Cold War Enemy Research Articles

Contending American Visions of North Korea: The Mission Civilisatrice versus Realpolitik

This article aims to situate US–DPRK relations in a broader historical and theoretical context, that is, part of the violent encounters between the West and the ‘Rest’ in modern times, to examine discursive causes of their animosity and devise preliminary solutions to usher in peace and reconciliation in the Korean Peninsula. Drawing on a postcolonial reading of the liberal internationalist project and the global nuclear order, as well as a reflexive realist critique of US foreign policy toward the rogue states, this research explores how two competing geopolitical discourses, the mission civilisatrice and realpolitik, have constructed the epistemological problématique of Washington’s approach to Pyongyang and contributed to internal tensions in it over time. After analyzing the historical trajectory of America’s contrasting understandings of the Korean question, I seek to offer their implications on the dramatic change in the bilateral relations in the Trump era. By interrogating Trump’s realist turn in grand strategy and its unexpected influence on the two Cold War enemies’ mini-détente in 2018–2020, this article asks how a genuine dialogue between the liberal, ‘civilized’ center and the illiberal, ‘barbarian’ periphery can be materialized in an alternative normative setting. In particular, I argue that Trump’s new realist trial posed a critical question on how to depart from old ontological assumptions that frame the dominant liberal internationalist/neoconservative approaches toward a more dialogical and equal negotiation and compromise. A peaceful resolution of the North Korean dilemma is inherently related to a larger reflexivist project that promotes a thorough interrogation of the self-righteous US identity and a great transformation of America’s imperialist monologue toward the Third World in general. Des visions américaines concurrentes de la Corée du Nord : Mission civilisatrice vs Realpolitik

Investment in the diplomatic ties: North Korea’s monetary support for Korean schools in Japan

This paper explores the purpose behind the funds sent from North Korea to Korean residents in Japan (Zainichi Koreans) during a mid-1950s thaw in the Cold War. By examining the triangular relationship between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, this article demonstrates that a primary aim of North Korea’s financial support was to cultivate Zainichi Koreans as agents of North Korea who would contribute to the normalisation of Japan-North Korea relations. I argue that North Korean remittances were an investment for inter-ethnic rapprochement during a period of geo-political stalemate between Cold War enemies.

Images of urban space in constructing the Cold War enemy: American skyscrapers in Soviet animation

ABSTRACT This article deals with an analysis of the representation of American cities in Soviet animated films of the Cold War (1946–63). The space-oriented discourse of popular geopolitics was a resource for constructing the Cold War enemy. The authors point out that the images of skyscrapers served as the main signifier of Americanness in Soviet animation. Among their principal functions were othering and dehumanising ‘enemy number one’, supporting the positive collective identity of the Soviet people and legitimising the Soviet way of life. The image of skyscrapers is discussed as a political symbol, which Soviet propaganda treated as an embodiment of America. This image incorporates the negative characteristics of the American enemy: exploitation; economic and social inequality; racism; the dictatorship of the magnates of Wall Street; egoism and hostility among persons; dominance of mass culture; incitement of base instincts in a person; and cult of violence and war.

Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China by Covell F. Meyskens

Reviewed by: Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China by Covell F. Meyskens Taomo Zhou Covell F. Meyskens. Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 281 pp. $28.99 (cloth). Most historians of the twentieth century world are familiar with Magnitogorsk, the Soviet steel complex on the freezing steppe of the Urals featured in Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain.1 But its Chinese counterpart is relatively little known and understudied. In Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China, Covell F. Meyskens skillfully fills this gap by presenting an impressively researched history of Maoist industrial projects hidden in China’s remote interior. The book succeeds in combining accounts of elite-level decision-making with bottom-up stories about the 16 million workers and their family members who migrated to inland China between 1964 and 1972. What is the “Third Front”? In Mao’s tripartite division of China’s geography, the First Front referred to the coastal areas; the Third Front included landlocked regions such as Guizhou, Sichuan, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces; the Second Front covered the regions in between (5). Launched by Mao in the aftermath of the great famine of 1958–1961 at home and contentious relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union abroad, the Third Front campaign served multiple purposes: to industrialize the interior, to defend national security, to resurrect Mao’s self-reliant development strategy, and to continuously create Maoist subjects who internalized the socialist ethos of collective good, hard work, and frugal living (23–24). Chapter 1 of this book delineates how the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 allowed Mao to overcome resistance within the top Chinese leadership and forge ahead with China’s construction of “a strategic industrial rear to defend itself against its Cold War enemies” (41). Meyskens urges readers not to see Mao’s perception of imminent danger triggered by American military involvement in Indochina as “irrational,” because “oversized responses to security threats were a global norm” in the Cold War context (210). Meyskens further proposes that, “on a semiotic level, the Cold War never happened in Mao’s China because the Chinese Communist Party never viewed the conflict between capitalism and socialism as cold from the late 1940s into the 1970s” (21). However, as the rest of the book brilliantly shows, although “cold war” (lengzhan 冷战) had never been part of the everyday vocabulary of the Third Front participants, their career trajectories, their family lives, and the changing ways in which they found meaning in life and self-worth in work were all part and parcel of the human story of the Cold War and should not be studied in isolation from the expanding field of global Cold War history. Chapter 2 traces the processes through which factories, individual workers, and their families reckoned with the life-changing call to relocate to the interior. What motivated one to become a “Third Fronter,” to travel far from home and spend the most productive time of one’s life in mountainous areas? Meyskens reminds us that the answer was much more complex than the simple lack of choices under an authoritarian regime. In contrast to two other mass-migration projects in Mao’s China—the punitive labor camps and the sent-down youth movement, the Third Front was well funded and was allocated “good people and good horses”—the politically reliable workers who passed background checks and the most advanced equipment available (80). Many Third Front participants [End Page E-14] made the conscious decision to prioritize revolutionary work over material comforts and family stability. Many saw themselves as honorable constructors rather than as reluctant conscripts and derived a strong sense of accomplishment from promoting the development of inland China through their strenuous labor (31–32). Zooming into the everyday life on the ground on Third Front construction sites, chapters 3 and 4 depict how these self-sacrificing socialist subjects endured long working hours, slept in mud huts or canvas tents, drank from “mountain streams,” ate cold buns (mantou 馒头) together with fish and shrimp scoured from the rivers, and used their muscle power to make up...

Символ детства и конструирование образа «врага номер один» в советском и американском кинематографе холодной войны

The paper analyses, based on the Soviet and US Cold War films, the role of the childhood symbol as a resource of forming the image of the enemy. The scientific relevance of the problem stems from the need to study 1) the reasons for and the forms of politicizing the childhood images, 2) the ways of constructing the image of the enemy and the means of deconstructing it, and 3) the cinematic images of the Cold War enemy, since they remain a factor in the contemporary relations between Russia and the United States. The author points out that the interest that symbolic politics actors show in the childhood symbol is explained by its ability to trigger strong emotional response. The Cold War cinematic representations of childhood served as an efficient tool for constructing the image of an enemy. Such an image had a number of functions: maintaining collective identity, mobilisation, justification of violence, legitimation of power, and predicting the victory. Unlike adult characters, children’s characters — even the negative ones — were pictured by both Soviet and US filmmakers not as enemies, but rather as victims of the unnatural and unjust social system of the “enemy number one”. In general, the Soviet and US films feature similar roles of “their” (i. e., Soviet and American, respectively) children and similar treatment of children — whether “their” or not — by adult characters. The cinematic images of children convincingly show that, despite the fact that both superpowers presented each other as antipodes, the basic values of the USSR and the US were much closer than it may seem. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the Cold War cinema employed the childhood symbol for the deconstruction of the image of the “enemy number one” and for rehumanisation of the opponent in the period of the detente.

Secret Bedfellows? The KGB, Carlos the Jackal and Cold War Psychological Warfare

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the understanding of the emergence, character, and significance of conspiracy theories on state–terrorism relations by providing a historical case study on the “Carlos–KGB [Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti] conspiracy theory”: the fictional narrative that the “super-terrorist” Carlos the Jackal was an agent of the KGB, exploited against the Soviet Union's Cold War enemies. The analysis shows that the stories originated from disinformation operations of Western intelligence services, which were then spread by the news media, politicians, and Carlos himself. The mythical Carlos simulated through Cold War psychological warfare is deconstructed as a symbol of Soviet control of international terrorism.

Conservative at Birth: The Creation and Paradoxes of United States Human Rights Policy During World War II

Previous scholarship on United States human rights policymaking has omitted or vaguely summarized the State Department’s role during World War II. However, this scholarship ignores real policy roots that began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms address. As FDR and officials at Foggy Bottom articulated a sweeping postwar vision, bureaucrats drafted bills of rights that encapsulated the conservative assumptions that guided policymakers after the war. These civil servants rejected international enforcement, accepted only rights contained in the United States Constitution, and safeguarded domestic racial discrimination. These ironic assumptions soon caused friction with European allies, Latin American neighbors, and Cold War enemies.

All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing by Carmel Finley

633 Reviews White and male.) Moreover, commercialization dramatically altered labor resources, as the harvest-time hands of family members and neighbors gave way to floating multitudes of “unskilled” hop-pickers, often drawn from the lowest ranks of society, whose wages were based on the weight of their hauls and the color of their skin. This was especially true in the American West, where the labor of a kaleidoscope of pickers — Indigenous, Asian, European, and American — accentuated the fault lines of race and class. Finally, Kopp argues that from the landing of the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay to the initial rise of the Willamette Valley as the “Hop Center of the World,” the North American beer industry underwent a staggering level of Europeanization , only to return the favor by the turn of the twentieth century. Readers familiar with W.J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic (1979), a social history with remarkable staying power, will follow Kopp’s periodization with keen interest. By the mid nineteenth century, the palates and proficiency of German and Irish immigrants, along with the practices of temperance advocates, helped transform the United States into a nation of beer drinkers. Temperance reformers perceived German lager beer to be an acceptable, if temporary, alternative to rotgut in what had become a nation of drunkards. The Midwest became the center of American brewing, and the most enterprising hop growers and brewers sought to perfect local and regional hops that might compete on the world stage. This led them to the Northwest. Kopp’s most difficult work, and it is admirable , is in describing the transplantation and cultivation of hops in the Northwest during and after the antebellum period, where the historical evidence is fragmentary at best. Fort Vancouver, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers, provides the earliest documentary evidence of hops cultivated for sale, as the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) governor George Simpson and chief factor John McLaughlin included the crop in shipments to provision Russian fur traders in Sitka, Alaska. Despite HBC policies against imbibing the fruits of their labor, anecdotal evidence suggests that fur traders did more than sell this “brewer’s gold.” The Gilded Age ascendance of the Willamette Valley as the nation’s leading hops producer helped some Oregon businesses endure the Prohibition years through crop and marketing diversification, and yet, exports continued in a global capitalist market unfazed by moral reform. After repeal, towns such as Independence responded to demand (the “hop rush”) by pioneering hop festivals to both attract workers and celebrate community, even if the “heritage” portrayed at these events suffered from Anglo historical amnesia. The post– World War II industrialization of the industry brought challenges to Oregon in the form of downy mildew and competition from corporate giants with their bland, seemingly hop-less macrobrews. Nevertheless, the partnerships formed in this period among growers, brewers, U.S. Department of Agriculture geneticists, and academic researchers (primarily from Oregon State University) led to the cultivation new hops varieties that would become staples of the craft beer revolution, long after the Yakima Valley had eclipsed the Willamette Valley in hops production. Ryan Dearinger Eastern Oregon University ALL THE BOATS ON THE OCEAN: HOW GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES LED TO GLOBAL OVERFISHING by Carmel Finley University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2017. Illustrations, notes, index. 224 pages. $45.00, cloth. Anyone who visited an Oregon beach during the early 1970s likely remembers huge ships hovering just beyond the twelve-mile limit of American sovereignty. Few saw those ships up close, but everyone knew they belonged to a 634 OHQ vol. 118, no. 4 vast Russian fleet that constituted half the tonnage of the global industrial fishery. For most residents and tourists, the ships made tangible the abstract specter of a Cold War enemy. For fishers, however, the Russians were taking all of their halibut, rockfish, and salmon. This is how many North Americans learned about the globalization of industrial fishing, but by then, the fishery’s expansion was decades old and stretched from the Barents Sea to the Southern Ocean, from the Caribbean to the Benguela Bight, and from Micronesia to the horizon off McPhillips Beach in 1971. The economic and ecological impact...

ASEAN’s Defense Diplomacy and China’s Military Diplomacy

ASEAN’s Defense Diplomacy and China’s Military Diplomacy Penghong Cai (bio) Unlike other major powers outside Southeast Asia, China directly borders the region and lays claim to being at least partially included as a Southeast Asian state. This geographic connection is an important dimension of the geopolitical and security environment for China. In the nineteenth century or even earlier, the Western intrusion into China followed Southeast Asian land and maritime routes, and in the early 1940s Japan first occupied the Indochinese Peninsula and then southwest China. The region surrounding southernmost China, referred to as the south gate of China, has significant implications for the country’s security. Therefore, China logically harbors doubts about a newly developed mechanism related to defense cooperation at its doorstep. Labeled as a tool of defense diplomacy, the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus) is diplomatically and tactically supported by China, but philosophically and practically the grouping’s vision of defense diplomacy remains divergent from the concept and policy of Chinese military diplomacy. This essay first examines the achievements of the ADMM-Plus and its benefits for China. It then analyzes the concept of defense diplomacy in Chinese military culture and concludes by considering obstacles to the future of the ADMM-Plus from a Chinese perspective. The ADMM-Plus’s Achievements and Benefits for China The ADMM-Plus was established in 2010 as a collective platform to ensure ASEAN centrality and realize the ADMM vision of being outward-looking, open, and inclusive. It consists of eighteen member states, including the ten ASEAN members plus Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. All the outside states have consented to ASEAN’s central role in regional affairs. When the ADMM-Plus began, some observers expected it to be “one of the more substantial pieces of Asia’s multilateral security architecture.”1 [End Page 89] These expectations require the ADMM-Plus to set up rules and carry out substantial activities. The last six years have seen some achievements. The ADMM-Plus has contributed norms for building regional security architecture and proposed new concepts like “dynamic equilibrium.” At the same time, it has upheld the ASEAN values of respecting national sovereignty, exercising self-restraint in defense diplomacy, finding peaceful solutions to disputes, maintaining ASEAN centrality, and promoting cooperative security (from Europe to ASEAN). In practice, the ADMM-Plus has set up working groups in nontraditional security areas such as counterterrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), military medicine, and peacekeeping and has gradually begun working in traditional security fields like maritime security—for example, by setting up a hotline for preventing incidents at sea. The most significant accomplishment of the ADMM-Plus is the joint military exercises it has held since its establishment. The most recent exercise was held in Brunei and Singapore in early May 2016 and comprised 3,500 personnel, 18 naval vessels, 25 aircraft, and 40 special forces teams from all eighteen member countries. Another significant result is that the ADMM-Plus has given the United States and China opportunities to work together despite tensions in the South China Sea. China supports and benefits from the ADMM-Plus process. It regards ASEAN countries as important neighbors and tries to improve its relationships with them through the ADMM-Plus. China dispatches its defense ministers to take part in the ministerial meetings, while only dispatching deputy ministerial officers to attend the Shangri-La Dialogue conferences. China can take advantage of the ADMM-Plus to deliver and circulate defense policies, associate with old and new counterparts and participants, learn different points of view, and establish necessary contacts. The forum also supplies China with specific information on the development of new security mechanisms and how they may affect China’s military diplomacy. Defense Diplomacy in the View of China’s Military Diplomacy Defense diplomacy is a traditional security concept used for the realpolitik purposes of strengthening Western allies against common enemies.2 The concept’s intellectual roots are in the use of defense alliances [End Page 90] as a tool to defend the Western democracies from Cold War enemies like China, but the emphasis now is on peacetime military cooperation and assistance. China...

Vietnam. Treacherous subjects: Gender, culture, and trans-Vietnamese feminism. By Lan P. Duong. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Pp. 243. Illustrations.

Treacherous subjects: Gender, culture, and trans-Vietnamese feminism By CAN P. DUONG Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Pp. 243. Illustrations. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000519 In Treacherous subjects, Lan Duong does what most Asian Americanists studiously avoid, that is, she engages in sharp criticism of nationalism in so-called 'homeland' and community politics. Her ambitious new book provides a courageous and much-needed gender analysis of Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American and French-Vietnamese literature and film, hopefully paving the way for new scholarship that looks across national borders. This approach should prove particularly fruitful in analysing Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions. Not only does it disrupt the borders placed by the institutionalisation of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies and the ideological divide between Vietnam and refugee communities abroad, it also reveals the impact of the legacy of colonisation and American imperialism on women and the stories they produce. Such complex comparative examination creates new ways of conceptualising Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic identities. The tensions created by having to side with one ideology or the decision to stay or leave Vietnam continues to haunt Vietnamese and those living in the diaspora. Lan Duong begins the book with a personal story to indicate her positionality. Her father was labelled a collaborator of 'Vietnam's colonial and Cold War enemies' by the Vietnamese because he left Vietnam as a refugee in 1975, while her mother was considered loyal because she stayed behind. Both suffered tremendous loss as the family was separated. The themes of loyalty and 'treason' are most relevant to Vietnamese and refugee Vietnamese in the diaspora. Trust or the inability to trust still pervades family and community dynamics as Duong argues, collective anxiety surrounds the impossibility or inability to remain faithful to one ideology or commitment, as historical and traumatic events unfold. These anxieties, she firmly shows, are overwhelmingly projected onto the bodies of women. Accusations of treason do not reflect reality, but point instead she says to the perceived interest in strengthening alliances for the purpose of nation or community building. In this book, Lan Duong specifically examines the impact of what she calls 'the trauma of betrayal' marking Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic subjectivities. Although these are characterised by divided loyalties and shifting alliances, she carefully points out that these are 'not fixed and tend to fluctuate with economic and political relations between countries. Duong uncovers double meanings in collaborative postwar Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literary and filmic representations, most interestingly in cultural works around the theme of treasonous collaboration. …

The Guard's Three Bodies: Linsanity, Celebrity and National Identity

Jeremy Lin was largely unknown prior to the phenomenon known as ‘Linsanity’ in February 2012. This piece compares and contrasts the ways in which Lin's story – and in particular his cultural, political and national identity – has played out in the USA, Taiwan and China, and also shows how the identities created for Lin in each of these three places constitute his ‘three bodies’. The USA, China and Taiwan all lay some claim on Lin's identity. Answers to basic questions about Lin diverge in each place. The US story focuses on issues of race and overlooked ability. In China, much attention is given to Lin's intellectual and athletic abilities, as well as his ‘Chineseness’. In Taiwan, broadcasters and politicians alike highlight his Taiwanese identity, and emphasise how Lin's success shows the value of non-academic training. Writers in all three countries have focused on lessons to be learned from Lin, with humility, team spirit, hard work and family values taking prominent place. In cross-strait relations, the long-time Cold War enemies remain diplomatically isolated yet economically and culturally intertwined. The Lin story displays the curious moment in People's Republic of China–Republic of China relations in which celebrities can treat the divide between the countries as permeable.

Revisiting NATO’s stabilizing role in south-eastern Europe: the Cold War experience and the longue durée

Balkan post-war animosities involved the osmosis of Cold War cleavages with older regional/nationalist disputes. By providing for deterrence and for the integration of Balkan affairs in a global context, NATO played a major role in discouraging territorial claims between Greece and Turkey on the one hand, and Bulgaria on the other. By the 1970s, the Cold War enemies of the Balkans were firmly on the path of détente. Ironically, NATO was less successful in facilitating a definite reconciliation between its two members, Greece and Turkey, although arguably it also contributed in averting a bilateral clash.

Contesting Identity

The interface between religion and politics has become strong in the wake of expansion of modernity in its contemporary form. This can be regarded as cultural globalization. To interpret this phenomenon, the demonization of Islam by the West led by the US has been taken as a key epistemological point. This article argues that this policy, framed as part of the American strategy in the global war on terrorism, has constituted a key component of the larger US agenda. One facet of this agenda is primarily related to America’s bid to perpetuate the institutional structure of the permanent war economy envisaged during the Cold War period. The structure consists of the vocational interests of the arms lobby and the hawkish politico-bureaucratic-strategic condominium in the US. To accomplish this goal, communism, the United States’ Cold War enemy, has been replaced by a new enemy, Islam, at the end of the Cold War. The events of 11 September 2001 brought all this to a full circle and facilitated the US to advance justifications for continuing the permanent war economy and to substantiate the transformation of the ideological conflict of the Cold War into a cultural conflict in the post-Cold War period. In this regard, the rise of US soft power, made possible by the pervasive impact of globalization, has helped defend America’s post-Cold War proposition regarding an emergent war culture and the portrayal of Islam as the Manichean other in this war.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

Onward, Christian Soldiers W. Taylor Fain (bio) William Inboden . Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 356 pp. Bibliography and index. $85.00. Speaking to an assembly of the National Council of Churches in 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower inveighed against the dangers of communism and invoked the critical role of religion in securing American cultural values and political institutions. The East-West struggle and American spiritual strength, he argued, were inextricably linked. Eisenhower warned his audience that the United States' Cold War enemies embraced "a godless atheism . . . denying all human rights, any kind of human dignity," and he asserted that "every type of free government, is a political expression of some form of religious belief." Shared faith, he concluded, was "the strongest link that we have among the countries of the West" (p. 100). His words reveal the president's belief in the indispensability of a civil religion closely linked to a "diplomatic theology" in waging the Cold War. Clearly, the thirty-fourth president took religion seriously. So does William Inboden in his ambitious, engaging, and largely persuasive examination of the "soul of containment." Until fairly recently, historians of American foreign relations found it difficult, perhaps even distasteful, to grapple with the influence of religious faith on the making of U.S. diplomacy. In Inboden's words, scholars tended "to shift uncomfortably in such cases and either shirk the subject or else probe even deeper, and often in ever more futility, for the 'real' motivation" behind U.S. policies (p. 224). Over the past two decades, though, many diplomatic historians have embraced the premises, tools, and methodologies of their colleagues who practice social and cultural history. Slowly at first, and then with increasing verve, they have worked to balance their concern with traditional forms of power and state relations with approaches that acknowledge the importance of the less tangible, but no less important, determinants of human relations. By 2000, the so-called "cultural turn" in the history of American foreign relations was in full swing. Studies of subjects such as race, gender, class, pathology, emotion, and of the complex ways they shaped the context and content of American diplomacy filled the pages of the journal Diplomatic History, [End Page 529] flew off the university presses, and became staples of the programs at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Andrew Rotter wrote approvingly that the "culture vultures" seemed to be taking over the discipline and that the study of U.S. foreign policy required a stronger engagement with the "webs of significance" that composed American culture. He identified religion as an important filament of those webs. 1 Rotter's endorsement of religion as a valuable prism through which to assess American foreign relations was not without its skeptics. Patricia Hill noted the limits of such an approach and wrote that, although "religion certainly constitutes a category that ought to be considered in the writing of diplomatic history . . . [it] cannot easily be abstracted as a structural component of social order. It cannot therefore be deployed as a category of analysis in the same ways that scholars have wielded gender, class and race." 2 But the door had been opened. In 2006 Andrew Preston called on historians to take up Rotter's challenge to pursue the study of religion's influence on American foreign policy. In what amounted to a manifesto, Preston lamented that "the influence of religion has been relatively neglected and generally unrecognized" by foreign relations historians. The reasons, he noted, were many, including fears of appearing partisan, a proclivity among scholars to explore secular issues, and empirical and methodological difficulties. Taking issue with Hill, Preston argued for a more systematic and sustained engagement with religious topics. He urged his colleagues to acknowledge "the continuing integral role of religion in the formation, execution, and justification of American foreign policy" and concluded that the history of modern American diplomacy demanded a respect for the role of religion, particularly recognition that "intangible, cultural, and value-laden factors were essential to the unfolding of the Cold War." 3 Enter William Inboden. A young member of the State...

“The Sun of World Poetry”: Pushkin as a Cold War Writer

“The Sun of World Poetry”: Pushkin as a Cold War Writer Olga Voronina The Spell of the Spectacle: The Pushkin Celebrations of 1949 The festivities dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, lasting from mid-April through early July 1949, were the second-greatest mass spectacle of the early Cold War after the Victory Parade. Echoing the sumptuous Pushkin Celebrations of 1937, the postwar jubilee was well rehearsed and artfully engineered. It included such preliminaries as an All-Union Pushkin Conference at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences; a Joint Session of the Academy’s Literature and Language, and History and Philosophy Departments; the reopening following the restoration of the Pushkin memorial apartment, and the laying of the foundation of the Pushkin monument in Leningrad; the post-renovation inauguration of the Pushkin estate in Mikhailovskoe, in the Pskov region; and the opening of a Pushkin obelisk in Zakharovo, near Moscow. In the course of three months, Pushkin scholars around the country reportedly delivered 219 public lectures, while Leningrad curators conducted 300 excursions around the Pushkin Museum. Twenty-seven thousand people took part in these activities; 10,000 more gathered for a meeting at the Pushkin monument in Moscow a day before the poet’s birthday. These statistical data were documented in the Proceedings of the Anniversary Celebrations published by the Academy of Sciences. According to Konstantin Simonov, then laureate of four Stalin Prizes and editor-in-chief of Novyi Mir, the scope of the jubilee underscored the greatness of the “Stalin era, which for the first time in the history of humanity made […] Pushkin’s oeuvre the common property of all the people.”1 Although this was a common trope regarding other pre-revolutionary writers as well, Simonov’s speech had distinctive political relevance. He delivered these words on 6 June 1949, at the Pushkin Session at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with Stalin present. Sitting in the presidium, the Generalissimo [End Page 63] again was the obvious other hero of the occasion. And yet there was a big difference between 1937 and 1949 concerning the nature of Stalin’s “glory.” After the war, Simonov and other speakers addressed their eulogies to Stalin the winner, laying words at his feet like the Victory Parade soldiers had laid the banners of the conquered enemy. War rhetoric permeated the Pushkin Celebrations of 1949. But however productive it is to consider the jubilee a spectacle of national recovery from war wounds,2 it was the Cold War that served as its underlying “trauma” and informed the speakers’ and journalists’ choices of arguments and tropes. Speaking of Pushkin’s “significance for the entire world,” Stalin’s ideologues, first and foremost, were referring to the geopolitical delineations recently established on a global scale. They also took into account the ongoing campaign against “servility toward the West” (nizkopoklonstvo pered zapadom),3 which was aimed at rooting out fascination with foreign arts and literature among Soviet citizens and curbing their awareness of Russia’s indebtedness to the Western cultural heritage. Seeking to detect and destroy the new “inner adversary” in Soviet society, the “servility” campaign had erected a wall between the Soviet intelligentsia and the people. My goal is to trace rhetorical outlines of these ideological boundaries [End Page 64] and compare them to Pushkin’s ideas about Russia’s relationship to Europe and a writer’s place within his or her society. Two keynote speakers at the Pushkin Session at the Bolshoy, Simonov and Aleksandr Fadeev, evoked Cold War alienation paradigms in their presentations. The first to speak, Fadeev attacked the “enemies of our socialist country, the enemies of their own nations, the lackeys of bourgeois culture, who […] cover their […] dependence on their coaches, the imperialists, with shrieks about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’”4 These words, borrowed from newspaper editorials, were a standard contribution to the Soviet project of defining the external Cold War enemy. The other object of Fadeev’s concern was the Soviet intelligentsia, whom he believed to be exceptionally fortunate but not always vigilant or politically zealous. Only in the Soviet Union, Fadeev said, “do the people treat the intelligentsia so kindly and surround them with such love...

Stretching the umbrella: NATO's eastern expansion

This article discusses how obtaining membership in NATO has played a role in advancing Western values in former Warsaw Pact countries over the last 20 years. The author elaborates on why it was desirable for these post-Communist governments to attain NATO membership, and how the membership of these former Cold War enemies has since fundamentally expanded the strategy of the organisation. Analysis points to the conclusion that the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the US compelled NATO to evolve again in its strategy and priorities, and once again triggered NATO expansion.

Mi Vida: The Manichean Face of Dictatorship

Fidel Castro is one of the few surviving Cold War enemies of the United States. He has witnessed as adversaries ten US Presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Younger. Castro is certainly the longest running dictator in the Western hemisphere, and arguably in modern times. He certainly has an acute sense of history, or at least Cuban–American relations, as the ultimate measuring rod of the success of his regime. To be sure, this relationship remains his testing rod from start to finish. Exactly 1 year prior to the anniversary of his movement’s 1959 seizure of power, he announced to a television audience that “In the morning, 49 years of the revolution will be behind us and the 50th year will symbolize half a century of heroic resistance. We proclaim our pride in this record to the world.” His autobiographical potpourri, Fidel Castro: My Life is intended to both share the pride and give his version of events for the historical record. Longevity is indeed the acid test of legitimacy—as it is for all political structures. There is a sense in which Castro’s premature celebration of a half century of rule is quite accurate. For the year 1958 was one in which his guerrilla movement held increased ground in the sparsely populated regions of Cuba, and even more significant, a time in which the decay of the Fulgencio Batista regime became apparent. The entrenched political apparatus had been paralyzed and the Cuban military forces had become incapable of hard fighting. So the claim of the text of this work that it represents a half century review is justified, and should not excite historical purists who date the regime from the entrance of the guerrilla forces on the streets of Havana on January 8th, 1959. Indeed the failed attack at the Moncada Barracks in 1953 is frequently used as the benchmark for the new era. But whatever the dates used by both friend and foe of the regime, this guerrilla group’s seizure of political power must be surely recognized as a major event of the twentieth century—a movement with a rise that, as of this writing, is still awaiting its fall, a fall that Fidel Castro has sworn to prevent from happening. It is assuredly an accident that the autobiographies of both Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro are entitled My Life. Even so and in both instances, the government changes they initiated have had a profound impact on the course of events. One must also note that Castro, like Clinton, has been clever enough to realize that makers of history operate in a climate of public acquiescence if not complete active support. That allows for the first and perhaps most significant observation about Castro’s autobiography: his increasing awareness of the need to reshape the record of his half century into a response to populist aims and nationalist ambitions. Castro’s thundering earlier rubbish that “history will absolve me” has been replaced by endless repetition in which Fidel assures his readers that in past and present, his only concern has been to satisfy the needs and desires of the Cuban people. Behind the absolute dictatorship of Castro family hierarchy lurks a mythic “public opinion” democracy of the people. This perhaps explains Castro’s extraordinary claims that Cuba has never been a nation that harbored political prisoners or ever resorted to illegal measures to extract confessions, even as thousands languish in its places of incarceration. Then again, it was none other than Joseph Stalin in his own autobiography who announced as his primary achievements as absolute Soc (2008) 45:300–304 DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9092-6

The Black Box: Notes on the Anthropology of the Enemy

AbstractThis article critically revisits the Foucauldian perspective on modernity by exploring the constitutive importance of limits of transparency in relations of power and knowledge. It differentiates between Foucault's Panopticon as a model for modernity, which posits a total visibility of subject under modern gaze, and what I call cybernetic ways of knowing that posit the 'black box' of the inner self that is blocked from visibility. The case in point is a comparative study of two anthropologies – two groups of anthropological cadres – the American anthropologists who in the 1940s were involved in emerging Soviet studies, and Soviet anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s who took part in Soviet reforms. The article draws attention to similarities in their perspective of images and notions of the enemy: the 'enemy of the people' within Soviet society and the Soviet society as the West's Cold War enemy. In doing so, the aim of this article is to develop an ethnographic perspective on state socialism that does not depend on a foundational dualist distinction between 'Soviet' and 'Western' or 'socialist' and 'capitalist' modernity as a starting point.

Policing the Cold War frontier: The Bedford Incident

This essay examines the use of the allusions to Moby-Dick in The Bedford Incident (novel 1963; film 1965) in reinforcing its application of the frontier trope, which underpins the description of how a US destroyer hunts a Soviet nuclear submarine in the Denmark Strait. In particular it focuses on the construction of the Cold War enemy as an unseen alien who, ironically, comes to resemble its American pursuers.

Leaving earth: space stations, rival superpowers, and the quest for interplanetary travel

Charged with the ever-present potential for danger and occasionally punctuated by terrible moments of disaster, the history of space exploration has been keenly dramatic. The recent disaster of the Space Shuttle Columbia was a sad but certain reminder that space travel is an extraordinarily dangerous occupation. Oddly enough, it often takes a tragic accident to remind us that we still have a presence in space. In the decades between triumph and tragedy we tend to ignore the fact that there have been scores of space pioneers who have risked their lives to explore our solar system. Indeed, the International Space Station is sometimes referred to as a /Alpha,a a moniker that implies that it is our first real permanent presence in space. But this notion is frowned upon by the Russians a and for good reason. Prior to the construction of the controversial International Space Station, a host of daring Russian cosmonauts, and a smaller number of intrepid American astronauts, were living in space for months, some of them for over a year. In this definitive account of mana (TM)s quest to become citizens of the cosmos, noted space historian Robert Zimmerman reveals the great global gamesmanship between Russian and American political leaders that drove us to the stars. Beaten to the Moon by their Cold War enemies, the Russians were intent on being first to the planets. They believed that manned space stations held the greatest promise for reaching other worlds and worked feverishly to build a viable space station program a one that would dwarf American efforts and allow the Russians to claim the vast territories of space as their own. Although unthinkable at the time, the ponderously bureaucratic Soviet Union actually managed to overtake the United States in the space station race. Leveraging their propaganda machine and tyrannical politics to launch a series of daring, dangerous, and scientifically brilliant space exploits, their efforts not only put them far ahead of NASA, they also helped to reshape their own society, transforming it from dictatorship to democracy. At the same time, the American space program at NASA was also evolving, but not necessarily for the better. In fact, the two programs were slowly but inexorably trading places. Drawing on his vast store of knowledge about space travel, as well as hundreds of interviews with cosmonauts, astronauts, and scientists, Zimmerman has superbly captured the excitement and suspense of our recent space-traveling past. For space and history enthusiasts alike, Leaving Earth describes a rich heritage of adventure, exploration, research, and discovery.