Soviet Camp Research Articles

The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings

The overlapping crises in Hungary and Poland in the autumn of 1956 posed a severe challenge for leaders of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU). After a tense stand-off with Poland, the CPSU Presidium (as the Politburo was then called) decided to refrain from military intervention and to seek a political compromise. The crisis in Hungary was far less easily defused. For a brief while it appeared that Hungary might be able to break away from the communist bloc, but the Soviet army put an end to all such hopes. Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian revolution, and a degree of order returned to the Soviet camp. Newly-released documents from Russia and Eastern Europe shed valuable light on the events of 1956, permitting a much clearer and more nuanced understanding of Soviet reactions. This article will begin by discussing the way official versions of the 1956 invasion changed and formerly secret documents became available during the late Soviet period and after the Soviet Union disintegrated. It will then highlight some of the most important findings from new archival sources and memoirs. The article relies heavily on the so-called Malin notes and on new materials from East-Central Europe. Both the article and the documents will show that far-reaching modifications are needed in existing western accounts of the 1956 crises.

The situation of Japanese prisoners of war in Soviet camps (1945–1956)

The situation of Japanese prisoners of war in Soviet camps (1945–1956)

Press content as a key to a country's alignment: The case of Ethiopia

Abstract This article examines the news content of an Ethiopian government‐run newspaper over a period of 20 years to determine how closely the present government is aligned with the Soviet Union. There are two schools of though among foreign policy scholars. Regionalists believe Ethiopia is nonaligned. They argue that since the country follows the tenants of African socialism, its international politics are shaped by indigenous factors such as nationalism and local economic and security needs, rather than by Soviet or U.S. influence. Globalists, on the other hand, believe Ethiopia belongs to the Soviet camp and is dependent on the Soviet Union. A review of a government‐run newspaper in two ten‐year periods before and after the takeover by Mengistu Haile Mariam found a dramatic shift in the nature of coverage. Under Emperor Haile Selassie before the ovethrow, the paper printed predominantly pro‐United States and anti‐Soviet news. But under Mengistu, the same paper printed vastly pro‐Soviet and anti‐United...

Yugoslav Camp Literature: Rediscovering the Ghost of a Nation's Past-Present-Future

They [prison and camp authorities] wanted to lower men to the animal level. And they succeeded. There, I realized that life should not be lived for its own sake. Life should be lived for the sake of a goal, faith, freedom, and truth.Radoslav Kostić-Katunac, Look, Lord, To the Other Side: Yugoslavia's GulagAleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn has immortalized Soviet camp literature. In contrast, Yugoslav prison and camp literature is virtually unknown. Yet, if literature indeed mirrors the human soul and even a nation's conscience—as Solzhenitsyn intimates— then it may also convey the human experience across time and space, language and culture. The question arises: Is camp and prison literature merely a sigh of wronged souls or is it a literary genre in its own right? If it is a genre, is it accessible at all to those not initiated in the Sisyphus-like context of human suffering etched into the world's Gulag archipelagos of prisons and forced labor camps? Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is, indeed, accessible to outsiders. The question still remains: Why bother with prison or camp literature— those heavy sighs of distraught creatures—rhyme or not? The answer is that if we forget camp literature, we might forget our own selves.

Patterns of Soviet Policy toward the Middle East

Soviet policy toward the Middle East since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war has been essentially reactive in nature, as Moscow has reacted to events in the region that it neither caused nor had much ability to control. Moscow has benefited from some events, such as the fall of the shah, the formation of an Arab anti-Camp David alignment, and U.S. policy errors in Lebanon. Just as frequently, however, Moscow's position in the Middle East has suffered from regional events, such as the movement of Egypt into the American camp, the outbreak and continuation of the Iran-Iraq war, and the numerous internecine splits in the Arab world. The arms that Moscow has poured into the Middle East have not given Moscow much influence in the region. Thus Moscow could not prevent Egypt's exit from the Soviet camp, the signing of the Camp David agreements, or the reestablishment of relations between Egypt and Jordan. Despite continued efforts, the USSR has been unable to bring about an end to the Iran-Iraq war or the rift between Assad and Arafat, nor has it gained solid support for the various versions of its Arab-Israeli peace plan.

The Soviet-Cuban Connection

In late April 1982, a news story circulated that then Secretary of State Alexander Haig had privately described Cuban President Fidel Castro as anguishing over an unspecified U.S. offer that could lead to both a rupture in Cuban-Soviet relations and an improvement in Cuban-American ones. 1 If indeed Castro should at some point decide to break away from the U.S.S.R. as China, Yugoslavia, and Albania did before, Soviet foreign policy would suffer a major setback. Like Cuba and unlike the U .S .S .R/s East European allies, communist governments in China, Yugoslavia, and Albania came to power largely through the success of indigenous communist guerrilla forces. All three of them originally allied with the Soviet Union, but eventually broke with it due to Soviet attempts to exercise a greater influence over their domestic and foreign policies than they desired. Should Cuba also sever relations, the U.S.S.R. would lose an important ally that in the past has worked to advance Soviet interests in Africa and Latin America. A Cuban defection from the Soviet camp might, in addition, lead other Third World Marxist-Leninist nations and movements friendly to Cuba to join it (these might include Angola, Nicaragua, and the guerrilla movements in Central America). But will a serious rift between Moscow and Havana actually take place, or were Haig's reported comments merely wishful thinking? It would seem that Soviet economic and military assistance to Cuba is so great that Castro would be unlikely to give it up easily. It is doubtful that Cuba could obtain from the West the same level of economic assistance on as favorable terms as it now receives from the U.S.S.R. In addition, Soviet military assistance to little

The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News. By Paul Lendvai. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981. Pp. 285. $26.00.)

The management of information for both domestic and foreign audiences has been a keystone of Communist rule and a basic element in attempts to export communism since before the Bolshevik revolution. Prior to the publication of Lendvai's book, however, the internal and external information policies of the Soviet bloc states have not been examined comprehensively. Those studies that have been done have looked specifically at one element of information policy or at one particular country, and, in the period after the signing of the Helsinki accords, they have become dated. This narrow approach has been taken in spite of the fact that the Communist media have been our major source of information on events and policies in the Communist bloc and have, themselves, been major political issues both within the Communist states and in their foreign policies. Lendvai uses his experiences as a journalist in the Hungarian press of the Stalinist period and the information he gathered later as a Western analyst and reporter on events in the Soviet bloc. He unveils the methods by which Communist leaderships control the dissemination of information for domestic consumption and casts a dissenting opinion of such practices. The use of foreign broadcasts and advocacy of the Third World's demands for a New World Information Order to strengthen the Communist position abroad is also debunked. In building his case, Lendvai provides previously unavailable data on the variegated systems of media direction and control, thereby providing information on how the media are produced and establishing the limits the leaderships impose on information for domestic and foreign policy. He then provides an even more detailed discussion of Soviet bloc trade in information and media training with the Third World as well as of the duality involved in their noncompliance with information access provisions in the Helsinki Final Act when, at the same time, they rely on those same accords to attack Western broadcasting in Communist states. However, Lendvai's emphasis on the controls and commitments of these leaderships slights the crucial evidence of the failures of their information management. Such evidence is striking. There is, after all, a recurring theme of the need for accurate information and open discussion in the mass media that appears with every thaw and crisis in Communist societies. Communist broadcasts abroad lack an audience in comparison to the high level of interest in Western broadcasts among citizens of the Soviet bloc. Then, too, the thousands of journalists from all over the Third World who have been educated in or aided by the Soviet Union and its East European allies have clearly failed to push their nations or their media into the Soviet camp to any significant degree. For the nonspecialist, the book provides a valuable, if polemical, overview of the various aspects of information policy and its use by the Soviet bloc states. For the specialist, the book has the same failings as the rest of the information available on this subject: too little is known, and the generalizations on the details of the media process are not always totally accurate. In this respect, the book provides not only a sense of the dimensions of the bureaucracy of misinformation, but it also serves as a call for more research to be done.

Albert Camus: The First of the New Philosophers

By JEANYVES GUERIN & DIANE S. WOOD French New Philosophers Jean-Marie Benoist, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, et alia burst into public attention with a proliferation of an tiMarxist tracts including Marx est mort (Marx is Dead; 1970), La cuisiniere et le mangeur d'hommes (The Cook and the Man-Eater; 1975), Les maitres penseurs (The Master Thinkers; 1977) and La barbarie a visage humain (translated by George Holoch as Barbarism with a Human Face; 1977). Termed Solzhenitsyn's Children by Michael Rubbo, producer of the PBS documentary of that name on them, the group had had their philosophical views radically altered as a result of reading Gulag Archipelago. While the moral indignation of these young thinkers heralds the attempt of contemporary leftist intellectuals to find an alternative to Marxism, the appellation new obscures the fact that their analyses of the inherent dangers of Marxism repeat arguments made thirty years before by Albert Camus in Lhomme revoke (translated by Anthony Bower as Rebel; 1951). current intellectual ferment as well as the recent biography by Herbert R. Lottman (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1979) prompts one to reexamine Camus's penetrating discussion of metaphysical and historical rebellion. Camus himself was not a philosopher but a writer with deep moral convictions who lucidly denounced political terrorism, whether it originated from the Right or the Left. horrors perpetrated by Fascists in Spain and Germany were as repugnant to him as the suffering in Soviet camps, for Camus believed that all executioners are of the same family.* No special excused status was given to any group: We will name concentrationary what is concentrationary, even socialism (Actuelles 7, 386). In The Cook and the ManEater (Paris, Seuil, 1975) Andre Glucksmann came to the same conclusion: Russian or Nazi, a is a camp (37). To the victim, the political leanings of his torturer are insignificant: Nothing resembles a charnel house more than another charnel house, and a tortured body doesn't show whether the torture was 'socialist' or 'capitalist' (75). Taking seriously the plight of Kravchenko, Czapski, Gliksman, etcetera, an earlier generation of those now called dissidents, Camus could not excuse the existence of institutionalized torture in the Soviet Union, and he warned that Marxism would lead to the same concentration universe as did Fascism. He lucidly perceived that the camps were an integral part of maintaining the state's authority and that their occurrence in wartime Germany and Stalinist Russia was a natural product of authoritarian leadership.

Roots of Eurocommunism

The publication by Santiago Carrillo in April 1977 of 'Eurocommunism' and the State [ 1 ] has ended another in a series of chapters in the history of the international communist movement. After Yugoslavia, China and Albania, the three most significant communist parties in terms of strength, electoral potential, superiority of organization and popular support, Italy, France and Spain, have broken away from the Soviet-dominated communist orthodoxy. However, unlike the Yugoslavs, Chinese or Albanians, whose departure from the Soviet camp was initially not for ideological reasons but was precipitated by pragmatic expectations at that time, the Eurocommunist group have presented several major challenges to the established versions of such cornerstones of MarxistLeninist theory as proletarian internationalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat [2] and opposition to the European Economic Communities. This paper is intended only as a preliminary discussion article examining the roots and parameters of what has already become one of the most important and interesting contributions to the ongoing process of reinterpretations of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. It is surprising that in the fast growing but mostly speculative literature on Eurocommunism, so far little attention has been given to its historical foundations and diversity. The name Eurocommunism was first invented in 1975 by a Croatian journalist, Frane Barbieri, working for the Milan daily, II Giornale Nuovo, as a generic title to distinguish those western European parties who were asserting their independence of Soviet tutelage [3], and who were aiming to transform the capitalist societies of Europe into socialist societies through the ballot box rather than some revolutionary process. Although it is highly questionable whether Eurocommunism exists as a definable ideology as against Eurocommunist strategy, its basic assumptions can be summarized as follows. The historical situation in the highly industrialized countries of Western

The Janus in the Soviet Camp

The Janus in the Soviet Camp

Mongolia: In the Soviet Camp

The Mongolian Peoples Republic (MPR), geographically a buffer zone between the Soviet Union and Communist China, has been a Soviet satellite of varying degrees of dependence since the Mongolian Revolutionary Army, assisted by Soviet troops, captured the old capital city of Urga in 1921 and established a provisional Communist government. Soviet dominance continued unchallenged until the Communists came to power in China during 1949. Throughout the 1950's China and the USSR were fraternalistic-at least ostensibly-so Mongolia worked to establish a policy of neutrality. As the intensity of the Sino-Soviet conflict increased, however, the MPR became correspondingly pro-Soviet; enough so that by the Mid1960's there was little doubt about Mongolia's chosen ally. Since 1966-and with a quickened pace during 1969-the USSR has continued to strengthen its controls over Mongolia's military, economic, and political policies. At this writing, Mongolia is clearly and unconditionally in the Soviet camp.

Mongolia: In the Soviet Camp

Mongolia: In the Soviet Camp

Integration as a Source of Stress on the European Community System

I intended to assure France primacy in Western Europe by preventing the rise of a new Reich …; to cooperate with East and West and, if need be, contract the necessary alliances on one side or the other without accepting any kind of dependency; … to persuade the states along the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic, and strategic bloc; to establish this organization as one of the three world powers and, should it be necessary, as the arbiter between the Soviet and Anglo-Saxon camps.

Indonesia: Internal Development or External Expansion?

On December 19, 1961, the thirteenth anniversary of the day when Dutch paratroopers captured the revolutionary capital of the Republic of Indonesia, Jogjakarta, and took President Soekarno and members of his government into captivity, Indonesia started mobilizing her energies for a showdown with the Netherlands concerning Western New Guinea. A massive equipment program, supported by Soviet and, to a lesser degree, American credits, enabled the Armed Forces of Indonesia to be ready by mid-summer 1962 for an amphibian assault. The primitive and inhospitable territory of Western New Guinea, as large as France but inhabited only by some 700,000 Papuans, most of whom had not progressed beyond neolithic culture, was defended by about 5,000 Dutch troops supported by some air and naval power. These forces may have found it difficult to resist for any length of time repeated attacks by the numerically superior and logistically favored Indonesian troops. Neither the interests of the 10,000 civilian Dutch citizens present in the territory, nor the economic value of Western New Guinea seemed to justify a costly military effort for any reason except perhaps national pride. Legitimate concern that the outbreak of hostilities would push Indonesia into the Soviet camp, on which it would have become totally dependent logistically as well as politically, mobilized American diplomacy. In March, secret Indonesian-Dutch negotiations started outside Washington, assisted by former U.S. Ambassador to India Ellsworth Bunker. On August 15, 1962, an agreement was signed at United Nations Headquarters in New York. It provided for a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (U.N.T.E.A.) to replace Dutch colonial administration on October 1, 1962, with the mandate to transfer administration of the territory to Indonesia not later than May 1, 1963. The agreement was ratified by the General Assembly of the United Nations in September and an Iranian administrator was appointed by the Secretary General, while Pakistan provided security forces flown in by the U.S. Air Force on behalf of the U.N., to safeguard stability during the transition period of seven months. President Soekarno obtained the additional satisfaction of having U.N.T.E.A. accept and utilize in the territory the Indonesian military who

The Soviet Concept of Satellite States

Is there a clear-cut Soviet concept of satellite states? Apparently not, for, from the official Soviet point of view a satellite state east of the Iron Curtain is an anomaly: ca n'existe pas. The very idea, the Soviets would have us believe, is an aberration, a falsification concocted, to use the Communist jargon, by the “ideological armbearers of the American monopolists and imperialists.” Unfortunately, this stand is not corroborated by facts. It is for us in the Western world as well as for the millions of private, honest citizens in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe that the existence of satellite states behind the Iron Curtain means a most disquieting and indeed a sinister reality.The term “satellite state” is first of all a question of political semantics. If one consults the records of the United Nations Commission which has just completed its work on the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he can readily appreciate the polarity between our approach and that of the Soviet camp to a whole register of political definitions.