The Rudolf Slánský Affair: New Evidence

Slavic Review ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Lukes
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Socialist Economy ◽  
International Capital ◽  
The West ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
General Secretary

Rudolf Slánský's arrest in November 1951 by Statni bezpecnost (StB), the Czechoslovak secret police, his Kafkaesque trial a year later, and his execution caused a sensation during the early years of the Cold War. For a full week, the trial could be followed live on the radio in Prague. The transcript of the proceedings was published and widely distributed. Yet the affair remained a mystery. Slánský, until recently the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), and thirteen of his colleagues, all of them lifelong party members, confessed to crimes of high treason against the Prague government, espionage on behalf of the west, and sabotage of the socialist economy. In tired, monotonous voices, they described their lives as being motivated by their hatred of the CPC and loyalty to such sponsors as the Gestapo, Zionism, western intelligence services, and international capital. In their final speeches, all the defendants demanded that the court impose upon them the death penalty. The judge disappointed only three—they received life sentences. Slánský and ten others were executed in December 1952.

The German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND): Evolution and Current Policy Issues

2010 ◽  
pp. 789-805
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Krieger
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Current Policy ◽  
Operational Control ◽  
Military Intelligence ◽  
The West ◽  
German Government ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Intelligence Agencies ◽  
The Cold War

This article discusses German's foreign intelligence services through the context of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Unlike other intelligence services of other nations, Germany has no separate military intelligence. The BND serves as Germany's sole foreign and military espionage agency. It also does not have an acknowledged capacity of covert operations compared to the intelligence agencies of other nations. The BND was established in 1956 as part of the West German rearmament within the NATO framework; however, by the time of its establishment the Bonn government had already abandoned its previous efforts to build a military intelligence organization from scratch and with people of its own. Because of this, the BND was under American operational control during the Cold War and German intelligence professionals have served as mercenaries for the Americans over a period of ten years, giving Americans an unique intelligence asset inside the West German government. In this article, the discussions include the evolution of the BND and the current issues faced by the German intelligence services.

The Sociology of New Thinking: Elites, Identity Change, and the End of the Cold War

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert English
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Identity Change ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Gorbachev Era ◽  
General Secretary

This article recounts the origins of Soviet “new thinking” as a case study of how Soviet intellectuals sought to redefine national identity in response to the West. It demonstrates that new thinking was fundamentally normative, not instrumental, insofar as it was developed in a period (1950s–1960s) when “socialism” was thought to be materially outperforming capitalism. It also demonstrates that new thinking decisively affected Soviet policy in the second half of the 1980s. Putting forth a socialization argument to show how newthinking ideas originated in the post-Stalin period within a community of intellectuals, the article charts the growing influence of these intellectuals through the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1980s, when Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party and empowered many of the new thinkers as advisers, their liberal, Westernizing ideas played an indispensable role in shaping his reforms. The analysis focuses on mechanisms of identity change at two levels: that of the community of reformist intellectuals, and that of the Soviet Union itself. The analysis challenges realist and rationalist views that new thinking was largely instrumental. Until the Gorbachev era, Soviet reformers advocated new-thinking ideas often at the risk of their personal, professional, and institutional interests.

Death to Spies! Austrian Informants for Western Intelligence Services and Soviet Capital Punishment during the Occupation of Austria

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Stelzl-Marx
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The West ◽  
State Security ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Security Personnel ◽  
Eastern Zone ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Cold War

Using recently declassified sources from Russian archives, this article discusses the status of the Soviet-controlled eastern zone of Austria during the postwar occupation (1945–1955) as a principal spying ground in Central Europe. The Western occupation powers hired many Austrians to gather information on the deployments of the Soviet Army and the Soviet authorities' exploitation of the “German assets” they had seized at war's end. The Austrians' principal incentive to spy was financial; they were well paid by their Western handlers. Austrian women had love affairs with Soviet soldiers and officers and then served as double agents for the West until the Soviet counterintelligence services caught up with them. From 1947 onward, some 500 Austrians disappeared after being detained by Soviet state security personnel and accused of spying. More than 100 of these Austrians were sentenced to death by Soviet Military Tribunal No. 28990 in Baden from 1950 until Iosif Stalin's death in March 1953, and they were then executed in Moscow. In retrospect the mismatch between the actions of these Austrian “spies” and the penalties meted out to them is striking. The Soviet penal system was exported to occupied areas during the Cold War in intelligence “games” against the West, with tragic consequences for “Stalin's last victims.”

Islam and the West: Coexistence or Clash?

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 363-374
Author(s):  
Noor Mohammad Osmani ◽  
Tawfique Al-Mubarak
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
The West ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
The Cold War

Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) claimed that there would be seven eight civilizations ruling over the world in the coming centuries, thus resulting a possible clash among them. The West faces the greatest challenge from the Islamic civilization, as he claimed. Beginning from the Cold-War, the Western civilization became dominant in reality over other cultures creating an invisible division between the West and the rest. The main purpose of this research is to examine the perceived clash between the Western and Islamic Civilization and the criteria that lead a civilization to precede others. The research would conduct a comprehensive review of available literatures from both Islamic and Western perspectives, analyze historical facts and data and provide a critical evaluation. This paper argues that there is no such a strong reason that should lead to any clash between the West and Islam; rather, there are many good reasons that may lead to a peaceful coexistence and cultural tolerance among civilizations

‘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.

Western welfare states watched from the East during the Cold War: condemnation, competition, and creative learning

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Inglot
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The West ◽  
Creative Learning ◽  
The Cold War

This paper examines international influences of the Western welfare state on social policy ideas, institutions and reforms in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It identifies three types of Eastern reactions to or interactions with the West: “condemnation” of various “bourgeois” conceptions of social welfare; “competition” or increased attention to redistribution and social needs of the population stemming from the demonstrable successes of Western welfare states; and “creative learning” or implicit acknowledgment that every industrial society, including the Soviet style centrally planned economies, had to adopt at least some elements of modernized social welfare models or policy originally developed in the West. Paradoxically, first the explicit and later more implicit rejection of the Western welfare state, including the social-democratic and various “third way” models, eventually led to the rise of neoliberal and anti-welfare attitudes among many Eastern social policy reformers during the last decade of communist rule and beyond, after 1989.

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.

Monumental Attack: The Visual Tools of the German Counter-Monument in Two Works by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, and Horst Hoheisel

Images ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-139
Author(s):  
Kristine Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The West ◽  
Visual Tool ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Negative Form

This essay argues that iconoclasm serves as the visual tool of choice for Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz in their Memorial Against Fascism (1986) and for Horst Hoheisel in his Negative Form (1987). The West German historians’ debate of the late 1980s established an image prohibition by framing the representation of the Holocaust as an unimaginable and sacred event. The Counter-Monuments rely on this ban on images. They attack monumentality and visibility as both fascist and capitalist characteristics, designated as such during the Cold War. The essay argues that the formal choices inherent in conceptualizing these two Counter-Monuments comprise familiar historical modes of iconoclasm. It ultimately questions the need to rely on iconoclasm in the Counter-Monuments and contemporary German memorialization of the Holocaust.

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