Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early History ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

scholarly journals The Soviet Military Plan of Tokyo (1966)

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Kent
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
City Plan ◽  
The City

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> As part of its secret Cold War mapping programme, the Soviet Union produced detailed plans of over 2,000 towns and cities within foreign territories around the globe. Some of these maps were made available for the first time in 1993 at the 16th International Cartographic Conference in Cologne, Germany, via a Latvian map dealer who discovered them at an abandoned depot outside Riga as the Red Army withdrew. However, Soviet city plans have only recently become the topic of cartographic research, which has provided some insights into aspects of their production, accuracy and purpose, that continue to have relevance for mapping diverse urban environments today.</p><p>This paper focuses on the city plan of Tokyo, which comprises four sheets and was produced by the General Staff of the Soviet Union in 1966. Street names are transcribed to allow phonetic pronunciation and the plan identifies almost 400 important objects (from factories to hospitals), which are described in a numbered list. Although the street-level detail of the plan is produced according to a standard specification and symbology, it adopts an uncommon scale of 1&amp;thinsp;:&amp;thinsp;20,000 (with contours at 5-metre intervals) and incorporates an unusual and transitory cartographic style in the history of the series.</p><p>In addition to highlighting the main features of the plan and exploring some possible sources, this paper interprets the wider context of the Soviet military plans of Japanese towns and cities (over 90 are known to have been mapped during the Cold War). Aside from their historical significance, it suggests how understanding the city plans can reveal how problems of the design and portrayal of detailed topographic information may be overcome through their unfamiliar, yet comprehensive, cartographic language.</p>

The Repurposed City of Berlin

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-194
Author(s):  
Quill R Kukla
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
Spatial Logic ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Different Order

This chapter explores the landscape of Berlin, taken as a city that shapes the agency of its inhabitants, and shows how, conversely, the residents of Berlin have remade spaces in their city to suit their needs. Berlin is a repurposed city: it was built to support a series of spatial and political orders that are now defunct, and its material structure must now be reused by different residents inhabiting a different order. In particular, the Cold War division of Berlin into east and west, divided by the Berlin Wall, fundamentally shaped the space of the city, and postunification residents must find ways to creatively repurpose this space. The chapter begins with the spatial history of Berlin and an analysis of its current spatial logic. It then provides detailed explorations and readings of a series of repurposed spaces within the city, comparing their present and past uses and meanings, and situating them within the history and spatial logic of each city.

Global Development

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Lorenzini
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

In the Cold War, “development” was a catchphrase that came to signify progress, modernity, and economic growth. Development aid was closely aligned with the security concerns of the great powers, for whom infrastructure and development projects were ideological tools for conquering hearts and minds around the globe, from Europe and Africa to Asia and Latin America. This book provides a global history of development, drawing on a wealth of archival evidence to offer a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a Cold War phenomenon that transformed the modern world. Taking readers from the aftermath of the Second World War to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the book shows how development projects altered local realities, transnational interactions, and even ideas about development itself. The book shines new light on the international organizations behind these projects—examining their strategies and priorities and assessing the actual results on the ground—and it also gives voice to the recipients of development aid. It shows how the Cold War shaped the global ambitions of development on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and how international organizations promoted an unrealistically harmonious vision of development that did not reflect local and international differences. The book presents a global perspective on Cold War development, demonstrating how its impacts are still being felt today.

Louis Menand: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. 2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 546 pp.

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-204
Author(s):  
Lance Kenney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
William James ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
The Cold War

Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, daunting in its choice of subject matter, closely aligns itself with the ancient sense of the word ‘history’ as a fluid, almost epic narrative. The Metaphysical Club of the title was a conversation group that met in Cambridge for a few months in 1872. Its membership roster listed some of the greatest intellectuals of the day: Charles Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, amongst others. There is no record of the Club’s discussions or debates—in fact, the only direct reference to the Club is made by Peirce in a letter written thirty-five years later. Menand utilizes the Club as a jumping-off point for a sweeping analysis of the beliefs of the day. The subtitle of the book belies its true mission: ‘a story of ideas in America.’ Menand discusses the intellectual and social conditions that helped shape these men by the time they were members of the Club. He then shows the philosophical, political, and cultural impact that these men went on to have. In doing so, Menand traces a history of ideas in the United States from immediately prior to the Civil War to the beginning of the Cold War.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

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.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

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