Pan-European Minimalism Beyond the Iron Curtain? Michael Fahres’s European Minimal Music Project 1980–1982

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Diplomats in Science Diplomacy: Promoting Scientific and Technological Collaboration in International Relations**

This issue of the International Journal of Mental Health offers insight into mental health care in a number of East European nations. A similar project was completed for Western Europe in 1987 ( International Journal of Mental Health , 1987, 16[l2]). The use of the political boundary between East and West to compile these two issues was an arbitrary decision. It was primarily a pragmatic choice: Europe is simply too large to be encompassed by a single issue. This use of the political schism between Eastern and Western Europe has, however, become even more arbitrary since the tumultuous events of 1989, when the Iron Curtain was in effect torn to shreds, revealing to many Westerners the great pluriformity that was always there. The Eastern bloc does not exist; it really has never existed. Looking from the West with eyesight clouded by the Cold War, we saw Eastern Europe as a formidable military union (the Warsaw Pact) and tight-knit economic community (COMECON). The only characteristics now shared by the former Soviet satellites are their economic malaise and undetermined political future: dissolution of the one-party system, secession movements, and civil strife. Mental health care in Eastern Europe mirrors this great variation. Hence, generalizing can be approached only more cautiously than we deemed necessary with regard to the West European nations. More so than in the West, we find variations in care even within single nation-states. Gebhart (pp. 21-45) describes the effects of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire on present-day Czechoslovakian mental health care. The Austrian part of the empire included the Czech nations Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, in which large asylums were characteristic of care. For Slovakia, in the Hungarian part of the empire, psychiatric care in large general hospitals was most characteristic, as was a long-standing tradition of family care of the mentally ill. The boundaries were different then, but history has left very visible marks on the care systems of the later-formed nations. The political turnaround of the late 1980s in Eastern Europe will undoubtedly affect both the mental health care needed and the systems for providing care. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of the Germanies,

Truth and Lies across the Iron Curtain Rósa Magnúsdóttir Melissa Feinberg, Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe. xxii + 232 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0190644611. $74.00. Melissa Feinberg has written an excellent book about political culture in Stalinist Eastern Europe. Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe is a timely book that focuses on fear, lies, and truth; themes that are all too familiar in contemporary political culture, dominated by ideological populism and fake (i.e., untrue) news. But more importantly, Curtain of Lies is also a welcome addition to the historiography on East European, Soviet, and Cold War history, as it joins a body of works that complicate the notion of resistance and demonstrate the porousness of the Iron Curtain.1 Additionally, it is transnational history at its best, with a focus on families, communities, ideologies, and regions instead of political borders, nations, policies, and states. Two opposite ideologies, communism and capitalism, dominated the political culture of the Cold War. To strengthen their propaganda, both communist regimes and the United States adopted a simple vocabulary of opposites meant to create loyalty and faith in their respective ideological projects. "Telling the truth about socialism" became a catchphrase in Soviet propaganda, at home and abroad, but even if both sides "spoke in terms of truth and lies, factual accuracy was usually not their primary concern" (xi). [End Page 649] These propaganda strategies of "truth telling," which implicitly and explicitly always relied on the concept of lying, had much to do with the fear that dominated the Cold War.2 In the war-torn regions of Eastern Europe, the regimes encouraged fear of a new war in order to create support for Soviet peace campaigns. In return, Americans painted a general picture of East Europeans as paralyzed by fear, not daring to take control of their own lives as they lived in a state of surveillance and terror.3 Both of these "fear campaigns" served the purposes of the respective superpowers; to secure and sustain support for their rule at home as well as to justify the costly propaganda campaigns in the early years of the Cold War. Feinberg's study shows how East Europeans adapted to these fears, and how they influenced the campaigns, focusing on flows of ideas rather than top-down strategies and bottom-up reactions. One example, related to the well-documented fear of a new war, shows that some people created a "fantasy of war as liberation" (127), where a war would free East Europeans from oppression.4 This kind of fantasy relied on the conviction that nuclear weapons would erase Soviet territory but not the satellite states. Interestingly, most people were convinced of a US victory in any of the imagined war scenarios, clearly not taking for granted that Soviet accomplishments in World War II could be repeated. These fantasies, as well as fantasies of a painless nuclear war, Feinberg describes as a coping strategy; as such, the war fantasies are indicative of one way in which East Europeans made sense of the available sources of information from both West and East in their everyday lives. In Feinberg's narrative, people's experiences are at the center: what was it like to live in Eastern Europe, and how did the superpowers' battle over truth inform people's way of life? Curtain of Lies provides a balanced account of how some East Europeans, while living under Stalinist control, took note of the situation in the West and "used, adapted, manipulated, and shaped political discourses from both sides of the Iron Curtain in order to make sense of their own experience" (xix). Feinberg thus challenges the prevalent [End Page 650] dichotomy of the historical literature in that agency is not an either/or question about oppression or resistance. Rather, Feinberg argues, we need to look at the sources of information available to East Europeans and understand how they informed people's approaches to their everyday lives. She finds that just as people's survival strategies were dependent on them navigating the "transnational political culture of the Cold War" (xv), East...

During the Cold War, the term “captive nations” should be regarded as a figure of speech, but also as a practical expression of the ideological declaration – anti‑communism. Using it, the government and the Congress of the United States expressed their support for the cause of freedom of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and the American society, including minority groups from Eastern Europe, expressed its solidarity with the people who were deprived the right to decide about their own fate. Was the promotion of the concept of “captive nations” a deliberate action of the U.S. government calculated to emphasize their interest in the fate of the regions from which many citizens of that country originated (response to bottom‑up pressure)? Or maybe it was a way to gain support for their foreign policy and its promotion at home and abroad (a propaganda tool)? What role did the refugees themselves play in these activities? This text is an attempt to assess the impact that they could have on the Congress, and thereby influence the processes shaping American foreign policy (both in terms of public debate, as well as concrete policy proposals). Undoubtedly, the activity of a number of business organizations, associating both U.S. citizens and immigrants from Eastern Europe, contributed to a significant popularization of the concept of “the captive” and the role of the United States as their spokesperson. However, the analysis suggests that the myth of captivity is not linked only to the American anti‑communism. It has been present in the American tradition since colonial times, and since its redefinition after World War II. Until today it is used by the U.S. authorities in order to justify global involvement.

The Emerging Europe of the 1990s

After the Second World War, a bipolar world, known as the Cold War Era, has been clearly formed between the Western Bloc and Communist Bloc while the United States and the Soviet Union at the peak on each side. In Eastern Europe, the United States was restrained and felt helpless about Soviet expansion in this area with the perception of Yalta system. On the other hand, in Asia, with the breakdown of talks, an all-out war resumed. A Chinese civil war fought between Kuomintang (also as KMT or Chinese National Party) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the end of 1948, KMT has occupied the inferior position. In the early period of 1949, CCP forces crossed the Yangtze River and successfully captured Nanking, the capital of KMT’s Republic of China (PRC) government. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with its capital at Beiping, which was renamed Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and millions of Nationalist Chinese retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the CCP takeover of mainland China, the United States came to reformulate its China Policy which later marked a turning point in Sino-American relationship during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950. In June 1948, the leader of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, was officially denounced and his party, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), was ejected as a member of the Cominform by the Soviet Union. Since the West branded Tito a Soviet puppet for his loyalty and constancy of faith to Stalinism, the Tito-Stalin Split presented a whole new realm of possibilities to the United States for its dilemma in china—“Chinese Titoism.” With the influence of Stilwell Incident over Sino-American relationship and the facts of Tito-Stalin Split, Truman made an about-face change to U.S. China Policy in 1949. By the early 1949, the Truman Administration has already been making plans to diverge from Chiang and his KMT such as the publication of China White Paper; at the same time, Truman Administration keeping making chances to have conversations with the CCP. By meeting and negotiating with the CCP officials, Truman Administration attempted to disunite Communist China and the Soviet Union, expected Mao to be the “Asian Tito,” and then Communist China can joint forces with the United States to fight against the Soviet Union, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Until the outbreak of Korean War in June 1950, the United States finally realized that what it faced is hostile china along with the Sino-Soviet partnership. By applying Graham T. Allison’s three decision-making models, namely, the Rational Actor Model (RAM), the Organizational Behavior Model (OBM), and the Governmental Politics Model (GPM) as the theoretical structure and basis, the thesis would step by step explore the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950 through the perspectives of the rational assessment and choice on national interest, struggles between/among organizations based on different target and organizational culture, and pulling, hauling and bargaining games among relative bureaucrats. In addition, the thesis also applied the principles from Alexander L. George’s book, Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy, to aim at examining how President Truman’s, who has the final say, character, personality, value and world views made effect in the decision-making process of the target case study. In the process of theory confirming, the thesis discovered that by the period of transformation of Chinese regimes in 1949, the Tito-Stalin Split of 1948 presented the United States a new inspiration for the Communist World, that is, the Eastern Bloc is not a rigid “Iron Curtain.” Truman Administration considered that Titoism may set its roots upon China, the Yugoslav-Soviet Conflict could be a replay situation that occurred in mainland China, and both would put the strategic thought—Engaging China to counter the Soviet Threat—into practice. Nevertheless, from the historical perspectives, this kind of strategic thought seemed over-optimistic, which did not conform to fully rational considerations. However, with regard to the background of the early Cold War Era and the suspicion between the Truman Administration and KMT, the alternative that the United States took reflected the principles of “bounded rationality model.” As a result, by examining the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950, what the thesis explored not only the facts about the Sino-American relationship in this period, but also the continuity and change of Truman’s China Policy along with its cause and effect.

The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry, by Justin Quinn. Oxford University Press, 2015. 218 pages. Justin Quinn's new book tracks movement of Central and Eastern European (primarily Czech) and American, British, and Irish poets and poetry across Iron Curtain between 1948 and 1989. As Quinn stresses, unassuming preposition across is key to his approach. Studies that remain on either side of Cold War's principal geopolitical divide, or within a single nation or language, afford only impoverished sense of unprecedented transnational dynamic of era (42) and its poetry. Nor will comparison of putatively discrete traditions suffice to enrich that sense. Between Two Fires instead returns to one of foundational insights of transnational studies, namely James Clifford's description of cultural exchange and other practices of displacement ... as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension (quoted in Quinn, 24). Quinn emphasizes poetry's traversal of the well-policed borders [and] formidable linguistic obstacles of Cold War. Between Two Fires attempts to show how poetry was transformed in process (25) and by circumstances of its own movement during conflict. Quinn's history begins with treacherous conditions in which Jan Zabrana, in 1950s Prague, translated radical American poets into Czech (chapter 2). It then moves to critical, institutional, and interpersonal means by which Mirsolav Holub and other poets of Warsaw Pact nations achieved extraordinary visibility in field of Anglophone poetry beginning in 1960s (chapter 3). Recounting how Czech and American poets came to read and reimagine one another's work from within their respective Cold War contexts, these core chapters constitute a significant contribution to transnational literary history of latter half of twentieth century. Quinn's subtle translations and readings of Zabrana and Holub alone would be of value; but no other scholar offers anything approaching so textured an analysis, in English, of literary-cultural field in Prague during first two decades of Cold War, from Soviet-backed Communist Party of Czechoslovakia's seizure of power in early 1948 through Prague Spring of 1968. The book makes a persuasive case that it is impossible to form a complete picture of poetry in [Cold War] US or UK without reference to translations from [the] (3) on other side of Iron Curtain. The opening chapter positions Between Two Fires in relation to recent work in world literature, Cold War cultural studies, and transnational literary studies. By Quinn's reckoning, these fields have broadly neglected geographic mobility, aesthetic and linguistic malleability, and political manipulability of Cold War-era poetry. Although this stocktaking chapter too often siphons off its critical energy by calling out weaknesses in other scholars' work, its attention to mutual implication of transnational and Cold War cultural studies will prove instructive for scholars in both fields. Drawing on Stephen Clingman's (2009) work on narrative, Quinn observes that transnational criticism broadly replicates established routes of scholarship, above all through binaries of modernism and postmodernism, colonialism and postcolonialism (21). For Quinn's project, latter binary is of greater concern than former. Since structure of center-periphery that marks postcolonial theory ... persists in transnational criticism in form of First World-Third framework (3-4), that criticism perforce neglects literature of Second World (5). [1] Quinn further observes that transnational literary scholarship tends to restrict itself to a single language, English, and to a single genre, novel. The study most proximate to Between Two Fires, Jahan Ramazani's A Transnational Poetics (2009), is an exception to genre rule of transnational literary studies as Quinn describes it. …

Scholars have long recognized the centrality of the home in Cold War discourse. They have also broadened research into the Cold War by looking at design and daily life behind the iron curtain. David Crowley, Susan E. Reid, and others have brought the design and material culture of the Eastern Bloc to the fore, and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Cold War Modern: Design, 1945–1970, curated by Crowley and Jane Pavitt with contributions by Reid and Greg Castillo, dedicated a significant portion of the exhibition and its catalogue to designs from Eastern Europe.1 In Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, architectural historian Greg Castillo continues this trend, offering an informed reading of the interiors and material artifacts exhibited at trade fairs and exhibitions held in divided Germany and elsewhere. He situates the Cold War home and its material culture at the center of the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and reinforces Beatriz Colomina’s argument that “everything in the postwar age was domestic.”2 Castillo elaborates on the work of historian Robert H. Haddow and expands our understanding of trade fairs and exhibitions by breaking down the polemic of case studies. Anne Massey’s essay, for instance, on the design of ocean liners, provides a detailed expose of the complex and collective design process involved, while Alison Clarke’s essay, examining the home furnishing choices of a retired couple, highlights the transitory nature of a domestic interior and the way in which stylistic aspirations and biographic memories structure its evolution. Like Clarke, Pat Kirkham’s essay on the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California, also emphasizes the active and ongoing construction of interior spaces by their inhabitants as she analyzes the way in which the couple used their home to entertain. In this, both Clarke’s and Kirkham’s essays exemplify the influence of material culture studies, noted by Keeble in his introductory essay, as the interior is viewed as a performative setting, which is an ongoing process requiring constant work. What is less evident in the anthology is the way in which material culture studies has sought to uncover the normative practices that structure the domestic interior.6 While Keeble suggests, correctly, that much of this work ignores the importance of style and aesthetics, and can tend toward a synchronic analysis of the interior, there are some notable examples where the demands of both are interwoven with excellent results. Judy Attfield’s seminal essay “Inside Pram Town: A Case Study of Harlow House Interiors, 1951–1961,”7 for example, explored the ways in which women responded to “modern” open plan living and the strategies of resistance they developed as a means to appropriate “modernity to their own designs [my italics].”8 A little more analysis of such “ordinary” interiors would have been a welcome addition. Of course an anthology must draw its boundaries somewhere, and Designing the Modern Interior pulls together essays that both extend and refine existing (albeit dispersed) works of historiographic significance as well as essays that present new research, providing a stimulating and authoritative introduction to the history of the modern interior. Indeed, the quality of research— in particular the detailed archival research—is excellent throughout, and where the anthology is particularly successful is in its “spatialization” of history, which, as Sparke claims, leads to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the subject. This is backed up by extensive endnotes and a select bibliography that provide a rich source of information to any student wishing to learn more. With one hundred illustrations and an engagingly lucid text, Designing the Modern Interior should be essential reading for such students. While some of the essays and issues raised might leave those more familiar with the subject desirous of longer and more extended analyses, this should not be read as a criticism; rather it is an acknowledgment that the subject of this quality work warrants further investigation and publication.

Reviewed by: Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic by Dóra Vargha Donna Harsch Dóra Vargha. Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic. Global Health Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xii + 260 pp. Ill. $105.00 (978-1-108-42084-6). Dóra Vargha's well-documented and clearly argued monograph is a welcome addition to the historiography on polio outside the United States and, more generally, to the history of medicine and public health in Socialist Eastern Europe. The book draws on primary sources from thirteen archives and libraries, including Hungarian repositories, an Albert B. Sabin collection, World Health Organization records, and International Committee of the Red Cross documents. It incorporates eyewitness accounts from fifteen people interviewed by Vargha. It offers a very interesting analysis of the intense coverage of polio by the Hungarian press. Last but not least, it weaves in information and arguments from a multitude of secondary studies. From this material, Vargha reconstructs a many-sided story that covers the epidemiological, cultural, and political history of polio in Hungary after the Second World War, while also situating Hungarian events and discourse within a wider medical context of international and cooperative efforts to develop a cure, on the one hand, and within the global political framework of Cold War ideological hostility and all-round rivalry, on the other. [End Page 633] The history of the fight against polio in Hungary, Vargha demonstrates, actually challenges the view that Cold War antagonisms were ubiquitous and constant in the 1950s and 1960s. The search for a cure and the testing of vaccines, she argues convincingly, were characterized by transnational medical collaborations that crossed the Cold War divide. Polio researchers and public health officials from all over the world, not only the United States and Western Europe, shared medical data and information, presented research at international congresses, and participated in major vaccine trials. Interest in polio peaked at the same time around the world because in the 1950s so many countries experienced frequent and severe polio epidemics. Socialist health officials in Hungary (and the Soviet Union) were eager to learn from and work with research teams from the West in carrying out the decisive trials of the Sabin vaccine, while Western hospitals and medical personnel were happy to help supply equipment and vaccine to Hungary (and other Eastern European states). Transnational exchange and cooperation were actively promoted by the World Health Organization—which, she argues, gained respect and, gradually, participation from East Bloc countries in the 1960s. The book traces the course of multiple polio epidemics in Hungary from the late 1940s through 1961. It discusses the varieties, technology, accessibility, venues, medical personnel, and patients' experience of polio treatment. It tracks the opening and extension of treatment centers and examines the ways in which Hungarian public health officials, doctors, and nurses worked to overcome and/ or circumvent shortages of, most significantly, iron lungs. Beyond the facts of polio, Vargha evaluates change and continuity in public discourse and private opinion about polio in Hungary. She considers why polio elicited considerably more official and popular fear than infectious diseases that were more common and deadlier than polio. As have other scholars, she points, above all, to the dominant demographic of its victims, children, and to the relatively high incidence of paralysis and, from that, long-term disabilities among them. Polio's perverse association with children's beloved summer recreational activities, she suggests, also contributed to the broad and deep anxieties that polio epidemics sparked. Polio's disproportionate impact on innocent children, she argues, is another reason that researchers and, more importantly, governments were willingly to breach the Iron Curtain when solving this international problem. The cooperative and successful effort against polio both represented and encouraged rising global concern about children's welfare. Inside Hungary too, the book shows, anxiety about polio's threat to children crossed domestic political divides and tempered the Communist regime's ideological rigidity. Initially, the repression that followed the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 hurt the efforts of doctors to diagnose and of hospitals to treat polio patients. When a polio epidemic broke out...

The Cold War: A World History

When, in May 1945, the Allies finally defeated Nazi Germany and began their military occupation, no-one expected that within five years the country would be divided into two political halves, one tied to the West and the other to the Soviet Union. Germany, despite its defeat in 1918, had remained the most powerful state in central Europe and had been an undoubted great power since 1870. If anything, the fear was that Germany would revive quickly and become a menace to the peace again. That it did become divided between East and West was of course due to the start of the ‘Cold War’ after 1945, with the Americans and British on the one side and the Russians on the other seeing, not Germany, but each other as the post-war ‘enemy’. In 1946 Winston Churchill was already able to speak of an ‘iron curtain’ stretching from Trieste, on the Adriatic, to Stettin, on the Baltic. By 1949 each side had established control of its own bloc—the Russians predominating in the Eastern European ‘People's Republics’, the Americans drawing the West Europeans together with the Marshall Aid Programme and the North Atlantic Treaty.

February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 179 THE EARLY “IRON CURTAIN” Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4l6, Canada stevenm@mcmaster.ca Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xvii, 488. isbn 978-0-19-923150-8. £18.99 (hb); £12.99 (pb). In his famous Westminster College address on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri , Winston Churchill Wred one of the opening salvos of the Cold War by proclaiming that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain” had been lowered across Europe. Patrick Wright’s intriguing and provocative book does not examine the phrase “iron curtain” in its popular Cold War context. Instead, he maintains that many characteristics of this metaphor, “including the pronounced sense of theatricality it would bring to international politics, were inherited from the period before the Second World War” (p. 18). Wright divides Iron Curtain into two primary chronological sections, the Wrst covering the period from 1914 to 1920. An iron curtain originally referred to the steel safety screen that descended in English theatres, beginning in the lateeighteenth century, to separate the audience from the often catastrophic Wres that broke out on the stage. The phrase entered the lexicon of international relations in January 1915 when British author and paciWst Violet Page (writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee) published an article lamenting that “War’s cruelties and recriminations, War’s monstrous iron curtain” (p. 80) had alienated European nations such as England and Germany sharing a common cultural heritage. But the barrier quickly moved east in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and “took the form not just of exaggerated political rhetoric, but of an economic blockade enforced by naval power” (p. 171), as the Allies sought to contain the infection of Bolshevism. Wright devotes most attention in this section to documenting the 1920 visit to Russia by the British delegation jointly sponsored by the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which sought to penetrate the dense fog of Allied anti-Bolshevik propaganda and validate the delegation members’ own preconceived views about the nascent socialist utopia in Russia. British delegates witnessed images both of progress carefully stagemanaged by their hosts and of terrible economic dislocation and poverty caused by the Allied blockade and the civil war, which allowed the majority of them to return home to lavish praise on the Soviet experiment that would, in their minds, inevitably fulWl its potential once the Bolshevik government became stable. February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 180 Reviews 1 “The Future of Europe”, European AVairsz 1, no. 1 (April 1949): 3. The second section of Wright’s book examines Western reports of life behind the iron curtain between 1920 and 1939. Here, the author focuses heavily on the theatrical nature of Soviet attempts to create modern-day Potemkin villages that werez—zwith a limited number of exceptionsz—zaccepted as reality by an endless parade of left-wing visitors. A second British Trades Union Congress delegation in 1924, for example, received a dramatically embellished picture of Soviet economic progress that included a train journey past a long-abandoned factory belching smoke created by burning wet straw frantically provided by Russian peasants; the resulting report of the delegation “repeatedly collapsed into the most abject conformity with the Soviet view of reality” (p. 245). The most tragic examples of Western visitors’ blindness to the truth occurred during the 1930s famine deliberately induced by Stalin, and Wright exposes a wide cast of characters who adopted a blinkered view of conditions in the ussr. Among intellectuals , Wright documents the 1931 visit of George Bernard Shaw, who cavalierly dismissed reports of widespread food shortages while dining sumptuously in Moscow’s Hotel Metropole. Among journalists, Wright develops the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Timesz correspondent who knuckled under to demands of Soviet censors to produce sanitized accounts denying or ignoring the famine in order to protect his privileged place in that...