The Free Europe University in Strasbourg: U.S. State-Private Networks and Academic “Rollback”

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-107
Author(s):  
Giles Scott-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
National Committee ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Royall Tyler ◽  
Political Warfare ◽  
The University

The Free Europe Committee (FEC, known from 1949 to 1952 as the National Committee for a Free Europe) was created in June 1949 in line with George Kennan's push for a greater mobilization of the private sector in U.S. political warfare against the Soviet Union. An oft-mentioned but little-explored part of the FEC conglomerate was the Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE), established in Strasbourg in 1951. This article focuses on four Americans who played lesser-known but, in their individual ways, central roles in the formation and running of the FEUE: James Burnham (the consultant), DeWitt Poole (the diplomat), Royall Tyler (the point man), and Adolf Berle (the intellectual). By tracking their input, the impulses that led to FEUE's formation, and its eventual demise, the article presents the university as a microcosm not just of the large-scale FEC operation but also of various strands that fed into U.S. political warfare as a whole.

The Free Germany Committee— An Historical Study

1952 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-366
Author(s):  
Andreas F. Lowenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
National Committee ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Interesting Insight ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Zone ◽  
Political Warfare ◽  
War Effort ◽  
History Of

In the summer of 1943 a group of German prisoners in the Soviet Union founded an association under Russian auspices designed to combat the war effort and government of Nazi Germany. The group, made up of soldiers, officers, and political exiles, called itself the National Committee “Free Germany,” and under that title operated with varying intensity throughout the remainder of the war. It was disbanded late in 1945, and by now has been largely forgotten. But many of its arguments are still effective in Germany today, and many of its members are now politically active in the Eastern Zone. I shall attempt to reconstruct here the history of the Free Germany movement, primarily as an addition to our historical knowledge of the Second World War. At the same time, I think, this account can provide an interesting insight into the workings of a certain type of German officer's mind, as well as a picture of a complete Russian operation in political warfare. With German rearmament an imminent problem and Soviet political strategy a continuing one, an examination of the Free Germany movement seems to be appropriate at the present time.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

SPATIAL LAYOUT OF THE SOVIET UNION TIMBER PROCESSING COMPLEX: THE IDEA BEHIND THE FIRST FIVE-YEAR PLAN

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-154
Author(s):  
Ivan V. ZYKIN
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Far East ◽  
Spatial Layout ◽  
Capital Investments ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Regions

During the years of Soviet power, principal changes took place in the country’s wood industry, including in spatial layout development. Having the large-scale crisis in the industry in the late 1980s — 2000s and the positive changes in its functioning in recent years and the development of an industry strategy, it becomes relevant to analyze the experience of planning the spatial layout of the wood industry during the period of Stalin’s modernization, particularly during the first five-year plan. The aim of the article is to analyze the reason behind spatial layout of the Soviet wood industry during the implementation of the first five-year plan. The study is based on the modernization concept. In our research we conducted mapping of the wood industry by region as well as of planned construction of the industry facilities. It was revealed that the discussion and development of an industrialization project by the Soviet Union party-state and planning agencies in the second half of the 1920s led to increased attention to the wood industry. The sector, which enterprises were concentrated mainly in the north-west, west and central regions of the country, was set the task of increasing the volume of harvesting, export of wood and production to meet the domestic needs and the export needs of wood resources and materials. Due to weak level of development of the wood industry, the scale of these tasks required restructuring of the branch, its inclusion to the centralized economic system, the direction of large capital investments to the development of new forest areas and the construction of enterprises. It was concluded that according to the first five-year plan, the priority principles for the spatial development of the wood industry were the approach of production to forests and seaports, intrasectoral and intersectoral combining. The framework of the industry was meant to strengthen and expand by including forests to the economic turnover and building new enterprises in the European North and the Urals, where the main capital investments were sent, as well as in the Vyatka region, Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Far East.

scholarly journals Lend-lease Program through the Prism of Official and Ego Sources

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
O. Lysenko ◽  
O. Fil ◽  
L. Khoynatska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Global Challenge ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army

Discussions around various aspects of World War II in the world’s scientific space and memory field have continued throughout the postwar decades. Initially, they were determined by polar and antagonistic ideological paradigms, and after the end of the Cold War – the discovery and introduction into scientific circulation of previously classified sources, testing of avant-garde methods of scientific knowledge, the development of interpretive tools. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union found itself virtually isolated, alone with the Axis bloc and their allies. It was difficult for the Soviet leadership to overcome the existing threats on its own, especially after the German attack. Only the realization by the Western Allies that Berlin’s aggressive course had become a global challenge made it possible to find a constructive way to join forces in the fight against a common enemy. One of the channels of cooperation between the states of the Anti-Hitler Coalition was the organization of supplies to the USSR of military equipment, ammunition, food, and materials necessary for the facilities of the Soviet military-industrial complex within the framework of the land lease program. Until recently, the problem of land lease was more in ideological discourse than in purely scientific. The currently available source base allows for an unbiased analysis of this phenomenon and elucidation of the place and role of foreign revenues to the USSR in strengthening its defense capabilities during the war against Germany and its allies. However, to this day, the researchers look out of focus, because of the perception of this phenomenon by veterans who fought on foreign military equipment, ate food from overseas. The authors of the article sees their task as combining these two dimensions of the lend-lease and finding out its impact not only on the scale of the large-scale armed confrontation, but also on the moral and psychological condition of the Red Army, for whom the war was an extremely difficult test.

Transformation of Russian Military Enterprise in the Geopolitical During the Putin Era

2021 ◽  
pp. 262-282
Author(s):  
Fei Wu
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Military Organization ◽  
Current Period ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Military Enterprise

Vladimir Putin's annual address as president in 2006 neatly summaries the reason why Russia had to press forward with long-overdue reforms of its armed forces. Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was still left with an oversized military organization built for large-scale mobilization and the demands of the Cold War, but highly ineffective for the type of conventional military conflicts that Russia was most likely to become involved in. The rationale behind Russia's reforms of the armed forces were thus clear long before the war in Georgia, which has often been pointed to as the reason why the reforms were launched in October 2008. President Vladimir Putin's current period runs out in 2024, when he is due to step down, according to the constitution. Given the fact that the current political system has been carefully crafted for almost 20 years, it is evident that there is uncertainty about its future. First, it no longer produces wealth for the population. For five years in a row, the real disposable income has been decreasing.

Soviet reform and the end of the Cold War: explaining large-scale historical change

1991 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Deudney ◽  
G. John Ikenberry
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Theoretical Issues

IntroductionAfter years of retirement in the academy, macro’historical commentary on contemporary events has returned to fashion. Radical domestic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and new patterns ofEast’West relations-in short, the collapse of communism and the end othe Cold War’mark the end of an era and present an invitation to international theorizing.1 Few would deny that these changes are momentous, but there is little consensus concerning their origins, trajectory, and implications. Explaining these events will necessitate a reweighing of fundamental theoretical issues. Thesize and speed of these changes were largely unexpected,reminding us how primitive our theories really are and encouraging us to broaden our theoretical perspective. To capture these events, theorists must reach across the disciplinary divides of Sovietology, international relations theory political economy, and political sociology.

Anna Louise Strong: Three Interviews with Chairman Mao Zedong

1985 ◽  
Vol 103 ◽  
pp. 489-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy B. Strong ◽  
Helene Keyssar
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Domestic Policies ◽  
The University ◽  
General Strike

Anna Louise Strong was part of the first generation of those westerners who reported extensively and sympathetically on socialist revolutions. Born in Nebraska in 1885, she obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1908, became involved in the labour movement in Seattle where she helped organize the general strike in 1919 and went first to the Soviet Union in 1921 on the advice of Lincoln Steffens. She became during the 1920s and 1930s probably the best-known American journalist reporting on the domestic policies of the Soviet Union. Her reportage was unswervingly sympathetic – what doubts she had were hidden in letters to friends, in strained disavowals, in odd turns of phrase in her many articles and books.

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