Georges Marchais and the Decline of French Communism

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Vanke
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Sharp Decline ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Communist Leader ◽  
Soviet Invasion ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Electoral Performance ◽  
French Communist Party

Georges Marchais's long tenure as the leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) witnessed a sharp decline in the party's electoral performance. Shortly after Marchais took over, the PCF received more than 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. By the time he left office, the party's share of the vote had dropped to less than 10 percent. A new biography of Marchais, by Thomas Hofnung, provides a nuanced assessment of the French Communist leader, showing why Marchais's political instincts, which once proved so remarkably effective, began to fail him the longer he was in power. Marchais's decision to endorse the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—1980 symbolized the decline of the PCF, but even then Marchais's colleagues were unwilling to remove him. He remained in office for another decade, as the fortunes of the party continued to ebb. Hofnung's perceptive book takes due account of Marchais's strengths but is especially illuminating in its portrayal of the French Communists in decline a decline that paralleled the waning of the Cold War.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

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.

Perspectives on Triggering Communism's Collapse

2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-143
Author(s):  
Tony Kemp-Welch ◽  
Andrzej Korbonski ◽  
Michael Szporer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Round Table ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Communist Government ◽  
A Chain

Marjorie Castle's volume in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, Triggering Communism's Collapse: Perceptions and Power in Poland's Transition, discusses events in the late 1980s that induced the leaders of the Polish Communist party to open negotiations with senior opposition figures, including the head of the still-banned Solidarity trade union. Preliminary talks in 1988 led to agreement on the holding of Round Table talks, which formally began on 6 February 1989 and ended two months later, on 5 April 1989, with arrangements to hold partly free parliamentary elections in early June. Contrary to the expectations of both the regime and the opposition, those elections resulted in an overwhelming victory for Solidarity, starting a chain of events that led to the formation of the first non-Communist government in a Soviet-bloc country since 1948. Three distinguished experts on Poland comment on Castle's analysis of Poland's transition and offer their own assessments of the importance and legacy of the Round Table talks.

The Politics of Culture in Cold War America

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 451-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

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.

Democratic Fantasies vs. Cold War Realities

2018 ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
White House ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
National Review ◽  
The World ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

The strain of Black Nationalism that existed within the United Nations also worried conservatives as they monitored the evolution of events in Southern Africa. In their intense desire to rid the world of communism, other issues, such as race, were either marginalized or ignored. The chapter analyzes the three publications’ view of race as it relates to the issue of Rhodesia during the height of the Cold War. In ignoring the suppression of an entire race of people, Human Events and National Review contrasted what they perceived to be a stable, anticommunist, biracial society with the militarism and lawlessness that they argued defined the 1960s and 1970s. While the two conservative publications viewed Rhodesia as a model of biracial success, Commentary focused on the Carter administration’s dismissive attitude about the dangers of Soviet encroachment within the African hemisphere. The Right argued that the Carter White House, in its refusal to endorse Rhodesia’s 1979 parliamentary elections due to a lack of representation of militant nationalist groups, and its belief in the policy of détente, continued to send a message of American weakness and indifference to totalitarianism around the world.

The Passion of William F. Buckley: Academic Freedom, Conspiratorial Conservatism, and the Rise of the Postwar Right

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
JULIAN NEMETH
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Cold War

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 479-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Wald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Literary Resistance ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Private Homes ◽  
Smith Act ◽  
The U.S

On the morning of June 20, 1951, a hundred FBI agents poured out of the Foley Square Federal Building in Manhattan at dawn, buttoned up their gray trenchcoats, and bounded into a fleet of waiting Buicks. Spreading throughout New York City in a well-orchestrated operation, they surrounded twenty private homes, burst into bedrooms, and dragged sixteen Communist Party leaders off to jail under the Smith Act charge of conspiring to teach the overthrow of the U.S. government. This was the second group of top Party functionaries to be arrested under the Act.

Indonesia-US Relations, 1949–1999

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Strategic Imperative ◽  
The Cold War

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.

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