Producing and Displaying Grief

Grief ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
World Peace ◽  
Soviet People ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Wartime Experience ◽  
Soviet Experience

Under Khrushchev, Baltermants returned to his wartime archive and produced art photographs for exhibition of some of his best work that he had taken during the war for publications. This chapter describes the process by which he produced Grief. This photograph, named for an emotion of the living, became a defining image of the Soviet experience of war. Given the horrors the photograph depicts, Baltermants hoped that it might also be used to position the Soviet Union as the global advocate for world peace. To that end, Baltermants curated his solo exhibitions, first in Moscow and then in London, in which he explored the tension between the commonalities of human experience and the differences in the wartime experience of the Soviet people. The chapter shows how in the 1960s, Baltermants made Grief both a powerful photograph and a useful weapon in Soviet cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.

THE SELECTIVE MEMORY ОF US-SOVIET COOPERATION DURING WORLD WAR II

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
David Goldfield ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Peace ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American Economy

By the time the US formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, the American economy was in desperate circumstances. President Roosevelt hoped that the new relationship would generate a prosperous trade between the two countries. When Germany, Italy, and Japan threatened world peace, a vigor- ous “America First” movement developed to keep the US out of the international conflicts. By the time the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, this be- came increasingly difficult. The US, instead, became “the arsenal of democracy” and supported the efforts of the British and, by 1941, the Russians to defeat Nazi aggression, particularly through the Lend-Lease program. Although after the war, the Soviets tended to minimize American, the residual good will from that effort prevailed despite serious conflicts. The Cold War did not become hot, and even produced scientific and cultural cooperation on occasion.

‘Gentlemen, you are Mad!’: Mutual Assured Destruction and Cold War Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan T. Berend
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lewis Mumford

In the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the historian and critic Lewis Mumford made a dramatic attack on the insanity of the nuclear age. In his article entitled ‘Gentlemen: You are Mad!’, Mumford said: ‘We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security’. According to Mumford, the modern superweapon society, for all its technological supremacy, was unable to recognise the looming disaster. People were sleepwalking towards the abyss of atomic war. The Cold War arms race created and served to maintain what Winston Churchill termed ‘the balance of terror’. By the end of the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had more than enough nuclear weapons to withstand a first strike and still be able to retaliate. This article explores how mutual assured destruction (MAD) was reflected and refracted in European culture and society from 1950 to 1985, and shows how film and fiction played a key role in highlighting the potential effects of MAD – a global nuclear holocaust.

From Stalin to Mao

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elidor Mëhilli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

scholarly journals Promoting the Socialist Community: Efforts and Effects of the Socialist Camp’s Cultural Diplomacy

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oksana Nagornaia
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Hybrid Identities ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

Based on an analysis of modern Cold War historiography, the article considers current discussions, topics, and perspectives in the chosen research landscape. Taking into account the modern circumstances, the author concludes that in the latest publications, there is a tendency to reconsider the dichotomic model “Sovietisation vs Americanisation” and, instead, take a closer look at the representations of socialism and the structures and actors of cultural diplomacy in Eastern Europe. Referring to propaganda projects of socialist integration and intercultural spaces, the author demonstrates what was specifically socialist about the forms and instruments of representations of the Eastern Bloc, the conflicting spheres of collaboration, and independent initiatives of people’s democracies in the sphere of cultural diplomacy. The author concludes that at the end of the Second World War, the propaganda system in the Soviet Union was integrated into a larger scheme of presenting the world system of socialism where the Eastern European states became symbolically appropriated spaces and promising symbolic resources. The cultural initiatives of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe at the international level testify to the cultural pluralism in the Eastern Bloc. The independent steps the countries of the socialist camp took for self-realisation on the international arena testify to this cultural pluralism. The effectiveness of their symbolic messages was facilitated by the geographical proximity to borders, integration into the contexts of western culture, and better developed information resources. In the article, the author’s own analysis is preceded by a review of materials thematically related to the section of the journal on the cultural diplomacy of socialism. Articles referred to in the study and devoted to the projects of the socialist camp prove the thesis that the Eastern Bloc that emerged during the Cold War and the hybrid identities developed under its influence survived the breakdown of the bipolar order and are important for modern culture.

Intelligence Failure Theory

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Failure Theory ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Intelligence Failure ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Intelligence Failures

Intelligence failures are commonly understood as the failures to anticipate important information and events, such as terrorist attacks. Explanations for intelligence failure generally include one or more of the following causal factors: organizational obstacles, psychological and analytical challenges, problems with warning information, and failures of political leadership. The earliest literature on intelligence failures is found in the 1960s, having developed in the context of the Cold War. At the time, the stable bipolar system was threatened by periodic surprises that promised to alter the balance of power. With tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, the United States and the Soviet Union spent a great deal of time and energy assessing each other’s intentions and capabilities and trying to avoid a catastrophic surprise. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, scholarship on intelligence failure decreased substantially. In the meantime, this scholarship diversified to include topics such as the environment, human rights, drug trafficking, and crime, among other things. Surprises in these areas were perhaps more frequent, but were less consequential. However, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, interest in both scholarly and journalistic analyses of intelligence failures has once again increased.

Latin American Tercermundistas in the Soviet Union

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.

The fashion gap: the Cold War politics of American and Soviet fashion, 1945-1959

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie M. Amerian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Struggle ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Key Participants

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that fashion played in the Cold War competition between the USA and the Soviet Union during the period from 1945 to 1959. Design/methodology/approach – This paper begins by situating fashion within the larger American efforts of cultural diplomacy. It then examines the American and Soviet approaches to fashion. Finally, it focuses on the fashion show at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. This paper utilizes primary sources, including archival sources and period newspapers and magazines. Findings – Both American and Soviet leaders tried to use fashion to embody the ideological values of each political and economic system. Both also acknowledged a “fashion gap”, whereby Americans enjoyed clear superiority thanks to a well-developed mass production system of ready-made, stylish clothing, that some termed the American Look. Americans hoped the fashion gap would demonstrate that only capitalism could provide women with an abundance of the necessary – but also desirable – consumer goods that enhanced their feminine beauty. Thus, fashion played an important part in the Cold War cultural struggle, in which American and Soviet women were key participants. Originality/value – Much has been written about the Cold War cultural diplomacy, especially the Moscow exhibition, but fashion is often left out of the analyses. Meanwhile, both the American Look and Soviet efforts to create socialist fashion have been examined, but no work has been done to look at the two together to understand fashion’s larger implications for the Cold War.

scholarly journals Bellicose Peace: China’s Peace Signature Campaign and Discourses about “Peace” in the Early 1950s

Modern China ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-280
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Forster
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Korean War ◽  
World Peace ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

In the early 1950s, China engaged in several military actions, most notably in the Korean War. Nevertheless, the World Peace Council, an international organization sponsored by the Soviet Union, praised the country as a “fortress for the protection of world peace” in 1954. This hinged upon a very specific, bellicose understanding of “peacefulness,” which did not mean the rejection of war, but war against the “right” enemy. I discuss this understanding, its function within the international community, its embeddedness in international political thinking, and its promulgation among the Chinese population, using the example of a campaign in 1950 to collect signatures on a World Peace Council–authored appeal against the atomic bomb. Self-promotion as a peaceful nation in the bellicose sense served a variety of purposes for the young People’s Republic of China (PRC), most importantly the goal to instill bloc thinking in the PRC’s population and to gain prestige within the new international order of the Cold War.

The Accidental Political Advantages of a Nonpolitical Book Program

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria M. Grieve
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Cold War

In the early years of the Cold War, the US government devoted substantial energy and funds to using books as weapons against the Soviet Union. Books and the principles they represented were to counter Soviet accusations of American materialism and spread American ideals around the globe. Founded in 1952, Franklin Books Program, Inc. was a gray propaganda program that operated at the nexus of US public–private cultural diplomacy efforts. USIA bureaucrats believed Franklin successfully carried out diplomatic objectives by highlighting the positive aspects of American culture and those who ran Franklin emphasized the “nonpolitical” aspects of cultural diplomacy, many of which directly targeted children. Franklin’s textbooks and juvenile science books cultivated a literate population friendly to the United States, reaching out to foreign young people through books, which like art, seemed to transcend the written word and represent abstract ideals of freedom and democracy.

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