocks” of the 1970s and the ensuing credit squeeze of the early 1980s, has been shaped in important measure by the pressures imposed and the opportunities offered by its complex relationship with the German Federal Republic. The direct and indirect constraints resulting from the GDR's status as junior partner in its alliance with the Soviet Union, the terms of the still tenuous accommodation the regime has worked out with its own citizens, and changes and conflicts within the political elite have also influenced the GDR's choices. The shortterm and long-term measures taken in response to the shocks appear to have been surprisingly successful, even though there is evidence that two of the latter–the return to a policy of economic reform “in small steps” and the utilization of the GDR's “West German connection” to restore its creditworthiness and strengthen its access to Western technology–proceeded only in the face of internal and external controversy. The GDR's apparent success in comparison to its East European neighbors must be attributed to a number of factors, only one of which is its special relationship with the Federal Republic.

The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1)

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
Collapse Of Communism

The largely peaceful collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected the profound changes that Mikhail Gorbachev had carried out in Soviet foreign policy. Successful though the process was in Eastern Europe, it had destabilizing repercussions within the Soviet Union. The effects were both direct and indirect. The first part of this two-part article looks at Gorbachev's policy toward Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism in the region, and the direct “spillover” from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union. The second part of the article, to be published in the next issue of the journal, discusses the indirect spillover into the Soviet Union and the fierce debate that emerged within the Soviet political elite about the “loss” of the Eastern bloc—a debate that helped spur the leaders of the attempted hardline coup d'état in August 1991.

Over the Horizon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Edelstein
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
The Cold War

This book examines how existing great powers in international relations respond to the rise or resurgence of other great powers. More specifically, it seeks to account for why existing powers often cooperate with rising powers despite the long-term threat that they potentially pose. To account for this behavior, the theory presented in the book focuses on the time horizons of political leaders . Leaders are unlikely to adopt competitive and costly strategies in the face of uncertainty about a rising power’s long-term intentions. Instead, they profit from cooperation in the short-term while they await more and better information about the rising state’s interests and intentions. To test this argument against alternative arguments, the book presents case studies of four modern examples of rising great powers and their strategic interactions with existing great powers: the rise of late nineteenth century Germany, the emergence of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the resurgence of interwar Germany, and the development of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the cold war. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications of the argument for international relations theory and the contemporary rise of China.

Curtain of Lies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The West ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cold War

Curtain of Lies examines the role of truth in the political culture of the Cold War by looking at Eastern Europe during the period from 1948–1956. It examines how actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain tried to delineate the “truth” of Eastern Europe and how this worked to set the parameters of knowledge about the region. Eastern Europe’s Communist governments, under the guidance of the Soviet Union, tried to convince their citizens that the West was the land of imperialist warmongers and that Communism would bring a glorious future to the region. Their propaganda efforts were challenged by competing discourses emanating from the West, which claimed that Eastern Europe was a totalitarian land of captive slaves, powerless in the face of Soviet aggression. Curtain of Lies investigates the ways that ordinary East Europeans were affected by and contributed to these two ways of thinking about their homelands, concentrating on the interactions between refugees who illegally fled Eastern Europe in the early 1950s and American-sponsored radio stations that broadcast across the Iron Curtain. These broadcasters interviewed refugees as sources of knowledge about life under Communist rule. Careful analysis of these interviews shows, however, that the meanings East European émigrés gave to their own experiences could be influenced by what they had heard on Western broadcasts. Broadcasters and their listeners (who also served as their sources) mutually reinforced their own assumptions about the meaning of Communism, helping to create the evidentiary foundation for totalitarian interpretations of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

CMEA: effective but cumbersome political economy

1986 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Marrese
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Economic Costs ◽  
Short Term ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Mutual Economic Assistance ◽  
Over Time

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance is primarily a forum for bilateral bargaining between the Soviet Union and each of the other CMEA countries. The bilateral negotiations are conducted with tremendous concern for Soviet long-term preferences and for the short-term economic-political stability of East European countries. The CMEA provides the Soviet Union with an effective but cumbersome politico-economic policy-making apparatus that is becoming less effective and increasingly cumbersome over time. From the East European perspective, the CMEA tends to solidify the positions of the East European leaders yet generate long-term economic costs. What are the preferences upon which the CMEA is constructed? How are CMEA characteristics related to these preferences? What are the economic costs and benefits to member countries in static and dynamic terms? Why have costs for all member countries risen over time? How is intra-CMEA trade likely to change during the next decade?

scholarly journals Frontier Dynamics: Reflections on Evangelical and Tablighi Missions in Central Asia

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-241
Author(s):  
Mathijs Pelkmans
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Kyrgyz Republic ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Successes And Failures

AbstractMissionaries have flocked to the Kyrgyz Republic ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evangelical-Pentecostal and Tablighi missions have been particularly active on what they conceive of as a fertile post-atheist frontier. But as these missions project their message of truth onto the frontier, the dangers of the frontier may overwhelm them. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst foreign and local Tablighis and evangelical-Pentecostals, this article formulates an analytic of the frontier that highlights the affective and relational characteristics of missionary activities and their effects. This analytic explains why and how missionaries are attracted to the frontier, as well as some of the successes and failures of their expansionist efforts. In doing so, the article reveals the potency of instability, a feature that is particularly evident in missionary work, but also resonates with other frontier situations.

SOVIET-CHINESE COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF SPORTS AFTER THE NORMALIZATION OF BILATERAL RELATIONS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE IRKUTSK REGION

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-149
Author(s):  
A.V. Surzhko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Irkutsk Region ◽  
Ping Pong ◽  
Bilateral Cooperation ◽  
Sports Officials

The article examines the main aspects of Soviet-Chinese cooperation in the field of sports after the normalization of bilateral relations in the late 1980s — early 1990s. Sport was one of the factors that contributed to overcoming the consequences of the thirty-year split between the USSR and the PRC at the state, regional and informal levels. During this period, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China actively exchanged numerous sports delegations, adopting each other's successful experience in organizing and conducting competitions, as well as training athletes. In the USSR, Chinese national sports were popularized, primarily wushu and ping-pong. More traditional for the Soviet side was football, matches in which Soviet and Chinese athletes repeatedly played. Also, the article reveals some economic aspects of sports bilateral cooperation. A common thing for this period was the conclusion of various kinds of agreements and contracts at the interregional level, including those related to the sports component. The personal role of regional party functionaries, sports officials and athletes in the development of Soviet-Chinese relations is shown. There is a certain continuity between the perestroika period and the "golden age" of Soviet-Chinese cooperation in the 1950s. The experience of cooperation in sports gained at the end of perestroika had a beneficial effect on the development of Russian-Chinese relations in the 1990s. The study is carried out on the example of the Irkutsk region, which, due to objective reasons, has developed long-term and strong relations with a number of Chinese cities. The main source of the research was the Irkutsk regional periodicals.

Flowers Through Concrete

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliane Fürst
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Psychiatric Hospitals ◽  
Stable Relationship ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Socialism

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland does what the title promises. It takes readers on a journey into a world few knew existed: the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies, who in the face of disapproval and repression created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting, manipulating, and shaping it to their late socialist environment. This book is a quasi-guide into the underground hippieland, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study in the power of transnational youth cultures. It tells the almost forgotten story of how in the late sixties hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union, often under the tutelage of a few rebellious youngsters coming from privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds—hippies were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed nonconformism was a symptom of schizophrenia. It also advances a surprising argument: despite obvious antagonism the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not incompatible. Indeed, Soviet hippies and late socialist reality meshed so well that the hostile, yet stable, relationship that emerged was in many ways symbiotic. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.

East European military expenditures in the 1970s: collective good or bargaining offer?

1983 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Reisinger
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Gross National Product ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Expenditures ◽  
Domestic Support ◽  
Nicolae Ceausescu ◽  
General Secretary

In late November 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, returned to Bucharest from a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). In a series of speeches from 25 November through 1 December, he began to denounce efforts by the Soviet Union to integrate more fully the armies of the WTO members and to get the East European members to increase their defense expenditures. Ceausescu was making a dramatic (and apparently successful) appeal for domestic support for his resistance to Soviet pressure. Other WTO member-states, although less publicly, have also resisted this Soviet pressure. Romania is not the only East European state ignoring Soviet calls for higher defense spending. Poland, for example, has also shown a significant decline during the 1970s in the amount of its gross national product (GNP) spent on defense (D/GNP). East Germany, on the other hand, increased its expenditures dramatically over the same decade.

scholarly journals Dyplomacja Nicolae Ceauşescu wobec przemian politycznych w Polsce w 1989 roku

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 239-258
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Nowak
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Warsaw Pact ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Communist Leader ◽  
Armed Intervention ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Gorbachev Era ◽  
Nicolae Ceausescu

Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Diplomacy in the Face of Political Changes in Poland in 1989 In 1989, Romania belonged to the communist countries, which particularly strongly attacked communist Poland for carrying out democratic reforms. For many months the diplomacy of communist leader Nicolae Ceaşescu tried to organize a conference of socialist countries on the subject of Poland, but as a result of Moscow’s opposition it did not come to fruition. During the Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union rejected the Brezhnev doctrine, while Romania actually urged its restoration. This was in contradiction with the current political line of Ceauşescu in favor of not interfering in the internal affairs of socialist countries. However, in 1989 it was a threat to communism, which is why historians also have polemics about Romanian suggestions for the armed intervention of the Warsaw Pact in Poland. In turn, Romania did not allow Poland to interfere in the problems of the Polish minority in Bukovina.

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