Beyond the Iron Curtain

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-186
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Vaclav Havel ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
Reading Clubs ◽  
The Cold War

Ray and Maggie Bradbury’s winter 1990 stay in Paris began as Bradbury successfully negotiated a fortieth anniversary hardbound edition of The Martian Chronicles from Doubleday. Chapter 26 also narrates how Bradbury discovered that his perennial popularity in Eastern Europe was expanding as the Iron Curtain collapsed, especially in Czechoslovakia, where newly elected President Vaclav Havel proved to be a Bradbury enthusiast. The chapter closes with Bradbury’s unexpected invitation to a May 1990 luncheon for President Gorbachev held at the Russian Embassy in Washington. Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were invited as the favorite writers of the Gorbachev family. Bradbury was also beginning to learn of the scattered and informal Bradbury reading clubs that had existed in Russia throughout much of the Cold War period.

Freedom and democracy

2018 ◽  
pp. 74-131
Author(s):  
Andrea Mariuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
The Past ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Central Eastern ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explains the importance of the values of freedom and democracy in the Cold War struggle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists. As soon as Cold War tensions broke down the ‘national unity’ of anti-fascist forces, both fronts claimed to be the exclusive representatives of ‘true’ democracy, and compared their competitor with the defeated fascist enemy. The Socialist-Communist alliance acquired the programme of ‘progressive’ (or ‘people’s’) democracy inspired by the experiments in Central-Eastern Europe, and made it the base for its opposition to the supposed Christian-Democratic ‘restoration’ of a new ‘reactionary clerical fascism’, along with the defense of the guarantees for parliamentary opposition established by the republican Constitution of 1948. The anti-Communist front, on its side, found strong unifying motifs in the description of Soviet dictatorship and the ‘sovietization’ of the countries occupied by the Red Army filtered beyond the Iron Curtain, and in their comparison with ‘totalitarian’ experiences lived by Italians in the past years.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Weight Of Evidence ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Cold War

Histories of the Cold War have often been preoccupied with issues of accountability and intent. Such histories have generally focused on leading political actors and concerned themselves with issues that implicitly or explicitly pitted one camp against another, asking questions such as: Who was responsible for starting the Cold War? Who made key decisions? Who won and who lost? This study has been motivated by a different set of concerns. Rather than setting one side against the other, it has examined the Cold War as a shared political environment and tried to illuminate some of the ways a political culture that relied on moral absolutes affected patterns of thought on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It has tried to expand the question of who knew what and when by shifting the focus to how knowledge about Eastern Europe was produced, showing how some experiences took on the weight of evidence, whereas others seemingly provoked little thought....

The Cold War and European Security, 1950–1960

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
European Security ◽  
The Public ◽  
German Army ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
European Defence Community

In examining European socialist responses to the issue of post-war European security, this chapter challenges the image of a continent irremediably divided along Cold War lines. Throughout the 1950s European socialists struggled to devise a stable and peaceful security order in a world of nuclear armaments and superpower rivalries. This struggle initially centred on the European Defence Community (EDC). For many socialists, the EDC offered a possible means not only of avoiding an independent German army but also perhaps of overcoming Cold War divisions. Following the EDC’s demise and West Germany’s integration into NATO, European socialists recentred their hopes on ‘disengagement’—the idea of creating a demilitarized and neutralized region in Central and Eastern Europe encompassing countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, during the late 1950s, European socialists emerged as the leading organized advocates of disengagement, working assiduously to keep the project in the public eye.

scholarly journals International Federation of Free Journalists: Opposing Communist Propaganda During the Cold War

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
Martin Nekola
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
International Federation ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
East European ◽  
The Cold War

The topic of supranational organizations of East-European émigrés during the Cold War still remains a lesser-known topic. There were a number of anti-Communist organizations between 1948–1989, consisting of former politicians, diplomats, soldiers, lawyers or academics from behind the Iron Curtain. The community of exiled journalists was represented by the International Federation of Free Journalists, officially founded in November 1948 in Paris by delegates from twelve nations. Its membership base soon grew to 1,400 people. The Federation warned the Western public against the injustices, false propaganda and the red terror in Eastern Europe for four decades.

NATO in Balkan’s Late Twenties Tide

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Xhavit Sadrijaj
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Cold War

NATO did not intervene in the Balkans to overcome Yugoslavia, or destroy it, but above all to avoid violence and to end discrimination. (Shimon Peres, the former Israeli foreign minister, winner of Nobel Prize for peace) NATO’s intervention in the Balkans is the most historic case of the alliance since its establishment. After the Cold War or the "Fall of the Iron Curtain" NATO somehow lost the sense of existing since its founding reason no longer existed. The events of the late twenties in the Balkans, strongly brought back the alliance proving the great need for its existence and defining dimensions and new concepts of security and safety for the alliance in those tangled international relations.

Lukewarm Neutrality in a Cold War? The Case of Austria

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwin A. Schmidl
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Military Occupation ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Other Orientation ◽  
Over Time

Geographically, Austria's position during the Cold War differed significantly from that of Switzerland or Sweden, let alone Ireland. Austria, like Finland, was situated along the Iron Curtain. In 1945, Austria was divided between East and West, and the Soviet Union hoped that the Austrian Communists could quickly gain power by largely democratic means. This effort failed, however, when the Communists lost decisively in the November 1945 elections. Over the next decade, Austria remained under Soviet and Western military occupation. The formal adoption of a neutral status for Austria in May 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty was signed, was a compromise needed to ensure the departure of Soviet forces from Austria. Although some other orientation might have been preferred, neutrality over time became firmly engrained in Austria's collective identity.

On polarization

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian James Baer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
Distinct State ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The ideological incommensurability of the worldviews or master narratives represented by the two opposing superpowers during the Cold War and embodied in the image of an impenetrable iron curtain gave particular salience to translation theory while also questioning the very possibility of translation. At the same time, the neoimperialist projects of the two superpowers produced startlingly similar approaches to the instrumentalization of translation as a vehicle for propaganda and diplomacy. Presenting polarization as a distinct state of semiosis, the effects of which are highly unpredictable, this article explores the various ways in which the radical polarization of the Cold War shaped the theory and practice of translation both within and across the ideological divide. Plotting the entanglements of the light and dark sides of translation during this time challenges traditional histories of the field that construe the period as one of progress and liberation.

The Doppelgänger and his Master

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuba Mikurda
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
Current State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Two Sides

A performative introduction, by Kuba Mikurda, to Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take (2009). Based on the themes of duality, playing for both sides, and doppelgänger fantasy, the tells not only the tale of Alfred Hitchcock’ lifelong fascination with such motifs, but also of the Cold War (and its influence on our contemporaneity) as a Hitchcock-esque reality. Using archive footage of Alfred Hichcock Presents, where the author of Psycho impersonates various alternative versions of himself, Grimonprez shows that the two sides of the Iron Curtain are actually two sides of the same coin – perfect mirror images of its double. The same is true for Cold War paranoia, the returning phantom of a global conflict, or atom war – it is ultimately difficult to say whether the films of the master of suspense, such as Birds and North by Northwest are its manifestation or is it maybe that in the current state of late modernity, our experience of the world took on the features of a Hitchcock film. Grimonprez – an artist known for gallery projects and theoretical interests, offers a story of the duplexity of a divided world – a slightly histo/erical one and full of distance and games. All the same, as Karen Beckmann reminds us, “the sameness of a twin is based on the repressed memory of division, breakage, and a sudden partition”.

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