scholarly journals John Connelly's Long March through East European History

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Gary B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe. The book title uses the geographical designation favored during the Cold War, but the subject is more precisely East Central Europe, a term that Connelly uses interchangeably with Eastern Europe to designate the lands lying between Germany and Austria in the west and the former components of the Soviet Union to the east.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. 350-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

The Truth About Friendship Treaties: Behind The Iron Curtain

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Selvage
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War

The basic, legal building blocks for the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War were the bilateral ‘Treaties of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance’ between the states of East Central Europe and the Soviet Union. Germany was the main potential enemy, but the treaties also applied to any state allied with it or any third state in general – most importantly, the United States. This article traces the evolution of the East Central European states' limited sovereignty from the origins of the friendship-treaty system during World War II through to its final reformulation in the mid-1970s. In terms of the Soviet bloc friendship treaties, one can speak of three periodsm the first of which began with the establishment of the system of friendship treaties under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, 1943–1948, and ended with his death in 1953. A second period began after Stalin's death in 1953 and the eventual assumption of power by Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, whose removal ushered in a third and final period for the friendship-treaty system under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev.

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.

Prospects for the Consolidation of Democracy in East Central Europe

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEN BERGLUND
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Continuous Flow ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Collapse Of Communism

Few events have drawn as much interest from the academic community as the breakdown of Soviet-style socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This paper might be classified as yet another in a continuous flow of scientific contributions, inspired by the collapse of communism. And this is indeed the case, but only in an oblique way.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

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