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.

Onto the Slippery Slope: East Germany and East-West Détente under Ulbricht and Honecker, 1965–1975

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Bange
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East German ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
East West

This article identifies and explains the fundamental shift of political and ideological paradigms that drew the Soviet Union's close ally, East Germany, into the détente process. Although economic and political influences and pressures, including from the Soviet Union itself, pushed the East German Communist regime to participate in this era of “peaceful coexistence,” officials in East Berlin were well aware of the dangers this posed to the Communist society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the long term. Even at this early stage of East-West interaction, détente left the GDR with the unenviable task of squaring ideology with realpolitik—a task that East German leaders found increasingly hard to cope with.

The New Constitution of the Soviet Union

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 1143-1152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Starr
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Great Achievement ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Stability

In 1934, the Soviet Union rounded out the first great cycle in its development. The fruition of the Five-Year Plan, the general collectivization of agriculture, the entry of the Soviet Union into the councils of the nations of the world—these and many other successes of the Communist régime were evidences of great achievement. Peace and order and economic progress had been attained at home; the stability of the government had been clearly demonstrated, and friends had been made abroad. The social and economic structure of the country had been completely transformed, and the Socialist community was now a going concern.

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 Salmon migration and fertility in East Germany – An analysis of birth dynamics around German reunification

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3-2018) ◽  
pp. 247-268
Author(s):  
Michaela Kreyenfeld ◽  
Anja Vatterrott
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Large Fraction ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German Population ◽  
German Reunification ◽  
Region Of Origin ◽  
Regional Mobility ◽  
Deutsche Rentenversicherung ◽  
East German

This paper uses rich administrative data from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Fund) to describe changes in the timing and the spacing of births that occurred in the period following German reunification. We examine differences in the birth dynamics of East Germans, West Germans, and women who migrated between the two parts of Germany in these years. As the pension registers provide monthly records on whether a person is living in East or West Germany, they also allow us to examine the role of regional mobility in birth behaviour. In particular, we test the “salmon hypothesis”, which suggests that migrants are likely to postpone having a child until after or around the time they return to their region of origin. Our investigation shows that a large fraction of the cohorts born in 1965-74 migrated to West Germany after reunification, but that around 50% of these migrants returned to East Germany before reaching age 40. The first birth risks of those who returned were elevated, which suggests that the salmon hypothesis explains the behaviour of a significant fraction of the East German population in the period following German reunification.

Willy Brandt's Eastern Policy

Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Donald Brandon
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union

Five years ago West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder launched a tentative “Opening to the East” which marked a break with Konrad Adenauer's relatively rigid approach to, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The “Grand Conbtion” of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats continued the experiment from 1966-1969. The Hallstein Doctrine—no diplomatic relations with any country which had such relations with East Germany (the Soviet Union being the sole exception)—was abandoned. West Germany established diplomatic relations with the maverick Rumanian regime, and re-established relations with Tito's Yugoslavia. Several trade and cultural exchange agreements were entered into with East European Communist nations.

“At War with Israel”: East Germany’s Key Role in Soviet Policy in the Middle East

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herf
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Arab World ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Global Cold War ◽  
State Of Israel

The Middle East was one of the crucial battlefields of the global Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West; it was also a region in which East Germany played a salient role in the Soviet bloc’s antagonism toward Israel. From 1953, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) signed its first trade agreement with Egypt, until 1989, when the Communist regime in the GDR collapsed, East Germany opposed the state of Israel and supported Israel’s enemies in the Arab world, providing arms, training, and other support to countries and terrorist groups that sought to destroy Israel. From the mid-1960s until 1989, but especially from 1967 to the mid-1980s, both the Soviet Union and the GDR were in an undeclared state of war against Israel.

scholarly journals Industrial and Chinese: Exhibiting Mao’s China at the Leipzig Trade Fairs

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-870
Author(s):  
Jennifer Altehenger
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Economic Significance ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Local Decision ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German

Between 1951 and 1965, the People’s Republic of China regularly exhibited at the international trade fairs in the East German city of Leipzig. One of the major attractions of the fairs, China’s grand pavilion was second in size only to the pavilion of the Soviet Union. This article examines the planning and execution of China’s exhibitions, illustrating how the young communist regime displayed its products and political system abroad and how citizens of other socialist and capitalist countries experienced China through objects, materials, images and narratives. Because the People's Republic of China was a new revolutionary state of enormous political and economic significance and yet also a state that other socialist regimes deemed too poorly developed to transition to socialism, these exhibitions were the site of constant negotiations and tension between Chinese and East German organizers and other local decision-makers and participants. As such, the People's Republic of China’s engagement with the fairs sheds further light on its international activities after 1949 and on the local history of the Sino-Soviet split. It is also a case study that calls attention to the historical significance of materiality that underpinned China’s interactions with the wider world, from minute quotidian things to grand gifts and major export goods.

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.

Warsaw Collective Security Pact

1960 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-363 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Atomic Weapons ◽  
Warsaw Pact ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist China ◽  
Foreign Ministers

According to the press, a one-day meeting of the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow on February 4, 1960, was attended by premiers and foreign ministers of the eight pact members (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania) and by observers from Communist China, Mongolia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. In a 4,000-word declaration issued after the meeting, the pact members expressed the hope that forthcoming East-West summit talks would be “a turning point in the relations” between the two groups of countries and proposed that the summit agenda include such topics as general and controlled disarmament, a German peace treaty, creation of a free city of West Berlin, a ban on nuclear weapons tests, and amelioration of relations between East and West. The committee also repeated the communist proposal for a non-aggression pact between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact countries and called on NATO members to respond to the Soviet Union's armed forces cut of 1, 200, 000 men by reducing their forces as well. It criticized NATO for maintaining “inflated armies” and for arming West Germany with atomic weapons, adding that the West German government was being given a free hand in the production of these weapons.

Displace of Documentary Heritage from the Soviet Union to Poland during the Third Decade of the XXth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Tatsiana Hiarnovich
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Actual Process ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

The paper explores the displace of Polish archives from the Soviet Union that was performed in 1920s according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 and other international agreements. The aim of the research is to reconstruct the process of displace, based on the archival sources and literature. The object of the research is those documents that were preserved in the archives of Belarus and together with archives from other republics were displaced to Poland. The exploration leads to clarification of the selection of document fonds to be displaced, the actual process of movement and the explanation of the role that the archivists of Belarus performed in the history of cultural relationships between Poland and the Soviet Union. The articles of the Treaty of Riga had been formulated without taking into account the indivisibility of archive fonds that is one of the most important principles of restitution, which caused the failure of the treaty by the Soviet part.

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