A Socialist 007 : East European Spy Dramas in the Early James Bond Era

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikołaj Kunicki
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Television Series ◽  
The West ◽  
James Bond ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Bond Phenomenon

If the James Bond films were officially unavailable to East European audiences until 1989, the Eastern Bloc did not escape the global reach of the Bond phenomenon. East European spy dramas began to appear during the late 1960s, and they were mostly made for television and not all that distant in spirit from the Bond films. This chapter examines three television series: More Than Life at Stake (1967-1968) from Poland, The Invisible Gun Sight (1973-1979) from the German Democratic Republic, and Seventeen Moments of Spring (1972) from the Soviet Union. While these tales of espionage evince the projections of the west in the east during the Cold War, they reveal foremost the powerful appeal of consumerism behind the Iron Curtain.

Curtain of Lies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The West ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cold War

Curtain of Lies examines the role of truth in the political culture of the Cold War by looking at Eastern Europe during the period from 1948–1956. It examines how actors on both sides of the Iron Curtain tried to delineate the “truth” of Eastern Europe and how this worked to set the parameters of knowledge about the region. Eastern Europe’s Communist governments, under the guidance of the Soviet Union, tried to convince their citizens that the West was the land of imperialist warmongers and that Communism would bring a glorious future to the region. Their propaganda efforts were challenged by competing discourses emanating from the West, which claimed that Eastern Europe was a totalitarian land of captive slaves, powerless in the face of Soviet aggression. Curtain of Lies investigates the ways that ordinary East Europeans were affected by and contributed to these two ways of thinking about their homelands, concentrating on the interactions between refugees who illegally fled Eastern Europe in the early 1950s and American-sponsored radio stations that broadcast across the Iron Curtain. These broadcasters interviewed refugees as sources of knowledge about life under Communist rule. Careful analysis of these interviews shows, however, that the meanings East European émigrés gave to their own experiences could be influenced by what they had heard on Western broadcasts. Broadcasters and their listeners (who also served as their sources) mutually reinforced their own assumptions about the meaning of Communism, helping to create the evidentiary foundation for totalitarian interpretations of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

Nikolai Rubakin’s Library for Revolutionaries

Slavic Review ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 554-559
Author(s):  
Alfred Erich Senn
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
European Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union

For almost forty years the private library of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rubakin, located first in Baugy-sur-Clarens and subsequently in Lausanne, Switzerland, served as a major fund of Russian books in Western Europe, and it attracted many of the great figures of the Russian Revolution. Rubakin in turn welcomed every new reader; his motto, imprinted on his bookplates, declared: “Long live the book, a powerful weapon in the struggle for truth and justice.” Upon his death in 1946 the Soviet Union inherited the collection, variously estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 volumes, and its departure represented a great blow to East European studies in the West.

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.

The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1)

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
Collapse Of Communism

The largely peaceful collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected the profound changes that Mikhail Gorbachev had carried out in Soviet foreign policy. Successful though the process was in Eastern Europe, it had destabilizing repercussions within the Soviet Union. The effects were both direct and indirect. The first part of this two-part article looks at Gorbachev's policy toward Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism in the region, and the direct “spillover” from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union. The second part of the article, to be published in the next issue of the journal, discusses the indirect spillover into the Soviet Union and the fierce debate that emerged within the Soviet political elite about the “loss” of the Eastern bloc—a debate that helped spur the leaders of the attempted hardline coup d'état in August 1991.

The Indian Ocean Creole Islands: Geo-politics and Decolonisation

1992 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Houbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International System ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
North And South ◽  
Radical Transformation

Decolonisation was a policy of the West, as well as a process reflecting the radical transformation of the configuration of power in the international system. The Soviet Union, perceived as poised to dominate Eurasia, had to be ‘contained’ lest it expanded into the Rimland and challenged the West at sea. This geo-political obsession was reinforced by the ‘loss of China’ and the outbreak of the bitter struggle between North and South Korea. But the cold war was about ideology as well as military power, and containment was therefore not just a question of building pacts but of fostering the ‘right’ kind of political régimes.

scholarly journals Creature features: The lively narratives of bacteriophages in Soviet biology and medicine

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-597
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Myelnikov
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The West ◽  
War Narratives ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Therapeutic Uses ◽  
Viral Nature ◽  
Post War ◽  
Scientific Narratives ◽  
The Cold War

The term ‘bacteriophage’ (devourer of bacteria) was coined by Félix d'Herelle in 1917 to describe both the phenomenon of spontaneous destruction of bacterial cultures and an agent responsible. Debates about the nature of bacteriophages raged in the 1920s and 1930s, and there were extensive attempts to use the phenomenon to fight infections. Whereas it eventually became a crucial tool for molecular biology, therapeutic uses of ‘phage’ declined sharply in the West after World War II, but persisted in the Soviet Union, particularly Georgia. Increasingly isolated from Western medical research, Soviet scientists developed their own metaphors of ‘phage’, its nature and action, and communicated them to their peers, medical professionals, and potential patients. In this article, I explore four kinds of narrative that shaped Soviet phage research: the mystique of bacteriophages in the 1920s and 1930s; animated accounts and military metaphors in the 1940s; Lysenkoist notions on bacteriophages as a phase in bacterial development; and the retrospective allocation of credit for the discovery of the bacteriophage during the Cold War. Whereas viruses have been largely seen as barely living, phage narratives consistently featured heroic liveliness or ‘animacy’, which framed the growing consensus on its viral nature. Post-war narratives, shaped by the Lysenkoist movement and the campaigns against adulation of the West, had political power—although many microbiologists remained sceptical, they had to frame their critique within the correct language if they wanted to be published. The dramatic story of bacteriophage research in the Soviet Union is a reminder of the extent to which scientific narratives can be shaped by politics, but it also highlights the diversity of strategies and alternative interpretations possible within those constraints.

scholarly journals Book Review: Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West. New York: Mulholland Books, 2019.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-52
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Cuevas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Secret War

In the years following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western leaders and political scientists lauded the turning point in history as a momentous triumph of democracy and economic liberalism over communism and the doomed command economic model. Western nations and the United Kingdom in particular, saw the period immediately after the Soviet collapse as an opportunity for political and economic cooperation not seen in more than a half century. Lavish public relations events including state dinners, meetings with the Queen of England and inclusion on the G-8 Economic Council were all extended to and accepted by Russia’s president in the years following what many in the West considered a victory for global democracies everywhere. Yet in Heidi Blake’s book, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West, what becomes vividly clear is that to Putin, this event marked the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” (p.12), and he laid the blame squarely on the West.

scholarly journals Voci libere in URSS

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Regime ◽  
International Level ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Conceptual Overview

Free Voices in the USSR is a project dedicated to the myriad of independent voices present in the culture of dissent in the Soviet Union in the second half of the twentieth century. Its aim is to offer a conceptual overview of the many forms of dissent by exploring two main thematic areas, the first devoted to “free voices” in the USSR and the second focused on reception in the West. The different manifestations of the USSR’s ‘Second Culture’, which was non-official and independent, spread thanks to the samizdat (the clandestine publication and circulation of texts within the USSR) and the tamizdat (the publication of texts forbidden in the USSR in the West). The reception of non-official forms of expression in the West is explored in the context of the debates arising from the Cold War; the role of the West in engaging with the literary, cultural and artistic challenges to the Soviet regime from within its own borders proved fundamental. Contributions to this website including critical essays, bio-bibliographic entries, archive information and the review and cataloguing of magazines are the result of coordinated research by a group of specialists at an international level.

scholarly journals Promoting the Socialist Community: Efforts and Effects of the Socialist Camp’s Cultural Diplomacy

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oksana Nagornaia
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Hybrid Identities ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

Based on an analysis of modern Cold War historiography, the article considers current discussions, topics, and perspectives in the chosen research landscape. Taking into account the modern circumstances, the author concludes that in the latest publications, there is a tendency to reconsider the dichotomic model “Sovietisation vs Americanisation” and, instead, take a closer look at the representations of socialism and the structures and actors of cultural diplomacy in Eastern Europe. Referring to propaganda projects of socialist integration and intercultural spaces, the author demonstrates what was specifically socialist about the forms and instruments of representations of the Eastern Bloc, the conflicting spheres of collaboration, and independent initiatives of people’s democracies in the sphere of cultural diplomacy. The author concludes that at the end of the Second World War, the propaganda system in the Soviet Union was integrated into a larger scheme of presenting the world system of socialism where the Eastern European states became symbolically appropriated spaces and promising symbolic resources. The cultural initiatives of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe at the international level testify to the cultural pluralism in the Eastern Bloc. The independent steps the countries of the socialist camp took for self-realisation on the international arena testify to this cultural pluralism. The effectiveness of their symbolic messages was facilitated by the geographical proximity to borders, integration into the contexts of western culture, and better developed information resources. In the article, the author’s own analysis is preceded by a review of materials thematically related to the section of the journal on the cultural diplomacy of socialism. Articles referred to in the study and devoted to the projects of the socialist camp prove the thesis that the Eastern Bloc that emerged during the Cold War and the hybrid identities developed under its influence survived the breakdown of the bipolar order and are important for modern culture.

The United States and the Cold War: from Truman to Eisenhower (1948–53)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Heller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
State Department ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter shows the change in America’s attitude towards Israel, from opposition to de jure recognition of Israel’s military capabilities for the west during ther Korean war. While in 1948 secretary of state General Marshall warned against an enduring conflict with the Arabs, Truman recognized it de facto. However, the state department continued to treart Israel as a liability. Henry Byroade claimed that Israel should not be the homeland of the Jewish people. Israel was left outside of strategic western alliances because it was assumed that its membership might push the Arabs towards the Soviet Union. The notion that Truman’s administration was pro-Israel is a myth. Although Truman himself was sympathetic, the State Department and the Pentagon did not consider Israel an asset.

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