Beneš-Stalin-Roosevelt-Truman

1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Roucek

The year of 1948 was one of the most critical ones of the postwar period. The presence of the Cold War could no longer be denied. Berlin was under Soviet blockade; Yugoslavia had broken with the Cominform; in elections in Italy it was feared that the Italian Communist party would be widely successful; France was in the grip of Communist-inspired workers’ strikes; Mao Tse-Tung was triumphing in China. Above all, Czechoslovakia, a country which had enjoyed real democracy from its birth in 1918, until the tragic Munich Agreement in 1938, where its people treasured political and personal freedom above everything else, and at the same time entertained the friendliest possible feelings towards the Russians, lost its democracy and became a Soviet satellite with the connivance of Moscow. Dr. Eduard Beneš, who had returned to his country, via Moscow, as President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and who had been promised by Stalin and Molotov, on several occasions, that they would not interfere with the internal affairs of his country, lost his power to Gottwald and his communist group while Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Zorin, who “happened” to be in Prague at the critical moment on a trade mission, supervised the transfer of power to the new masters of Czechoslovakia.

Author(s):  
Bradley Simpson

The US relationship with the Republic of Indonesia has gone through three distinct phases. From 1945 until 1966 Indonesia’s politics and foreign policy were driven by the imperatives of decolonization and nation building, dominated by its founding President Sukarno and cleaved by bitter rivalry between secular political forces, regional movements, Islamic parties and organizations, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the armed forces. In the aftermath of the September 30th Movement, an alleged coup by the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party), under the leadership of General Suharto, launched a campaign of mass murder in which hundreds of thousands of alleged Communists were killed and Sukarno ousted. Suharto would rule Indonesia for the next thirty-two years (1966 to 1998). With the Cold War inside Indonesia effectively over and a staunchly anti-Communist and pro-US regime in power, US-Indonesian relations entered a long period of what one might call authoritarian development in which US officials focused on political stability, supported the military’s heavy involvement in politics, encouraged pro-Western investment and development policies, and sought to downplay growing criticism of Suharto’s abysmal record on human rights, democracy, corruption, and the environment. The end of the Cold War reduced the strategic imperative of backing authoritarian rule in Indonesia, and over the course of the 1990s domestic opposition to Suharto steadily built among moderate Islamic forces, human rights and women’s activists, environmental campaigners, and a burgeoning pro-democracy movement. The Asian financial crisis, which began in the summer of 1997, accelerated the forces undermining Suharto’s rule, forcing his resignation in May 1998 and inaugurating a third phase of formally democratic politics, which continues to the 21st century. Since 1998 US policy has focused on regional economic and security cooperation, counterterrorism, trade relations, and countering the growing regional power of China.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002252662110314
Author(s):  
Pavel Mücke

The long-term First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and later also President of the Republic, Antonín Novotný (1904–75), was popularly known as “Nice Tony”. As a communist politician and statesman, Novotný was well known as a great disciple and follower of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, famous for his personal and very contact-oriented diplomacy. The main contours of several of Novotný's official visits have already been analysed from political and diplomatic history perspectives. Based on archival research and available memoirs, this article tries to reconstruct the still non-visible and unknown view of transport history and, consequently, traveling and tourism history. It outlines the general contours and several aspects of V.I.P. communists’ international travels on the cases of several trips abroad which took place during the 1950s and 1960s of the Cold War era.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Xhavit Sadrijaj

NATO did not intervene in the Balkans to overcome Yugoslavia, or destroy it, but above all to avoid violence and to end discrimination. (Shimon Peres, the former Israeli foreign minister, winner of Nobel Prize for peace) NATO’s intervention in the Balkans is the most historic case of the alliance since its establishment. After the Cold War or the "Fall of the Iron Curtain" NATO somehow lost the sense of existing since its founding reason no longer existed. The events of the late twenties in the Balkans, strongly brought back the alliance proving the great need for its existence and defining dimensions and new concepts of security and safety for the alliance in those tangled international relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Zilya Khabibullina

The Spiritual Administrations of Muslims of the USSR were official organizations accountable to the Council for Religious Affairs, which concerned with regulation the life of religious communities in the allocated territory. Their competence included functions of a theological nature, statistical treatment, observation of cult objects and believers. Under the pressure of post-war circumstances, the beginning of the Cold War, religious organizations were engaged in the propaganda foreign policy tasks of the USSR. In permitted international contacts, they created a positive image of the country and demonstrated freedom of religion. The article examines the participation of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European part of the USSR and Siberia in the spread of the Soviet ideological project abroad. Territorially, the spiritual administration was located in Ufa, the materials of the National Archives of the Republic of Bashkortostan offer an insight into such forms of interaction with the foreign world as: staff meetings of the spiritual administration with representatives of foreign states, visits of Islamic spiritual leaders to Muslim countries, their publication in foreign editions, participation in international conferences, the presence of believers of the USSR in Saudi Arabia during the Hajj. In the 1950s DUMES has been converted regularly subjected to demonstrations to foreign guests of Bashkiria and all kinds of delegations as a symbol of freedom of conscience in the USSR. The Muslim clergy had promoted of the Soviet lifestyle and the country’s achievements in a deep crisis of religious life in the USSR.


Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 451-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.


Author(s):  
A.A. Mushta ◽  
◽  
T.V. Rastimehina ◽  

The interrelated concepts of memory policy, historical policy and security policy are considered. It is shown that in Russia and in the Republic of Belarus there is a steady trend of securitization of historical policy and memory policy. The tendencies of indoctrination of the securitist model of historical policy into official documents of both states are considered. It is shown that both in Belarus and in Russia, the internal political confrontation is considered in the historicist construct of the Cold War. It is argued that in the context of the need to deepen integration within the framework of the Union State, it is necessary to search for a relatively unified holistic concept of history for all the forces of Russian and Belarusian societies.


Author(s):  
Jason Lim

The term “overseas Chinese” refers to people who left the Qing Empire (and later on, the Republic of China or ROC) for a better life in Southeast Asia. Some of them arrived in Southeast Asia as merchants. They were either involved in retail or wholesale trade, or importing and exporting goods between the Qing Empire/ROC and Southeast Asia. With the decolonization of Southeast Asia from the end of World War II in 1945, overseas Chinese commerce was targeted by nationalists because the merchants were seen to have been working together with the colonial authorities and to have enriched themselves at the expense of locals. New nationalist regimes in Southeast Asia introduced anti-Chinese legislation in order to reduce the overseas Chinese presence in economic activities. Chinese merchants were banned from certain trades and trade monopolies were broken down. Several Southeast Asian states also attempted to assimilate the overseas Chinese by forcing them to adopt local-sounding names. However, the overseas Chinese continued to be dominant in the economies of Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore. Malaysia introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which has an anti-Chinese agenda, in 1970. The decolonization process also occurred during the Cold War, and Chinese merchants sought to continue trade with China at a time when governments in Southeast Asia were suspicious of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Attempts by merchants from Malaya and Singapore to trade with the PRC in 1956 were considered to have failed, as the PRC had other political concerns. By the time Singapore had gained independence in 1965, the door to investment and trade with the PRC was shut, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia turned their backs on China by taking on citizenship in their countries of residence.


Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis

This chapter follows Eva Palmer Sikelianos's life to its end. From writing Upward Panic to exchanging weaving tips, to translating Angelos Sikelianos's work, to becoming a polylingual correspondent with hundreds of people as World War II gave way to the Cold War, Eva made writing the primary medium of her art of living. She found urgency in writing—a clarity of purpose that propelled her into the present in a new way—especially after she received a contraband package of Angelos's wartime resistance poems on the eve of the Greek civil war in 1944. The urgency of that critical moment thrust her into political action, turning her pen into a tool for anti-imperialist activism in a way that set up her brilliant last act.


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