scholarly journals The Pro-Soviet Message in Words and Images: Dyson Carter and Canadian “Friends” of the USSR

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-206
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
History Of ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Communist Party Of Canada

Abstract Dyson Carter, Sovietophile and member of the Communist Party of Canada, spent most of his career promoting the USSR to North Americans. He served as President of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society (CSFS) from 1949 to 1960, edited the CSFS newsletter News-Facts about the USSR from 1950 to 1956, and published the popular pro-Soviet magazine Northern Neighbors from 1956 until 1989. His work was supported from Moscow by the All-Union Society for Friendship with Foreign Countries (VOKS), and his writing had wide appeal on the Canadian left. Based on recently released archival material from Russia and Canada, as well as oral history, this story of propaganda and persuasion in Cold War Canada offers a new perspective on the history of the Canadian left.

scholarly journals Such Stuff As Diaspora Dreams Are Made On: Birobidzhan and the Canadian-Jewish Communist Imagination

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Srebrnik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Jewish Immigrant ◽  
Socialist Republic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Communist Party Of Canada

This article examines the history of two organizations whose main aim was to provide support for the Soviet project to establish a Jewish socialist republic, the official language of which was to be Yiddish, in the Birobidzhan region of the USSR. ICOR was founded in 1924 and was active within the Jewish, immigrant, working-class milieu; Ambijan, in Canada called the Canadian Birobidjan Committee, was formed in the United States in 1934. Both groups were ideologically and organizationally tied to the Communist Party of Canada and operated for some three decades. They became ideologically marginal and politically irrelevant during the Cold War, especially after the Birobidzhan project was exposed as largely fraudulent. Both groups disbanded in the 1950s.

Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 114-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan C. Iacob
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
The Continuum

This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize and de-parochialize national historiographies. Second, it can provide the background to for the Europeanization of the history of the communist period in former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Third, and most importantly, the transnational approach can reconstruct the international dimension of the communist experience, with its multiple geographies, spaces of entanglement and transfer, and clustered, cross-cultural identity-building processes. The article concludes that the advent of transnationalism in the study of communism allows for the discovery of various forms of historical contiguousness either among state socialisms or beyond the Iron Curtain. In other words, researchers might have a tool to not only know more about less, but also to resituate that “less” in the continuum of the history of communism and in the context of modernity. The transnational approach can generate a fundamental shift in our vantage point on the communist phenomenon in the twentieth century. It can reveal that a world long perceived as mostly turned inward was in fact imbricate in wider contexts of action and imagination and not particularly limited by the ideological segregationism of the Cold War.

The politics of phosphorus-32: A cold war fable based on fact

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN KRIGE
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Atomic Energy Commission ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

ABSTRACT In July 1949, and again in January 1950 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission shipped useful amounts of the short-lived isotope phosphorus-32 to a sanatorium in Trieste, Italy. They were used to treat a patient who had a particularly malignant kind of brain tumor. This distribution of isotopes abroad for medical and research purposes was hotly contested by Commissioner Lewis Strauss, and led to a bruising confrontation between him and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This paper describes the debates surrounding the foreign isotope program inside the Commission and in the U.S. Congress. In parallel, it presents an imagined, but factually-based story of the impact of isotope therapy on the patient and his doctor in Trieste, a city on the Italian-Yugoslavian border that was at the heart of the cold war struggle for influence between the U.S. and the USSR. It weaves together the history of science, institutional history, diplomatic history, and cultural history into a fable that draws attention to the importance of the peaceful atom for winning hearts and minds for the West. The polemics surrounding the distribution of isotopes to foreign countries may have irreversibly soured relationships between Oppenheimer and Strauss, and played into the scientist's loss of his security clearance. But, as those who supported the program argued, it was an important instrument for projecting a positive image of America among a scientifc elite abroad, and for consolidating its alliance with friendly nations in the early years of the cold war——or so the fable goes.

Tito's Secret Empire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Klinger ◽  
Denis Kuljis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time

This groundbreaking biography of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia presents many startling new revelations, among them his role as an international revolutionary leader and his relationship with Winston Churchill. It highlights his early years as a Comintern operative, the context for his later politics as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors argue that in the 1940s, between the dissolution of the Comintern and the rise of NAM, Tito's influence and ambition were far wider than has been understood, extending to Italy, France, Greece and Spain via the international communist networks established during the Spanish Civil War. The book discloses for the first time the connection between Tito's expulsion from the Cominform and the Rome assassination attempt on the Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti — the man who had plotted to overthrow Tito. The book offers a pivotal contribution to our understanding of Tito as a figure of real, rather than imagined, global significance. The book will reward those who are interested in the history of international Communism, the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, or in Tito the man — one of the most significant leaders of the twentieth century.

Rivalry and Unification: Mobilising Rural Workers in São Paulo on the Eve of the Brazilian Golpe of 1964

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Welch
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military

AbstractThe article utilises oral history, labour and military court records, newspaper accounts, and government documents to narrate the history of rural labour mobilisation in the Aha Mogiana region of São Paulo, Brazil, during the years 1959 to 1964. It shows how rival rural leaders linked either to the Brazilian Communist Party or the Catholic Church organised many workers, led numerous influential strikes, and helped hundreds of workers sue for their rights in court. Eventually, Catholic and Communist competitors joined forces under the guidance of a federal agency (SUPRA). Coordinated by SUPRA, the newly unified Alta Mogiana movement was suppressed by the military regime that took control of Brazil in April 1964.

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