Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s
240
Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s
240eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
An outgrowth of the forty-sixth annual Walter Prescott Webb Lectures, hosted in 2011 by the University of Texas at Arlington, Cold War Crossings features diverse focuses with a unifying theme.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623491420 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas A&M University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2014 |
| Series: | Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, published for the University of Texas at Arlington by Texas A&M University Press , #45 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cold War Crossings
International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940sâ"1960s
By Patryk Babiracki, Kenyon Zimmer
Texas A&M University
Copyright © 2014 University of Texas at ArlingtonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-142-0
CHAPTER 1
THE IRON CURTAIN AS SEMIPERMEABLE MEMBRANE
Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex
MICHAEL DAVID-FOX
Perhaps the most famous words ever uttered about the postwar division of Europe belong to Winston Churchill. In what is commonly called the Iron Curtain speech, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, he declared: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere...." Churchill's speech came just days after the transmission of another of the most influential texts of the Cold War, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" of February 22, 1946. "At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs," Kennan telegraphed from Moscow to Washington, "is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity ... isolation of Russian population from outside world and constant pressure to extend limits of Russian police power ... are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers." Both Churchill's public prophecy and Kennan's classified policy manifesto were, each in its own way, warnings that an ideological divide was premised on an even deeper civilizational rift between Russia and the West.
At Westminster College in Fulton, Churchill did not invent the term "Iron Curtain," just as Kennan did not invent the containment doctrine that was premised on his text. But Churchill did make the concept world famous at the very outset of the Cold War. In so doing, he was enshrining a metaphor that would not only rally his contemporaries but retrospectively structure historians' understanding of communism and the Eastern bloc. There are, in fact, excellent reasons why Churchill's metaphor of an Iron Curtain has survived down until the present day. It captured an important truth or, perhaps better to say, a striking part of the truth. In 1946 Churchill was eloquent in warning about communist takeovers in Eastern Europe, which in the course of only the next two years were transformed from Soviet-influenced "people's democracies" to fully Sovietized satellites of the USSR with their own brands of Stalinism. The Iron Curtain vividly evoked the salient fact that the Stalinist Soviet Union and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe had become radically isolated from the outside world.
The Bolshevik new regime had aspired to regulate relations and contacts with foreigners throughout the 1920s, but the inauguration of the Stalin period at the end of that decade coincided, as is well known, with a new level of isolationist policies predicated on security and ideological "vigilance." Restrictions on travel abroad, the import of foreign publications, and many kinds of professional and cultural contacts were heightened during Stalin's "Great Break" of 1928–32 and then again in the course of the 1930s. The xenophobia and spy mania of the Great Purges of the late 1930s connected foreign contacts to a wave of terror. This was followed, a decade later, by what was undoubtedly the most isolationist phase of Soviet history, the anti-Western and anti-cosmopolitan campaigns closely linked to the Cold War.
Churchill coined the metaphor of the Iron Curtain on the very eve of the launch of the militant ideological campaign known as the Zhdanovshchina, or the time of Zhdanov, which reversed the relative relaxation of policies during World War II. In April 1946, the month before Churchill's speech, Andrei Zhdanov took over as head of the Central Committee's Agitprop directorate and launched a new campaign for ideological orthodoxy that quickly included Stalin's condemnation of cultural figures guilty of "fawning before the West." In the years of late Stalinism that followed, the small numbers of foreign visitors allowed into the USSR could not help noticing that Soviet citizens were afraid to talk to them or even crossed to the other side of the street. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 in the heart of Cold War Europe seemed to confirm Churchill's metaphor as a kind of prophecy.
But the Iron Curtain was not only a prescient encapsulation of an important truth; it was a concept that closed off recognition of certain cross-border interactions that were crucial even under the most isolationist phases of the Stalin period. It is worth pausing, therefore, to consider the symbolic implications of Churchill's Iron Curtain. Although steel is harder and no less impenetrable, and in fact consists mostly of iron, Churchill could hardly have called it a Steel Curtain. The superior alloy steel would have been far more in line with the Soviet self-image of a modern, superior system that would leap over the advanced industrialized countries of the West. Stalin, the revolutionary pseudonym of Iosif Dzugashvili, derives from the Russian word for steel, stal.' The Iron Curtain recalls far more the prehistoric Iron Age, strong and brutal yet very primitive. This was the sense used by the foreign correspondent and historian William Henry Chamberlin in his 1934 book on Stalinist industrialization, Russia's Iron Age.
Churchill's formulation thus implicitly based itself on an evocation of images about barbarism in Russia and the East that long predated the Bolshevik Revolution. These fit in with his much less quoted references at Fulton to religion ("Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization") and race (his off-hand assumption about the predominance of the "strong parent races" of Europe). The little-known Soviet response to Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, the main outline of which was summarized in Pravda, was to dismiss the British statesman as irrelevant and relegate him to the dustbin of history. Pravda recalled that Churchill, the former secretary of the British war office, had been an ardent supporter of Western military intervention against Bolshevism during the Russian Civil War of 1918–20 and predicted that this time he would be equally ineffectual. Stalin himself, a few days later, mocked his "Don Quixote-like antics." Churchill, in other words, was tilting at windmills; the current Conservative Leader of the Opposition in Parliament could not stop the inevitable forward march of a superior communist civilization. Over the longer term, as Nick Rutter discusses in this volume, the Soviet and East bloc response was not to reject the reality of thezheleznyi zanaves (iron curtain) but to conceive a "counter-curtain": Churchill's dark line across the map of Europe was redefined as a bourgeois barricade against communist truths and, later, a defensive wall against Western aggression.
For his part, Kennan, a professional student of Russian and Soviet history and politics, drew the roots of contemporary Soviet positions back to areas in which, historians today would agree, there were genuine continuities across the 1917 divide: the imperial Russian state's insecurity about border regions and the Russian ruling elite's longstanding doubts and fears about competitiveness with the West. Yet, in so doing, he echoed Churchill by drawing on hoary tropes about Russian backwardness, referring to Russians' "natural and instinctive urges," immutable fears, archaic nature, and "oriental secretiveness." As in the case of Churchill, Kennan's salvo provoked an immediate response. Stalin read the widely disseminated telegram after it was acquired by Soviet intelligence. Not to be outdone after Kennan's initiative became a sensation in Washington, the Soviet dictator actually ordered an analogous cable about American intentions to be prepared and sent by his ambassador to the United States, Nikolai Novikov. After this was ghost-written by Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov, who emphasized the American imperialistic striving for world supremacy, it was transmitted to Moscow on September 27, 1946.
As both the content of the Iron Curtain speech and the Long Telegram and the twin Soviet responses to them suggest, the incipient Cold War involved far more than a geopolitical clash. It was centrally concerned about competing claims of cultural, systemic, and civilizational superiority. Churchill's warnings about the Iron Curtain were part of a defense of Western civilization through the prism of the Anglo-American alliance. The Soviets after World War II began declaring (with justification) that Soviet power had saved the world from the Nazis, but not only that: the claim was also advanced that a Russian scientist had invented the light bulb and that Soviet culture incorporated all the best traditions of Western civilization as well. In this sense, communism presented itself as the true West. Historians for some time now have been investigating this symbiotic competition over the mantel of civilization under the rubric of the "cultural Cold War." David Caute, opening his book on the topic, observed that this conflict was more than a traditional political-military confrontation. It was "at the same time an ideological and cultural contest on a global scale and without historical precedent." The important element of symbiosis in the Cold War cultural or civilizational conflict between East and West is beautifully evoked by the Soviet responses to the Iron Curtain speech and the Long Telegram.
If investigating the cultural Cold War as a symbiotic relationship across the East-West divide has become a growth industry, a second line of investigation that transcends the Iron Curtain is only now becoming a serious component of historical agendas. This is the notion that even Stalinism, one of the most isolationist and autarkic regimes of the twentieth century, was shaped and influenced by border-crossings, borrowings, and constant if often covert and skewed observation of the outside world. In other words, taking the imagery of the Iron Curtain too literally can obscure an important avenue of historical investigation.
In this chapter I will make the case that Stalin's Soviet Union erected less an Iron Curtain than a semipermeable membrane. Biologists can also call this cellular barrier a selectively permeable or differentially permeable membrane. This is very much what I am trying to suggest: some goods, people, knowledge, and models from the outside world selectively and in different ways crossed the borders of communist countries. Beyond that, the image of the "West"—which was of course crucial to the dream of surpassing it—played a fundamental role in the domestic order of communist societies even at the height of Stalinist isolationism.
There are good reasons why the international and transnational dimensions in the history of communism were long hidden in the shadows of the Iron Curtain. The two successive foundational schools of Soviet history after World War II, the totalitarian and the revisionist, were both constructed around a largely domestic grand narrative about the development of Soviet communism. Diplomacy and external crises were thrown into the mix only when they were so obtrusive that they could not be ignored in the making of the Soviet system. The almost exclusively domestic focus of the first two generations of Soviet studies was bolstered by its Cold War exceptionality and driven by the conceptual keys of the totalitarian and revisionist paradigms—the primacy of ideology and political control, in the first instance, and social forces from below, in the second. Partly as a result, the study of Soviet foreign policy and international communism developed as largely segregated subfields; only rarely was international history integrally connected with the formation of Soviet communism at home. To be sure, debates about the balance between particularity and comparability have in one way or another animated the Russian and Soviet field throughout its history. But the weight of the Cold War–era stress on the unique and sui generis nature of the Soviet system has been modified by post-Soviet debates about the concept of Soviet modernity and a wave of comparative and transnational studies that include Soviet material.
This chapter attempts to develop one overarching interpretation that makes sense of several kinds of border crossings and international interactions in the context of communism as they had an impact on very different periods, from the early years of the Soviet regime through the postStalinist 1950s. It makes two interrelated claims. First, numerous border crossings had a crucial impact not just before and after, but throughout the history of Stalinism. They assumed special importance in two European contexts: both in relationship to the West, that is to say across the division of Europe, and between the Soviet Union and its new, postwar "outer empire" in Eastern Europe. Second, these border crossings are integral to understanding the rise and fall of the Stalin-era declaration that communism was a superior civilization. As this implies, these encounters were fundamental to self-understandings throughout the communist second world.
ORIGINS OF THE SOVIET SUPERIORITY COMPLEX
Prewar Soviet communism is the necessary starting point for this discussion, for the 1920s and 1930s produced the system that was put to the supreme test in World War II and provided models both for late Stalinist reconstruction and for the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. The triumph of Bolshevism in 1917 greatly amplified the nineteenth-century Russian competition with the "West" that was at the heart of the great debates over Russian national identity. The West referred primarily to the great powers and advanced industrial societies of central and Western Europe. But as many people have pointed out, it was also an imaginary construct: in order to conceive of a unified "West," something much easier to do from afar, all the many differences among European countries and their historical trajectories need to be downplayed. The Bolshevik Revolution, with its promise to leap into an alternative form of modernity called socialism, reconceived the West as bourgeois capitalism. This greatly heightened the competition, the threat, and ultimately the allure of what the Soviet Union measured itself against. Throughout the history of communism the "West" continued to be an ever-present measuring stick, even when it was severely misunderstood.
The Leninist orthodoxy of the 1920s was that the Soviet Union must adopt the best features of Western bourgeois societies in order go beyond them. In practice, the right kinds of foreign contacts and foreign travel, especially in the cultural and scientific realm, were prestigious for the political and intellectual elite. Old Bolshevik intellectuals who had lived in Europe, when they talked about cultural revolution, wanted not only to politicize but to civilize and enlighten their own people, whom Lenin famously called semi-Asiatic. Internationally, the Soviets touted their achievements, but it was assumed that in many areas, culturally and economically, the Soviet Union still needed, to use the slogan, to "catch up and overtake" (dognat' i peregnat') the advanced Western countries. This slogan, originally Lenin's, was rearticulated by the Fifteenth Party Congress in late 1926 and quickly emerged to play a central role in the ideology of the First Five-Year Plan.
What came next, the Stalinist declaration of superiority over the West in all realms, became the new orthodoxy by the mid-1930s. This, it can be argued, was the ideological equivalent of the collectivization of agriculture or the forced industrialization of the Five-Year Plans. With global capitalism barely recovering from its moment of greatest crisis during the Great Depression, socialism was declared built at the "Congress of Victors," the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. During the mid-1930s, at the height of the Popular Front cooperation abroad, Soviet domestic audiences were constantly told that their country was the best in the world in all respects—that is, not only in terms of the political system and social order but also in cultural and even economic affairs.
As Raisa Orlova, the dissident, recalled in her memoirs about her youth in the 1930s: "If one were to do a statistical analysis of newspaper language of these years, phrases like 'the very best [whatever] in the world,' 'for the first time in the history of mankind,' and 'only in our country' would prove to be among the most frequent." By the late 1930s, the party's agitators were instructed to report gushing praise from foreign delegations to underscore the leading place of "the country of victorious socialism" not only in culture and science, but in economics as well. "In machine-building the USSR holds first place in Europe and second place in the world.... In excavation of gold, in production of superphosphate the Soviet Union has overtaken all the countries of Europe.'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cold War Crossings by Patryk Babiracki, Kenyon Zimmer. Copyright © 2014 University of Texas at Arlington. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Introduction Vladislav Zubok,
1. The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex Michael David-Fox,
2. The Taste of Red Watermelon: Polish Peasants Visit Soviet Collective Farms, 1949–1952 Patryk Babiracki,
3. The Western Wall: The Iron Curtain Recast in Midsummer 1951 Nick Rutter,
4. Socialist Encounters: Albania and the Transnational Eastern Bloc in the 1950s Elidor Mëhilli,
5. The Soviet-South Encounter: Tensions in the Friendship with Afro-Asian Partners, 1945–1965 Constantin Katsakioris,
6. Meeting at a Far Meridian: US-Soviet Cultural Diplomacy on Film in the Early Cold War Marsha Siefert,
Contributors,
Index,