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.

La Ley Maldita: The Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-125
Author(s):  
James Lockhart
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Coal Mining ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Law ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Mining Regions

This chapter explains Chileans' contributions to the origins of the larger Cold War from 1947 into the 1950s. It incorporates the González administration's conflicts with Chilean Communists and the Soviet bloc, from events in Santiago and Chile's coal mining regions to those in Prague, Bogotá, and the United Nations, into the unfolding global conflict, thus reframing the passing of the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, which banned the Chilean Communist Party.

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.

scholarly journals ‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism, and Soviet Human Rights Violations1

2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-337
Author(s):  
Mark Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Union Leader ◽  
British Trade ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists highlighting Soviet abuses. This article assesses Chapple’s support for human rights in the Soviet Union, arguing that because of his historic membership of the Communist Party and subsequent anti-communist leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) in Britain, his support for victims of Soviet persecution was multifaceted in the Cold War context.

Communists: Ireland’s ‘Fifth Column’?

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter discusses perceptions of Moscow’s ‘fifth column’ in the Irish state. While the communist party amounted to little more than an insignificant cult, not all communists declared themselves openly. Significantly, other political strands, particularly the IRA, were seen to be susceptible to communist manipulation. During the Cold War this gave rise to exaggerated fears about communism and its agents. Dublin officials co-operated with the British, and the Americans, in combating communists and their left-wing republican allies. In Northern Ireland, the Communist Party (CPNI) remained extremely weak, but retained influence of some significance within trade union officialdom. And, in Britain, the Connolly Association attempted to organise Irish exiles under the tutelage of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The US embassy in Dublin was sensitive to any suggestion of communist activity; Irish and American officials placed intelligence co-operation on a formal footing in 1954.

scholarly journals Anthropological adventures with Romania's Wizard of Oz, 1973-1989

Focaal ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 2004 (43) ◽  
pp. 134-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Verdery
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
New Model ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

Throughout the Cold War, most people in the US saw the communist party-states of the Soviet bloc as all-powerful regimes imposing their will on their populations. The author, a child of the Cold War, began her fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s in this belief. The present essay describes how her experiences in Romania between 1973 and 1989 gradually forced her to see things differently, bringing her to realize that centralization was only one face of a system of rule pervaded by barely controlled anarchy and parasitism on the state. It was not simply that the regime had failed to change people's consciousness; rather, the system's operation was actively producing something quite different. These insights contributed to the author's developing a new model of the workings of socialism.

scholarly journals "Communist" dispossession meets "reactionary" resistance

Focaal ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (54) ◽  
pp. 89-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Projit Bihari Mukharji
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Term Change ◽  
Communist Government ◽  
Set Up

The reflections in this article were instigated by the repeated and brutal clashes since 2007 between peasants and the state government’s militias—both official and unofficial—over the issue of industrialization. A communist government engaging peasants violently in order to acquire and transfer their lands to big business houses to set up capitalist enterprises seemed dramatically ironic. De- spite the presence of many immediate causes for the conflict, subtle long-term change to the nature of communist politics in the state was also responsible for the present situation. This article identifies two trends that, though significant, are by themselves not enough to explain what is happening in West Bengal today. First, the growth of a culture of governance where the Communist Party actively seeks to manage rather than politicize social conflicts; second, the recasting of radical political subjectivity as a matter of identity rather than an instigation for critical self-reflection and self-transformation.

‘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.

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.

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