Unreliable Allies

2019 ◽  
pp. 266-288
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
German State ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Great Persistence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Diplomatic Relationship

Chapter 11 turns to a crucial challenge faced by the CIA-backed Russian exiles: the shifting political situation in West Germany, the crucial place d’armes for Cold War political operations against the Soviet bloc. The two main Russian organizations funded by the agency, the NTS and TsOPE, attempted with great persistence to gain the sympathy of West German political and academic elites in the 1950s. German anti-Russian sentiment limited the success of the émigré charm offensive, however, while the shifting form of the Cold War in Europe weakened their position in the country. In the second half of the 1950s, CIA operations utilizing exiles came under scrutiny and pressure from the now sovereign West German state, which sought to safeguard its new diplomatic relationship with the USSR.

‘The Continuation of Politics by Other Means’: Britain, the Two Germanys and the Olympic Games, 1949–1972

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. GERALD HUGHES ◽  
RACHEL J. OWEN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German State ◽  
German States ◽  
British Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Sport ◽  
The Olympic Games

AbstractThis article evaluates the interplay between international sport and international politics during the cold war through an examination of the two Germanys and the Olympics from a British perspective. Germany was at the centre of Olympic and cold war politics between 1945 and the early 1970s, and the two German states competed fiercely over questions of national legitimacy. West Germany was initially successful in denying international recognition to the ‘other’ German state. East Germany countered this by developing a strategy that utilised international sport, particularly the Olympic Games, to further its claims for statehood. While recognising the flaws in the West German case against East Germany, British policy was constrained by the need to accommodate Bonn's sensibilities, given that the Federal Republic was a major ally. An examination of this ‘Olympian’ struggle from a British perspective tells us much about the West's cold war strategy and casts new light on this arena of East–West competition.

„Duch czasu wycisnął jednak na tej pracy swe piętno”. Historia Zagłady w badaniach Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w okresie stalinowskim

2017 ◽  
pp. 138-159
Author(s):  
Stephan Stach
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Research Institution ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw was probably the only research institution in the Soviet Bloc and one of very few that undertook research on the Shoah during the 1950s. This article analyses the institute’s research and working conditions against the background of the general political regime under Stalinism in Poland. It argues that despite sometimes heavy-handed political biases in its publications, the institute made an important contribution to research on the Shoah. Its work also came to the attention of Jewish centers outside the Soviet Bloc, though it was seen through the prism of the Cold War.

Cold War Exiles and the CIA

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Home Base ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Secret War

During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA undertook support of Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War II or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA’s Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA’s patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.

scholarly journals Saints on Stage: Popular Hagiography in Post-WWII Italy

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Daniela Cavallaro
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Goal ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lives Of The Saints

This article brings to light several examples of the hagiographic plays staged in Italy during the 1950s and early 1960s in parishes, schools, and oratories. The article begins with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, which focuses on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people of the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859. Next, it offers a brief panorama of the pervasive presence of the lives of the saints in post-WWII Italy. The main discussion of the article concerns the hagiographic plays created for the Salesian educational stages in the years between 1950 and 1965, especially those regarding the lives of young saints Agnes and Domenico Savio. The article concludes that the Salesian plays on the lives of the saints, far from constituting a mere exercise in hagiography, had a definite educational goal which applied to both performers and audiences in the specific times of Italy’s reconstruction and the cold war.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

scholarly journals Taming the Expellee Threat in Post–1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERTTI AHONEN
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
World War ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.

Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Denise Getchell
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Good Neighbor ◽  
The Cold War

This article reevaluates the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 that overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup is generally portrayed as the opening shot of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere and a watershed moment for U.S.–Latin American relations, when the United States supplanted its Good Neighbor Policy with a hardline anti-Communist approach. Despite the extensive literature on the coup, the Soviet Union's perspectives on the matter have received scant discussion. Using Soviet-bloc and United Nations (UN) archival sources, this article shows that Latin American Communists and Soviet sympathizers were hugely influential in shaping Moscow's perceptions of hemispheric relations. Although regional Communists petitioned the Soviet Union to provide support to Árbenz, officials in Moscow were unwilling to prop up what they considered a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution tottering under the weight of U.S. military pressure. Soviet leaders were, however, keen to use their position on the UN Security Council to challenge the authority of the Organization of American States and undermine U.S. conceptions of “hemispheric solidarity.” The coup, moreover, revealed the force of anti-U.S. nationalism in Latin America during a period in which Soviet foreign policy was in flux and the Cold War was becoming globalized.

Onopvallend turen naar de Russen

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
SANDRA VAN LOCHEM-VAN DER WEL ◽  
HENK VAN LOCHEM
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Observation System ◽  
Existing Buildings ◽  
Aircraft Observation ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Secretly watching the Russians. Cold War aircraft observation posts on existing buildings During the 1950s a network of aircraft observation post was built in The Netherlands, as a detection/observation system against low-flying hostile aircraft during the Cold War. Preferably, these were placed on highrise buildings. 134 of these 276 observation posts were built on existing buildings, on factories, mills, water towers, monasteries, government buildings and bunkers. Since their decommissioning in 1964-1968, many posts have been demolished. Approximately 37 posts on existing buildings remain, but mostly go unnoticed and many risk demolition in the future. These remaining aircraft observation posts are remarkable relics of our military heritage from the Cold War.

Western welfare states watched from the East during the Cold War: condemnation, competition, and creative learning

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Inglot
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The West ◽  
Creative Learning ◽  
The Cold War

This paper examines international influences of the Western welfare state on social policy ideas, institutions and reforms in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It identifies three types of Eastern reactions to or interactions with the West: “condemnation” of various “bourgeois” conceptions of social welfare; “competition” or increased attention to redistribution and social needs of the population stemming from the demonstrable successes of Western welfare states; and “creative learning” or implicit acknowledgment that every industrial society, including the Soviet style centrally planned economies, had to adopt at least some elements of modernized social welfare models or policy originally developed in the West. Paradoxically, first the explicit and later more implicit rejection of the Western welfare state, including the social-democratic and various “third way” models, eventually led to the rise of neoliberal and anti-welfare attitudes among many Eastern social policy reformers during the last decade of communist rule and beyond, after 1989.

Western Integration vs. Reunification? Analyzing the Polls of the 1950s

2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Kruke
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Social Research ◽  
German State ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
German Question ◽  
The 1950S

From the beginning of the West German state, a lot of public opinion polling was done on the German question. The findings have been scrutinized carefully from the 1950s onward, but polls have always been taken at face value, as a mirror of society. In this analysis, polls are treated rather as an observation technique of empirical social research that composes a certain image of society and its public opinion. The entanglement of domestic and international politics is analyzed with respect to the use of surveys that were done around the two topics of Western integration and reunification that pinpoint the “functional entanglement” of domestic and international politics. The net of polling questions spun around these two terms constituted a complex setting for political actors. During the 1950s, surveys probed and ranked the fears and anxieties that characterized West Germans and helped to construct a certain kind of atmosphere that can be described as “Cold War angst.” These findings were taken as the basis for dealing with the dilemma of Germany caught between reunification and Western integration. The data and interpretations were converted into “security” as the overarching frame for international and domestic politics by the conservative government that lasted until the early 1960s.

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