All Quiet on the German Front? Germany in the Post‐Detente Era

1984 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 438-450
Author(s):  
Edwina Moreton
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
German Government ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German Question ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
East German ◽  
Post War ◽  
Sensitive Issues

WHEN ALL ABOUT THEM IN EASTERN EUROPE WERE LOSING their heads, the Russians could always count on the East Germans. Now nobody, least of all the Russians, seems so sure. Whether or not East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, visits West Germany this autumn as planned, the German question is back on the political agenda of both East and West. The sharp battle-by-reprint, during the summer of 1984, in the party newspapers of East Germany and the Soviet Union over the permissible degree of contact between the East German regime and the West German government has revealed in public a remarkable rift within the Warsaw Pact over one of the most sensitive issues in post-war Soviet foreign policy: strategy towards Germany.

The East German Campaign against RIAS

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
German Government ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East German ◽  
The Media ◽  
Socialist Unity

This chapter turns to the East German propaganda campaign against RIAS, examining the various efforts taken by the German Democratic Republic to stop its population from listening to the American-sponsored broadcaster. The Socialist Unity Party's media organs deployed a consistent arsenal of themes through anti-RIAS pamphlets and newspaper stories. These almost always depicted RIAS as a militaristic, imperialist organ that strove to keep Germany divided and hoped to provoke a war with the Soviet Union. However, the East German government went beyond simply attacking the station in the media. It also targeted individuals who listened to RIAS as a minority of unpatriotic, treasonous vagrants who were easily duped by the lies of the United States.

East German Music and the Problem of National Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Silverberg
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Awkward Position ◽  
East German

Caught between political allegiance to the Soviet Union and a shared history with West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied an awkward position in Cold War Europe. While other countries in the Eastern Bloc already existed as nation-states before coming under Soviet control, the GDR was the product of Germany's arbitrary division. There was no specifically East German culture in 1945—only a German culture. When it came to matters of national identity, officials in the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) could not posit a unique quality of “East Germanness,” but could only highlight East Germany's difference from its western neighbor. This difference did not stem from the language and culture of the past, but the politics and ideology of the present: East Germany was socialist Germany.

scholarly journals Stalin's German Policy After Stalin

Slavic Review ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Baras
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
German Reunification ◽  
German State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East German ◽  
The Stability

Stalin's “last word” on German reunification was contained in the Soviet diplomatic note of March 10, 1952, which proposed a peace treaty with Germany. Until the middle of 1953, Stalin's heirs continued to press for reunification on the basis of the 1952 note. The East German uprising of June 17, 1953 (which is commemorated in West Germany, with unintended irony, as the “Day of German Unity“) marked the de facto termination of the Soviet reunification initiative. As a result of the uprising, the rulers of the Soviet Union and East Germany were forced to place greater emphasis on the consolidation of the Communist regime in the GDR—that is, the stability of East Germany required policies explicitly directed toward the development of a separate, socialist East German state. Thus, the uprising and the subsequent Soviet intervention further undermined the credibility of an already questionable Soviet reunification initiative.

Genuine Pacifism or Soviet Infiltration? Allied Responses to West German Rearmament Protests, 1950–52

Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
William Whitworth
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
German Government ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
German People ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

Abstract This article examines the reactions of British and U.S. officials to the wave of anti-rearmament protests which erupted in West Germany in the early 1950s. It examines the discourse generated by these officials to argue that the West German protests were either encouraged or condemned by different diplomatic figures. Most officials blamed the Soviet Union for the dissent in Germany and called for widespread concessions to the German government to better calm the situation. Some officials, however, supported the protests and protesters and looked to use the demonstrations to argue for increased contact with the Soviet Union and a thawing of the Cold War. A lasting impact of this discussion was that the image of the German people began to change in the eyes of Western policy makers- with old stereotypes from the Second World War beginning to give way to a new appraisal of Germans as activists and pacifists.

The Ruhr Authority and the German Problem

1955 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amos Yoder
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
German Government ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West ◽  
John Foster Dulles ◽  
Do So

Not long ago—early in 1954—the world observed a debate at Berlin between diplomats of East and West who offered their alternatives for solving the German problem. The Soviet solution as set forth by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was to use Germans as pawns in a diplomatic maneuver whose object was clearly to wreck Western European integration and to strengthen the Soviet Union. The solution proposed by the Western diplomats, John Foster Dulles, Anthony Eden and George Bidault, was to regard Germans as equals with whom they would negotiate a solution to Germany's problems. The Soviets have used the satellite East German regime to parrot their program and they have groomed it to neutralize Germany or lead it into the Communist camp. The Western diplomats have concluded that in order to obtain a lasting German settlement there must be free elections to establish an all-German government, which would be competent to negotiate about Germany's future and would be free to join the Western Alliance, if it chose to do so.

RESTORATION OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF YALTA IN 1944

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (72) (4) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
N. D. Borshchik
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Southern Coast ◽  
Recreational Facilities ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Resorts ◽  
Post War ◽  
Short Time

The article considers little-studied stories in Russian historiography about the post-war state of Yalta — one of the most famous health resorts of the Soviet Union, the «pearl» of the southern coast of Crimea. Based on the analysis of mainly archival sources, the most important measures of the party and Soviet leadership bodies, the heads of garrisons immediately after the withdrawal of the fascist occupation regime were analyzed. It was established that the authorities paid priority attention not only to the destroyed economy and infrastructure, but also to the speedy introduction of all-Union and departmental sanatoriums and recreation houses, other recreational facilities. As a result of their coordinated actions in the region, food industry enterprises, collective farms and cooperative artels, objects of cultural heritage and the social and everyday sphere were put into operation in a short time.

Prokofieva Tamara Aleksandrovna: Engineer-topographer of the first rank

2017 ◽  
Vol 922 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
V.L. Kashin ◽  
N.L. Kashina
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Aerial Photography ◽  
The North ◽  
Moscow Institute ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Executive Positions

Biographic information about the veteran of geodetic service of the Soviet Union Tamara Aleksandrovna Prokofieva is provided in this article. On January 1, 2017, she turned 96 years old. T. A. Prokofieva’s biography is in many respects similar to destinies of her age-mates who met the Great Patriotic War on a student’s bench. In 1939 she entered the Moscow Institute of Geodesy, Aerial Photography, and Cartography. Since then all her life was connected with geodesy. In this article we use Tamara Aleksandrovna’s memories of a communal flat of the 1930s, peripetias of military years, of the North Caucasian and Kazakh aero geodetic enterprises where she worked with her husband Leonid Andreevich Kashin who held a number of executive positions in geodetic service of the USSR in the post-war time.

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.

Institutional Change in the East German Transformation Process: The Role of the State in the Reorganization of Property Rights and the Limits of Institutional Transfer

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Lehmbruch
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Transfer Payments ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
East German ◽  
Eastern European Countries

German social scientists have often stressed that the East German transformation was a process sui generis that differed strongly from the transformation paths of eastern European countries. This difference was of course mainly due to the integration of the former GDR into the Federal Republic of (West) Germany. Indeed, it is commonly assumed that the wholesale transfer of West German institutions left little room for the endogenous paths of transformation observed in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The unintended outcome of this strategy of “exogenous” institutional change was a transformation crisis with the effect of a profound external shock. To be sure, this shock was mitigated by the simultaneous introduction of the West German “social net,” accompanied by massive transfer payments. But many of the dire predictions made by skeptical observers in 1990 have indeed come true.

Soviet Foreign Policy Factionalism Under Stalin?: A Case Study of the Inevitability of War Controversy

1976 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Paul Marantz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Harsh Discipline ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
Important Evidence

AbstractThere has been a great deal of controversy among Western scholars concerning the direction of Soviet foreign policy in the final years and months of Stalin's rule.1 One of the crucial questions at issue is whether or not there were significant divisions of opinion within the Politburo over foreign policy matters. This article attempts to explore this particular question through an examination of a doctrinal controversy that surfaced during Stalin's last years. In one of his most famous works, Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism, Lenin argued that war was an inevitable concomitant of the capitalist system. He contended that the unending struggle for markets meant that periodic wars among the capitalist powers were unavoidable and inevitable.2 Stalin adhered to this view throughout his long reign, and it was not until three years after Stalin's death, in Khruschchev's speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, that it was finally revised. Yet despite Stalin's strict adherence to the Leninist analysis of imperialism, and despite the harsh discipline that characterized his rule, there is evidence that the official interpretation was being publicly questioned even while Stalin was still alive. Given the nature of esoteric communication in the Soviet Union,and the close connection between doctrinal and policy debates, an examination of the controversy concerning the inevitability of war can provide important evidence having a direct bearing upon our understanding of this period.3

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document