Cold War

This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the 'Iron Curtain'. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an 'anarchive': a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts.

The Cold War is often stereotypically depicted as a period of complete separation between Eastern and Western Europe, a time of little communication and exchange between what is often called the "Eastern bloc" and the capitalist West. The essays in this volume discuss the official and unofficial channels of communication between the Eastern bloc and the West as well as the complex networks of transmission and reception that enabled the exchange of ideas between the two.

In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons, their smiling faces used to sell everything, including war. This book offers an original account of how Soviet and American leaders used emotionally charged images of children in an attempt to create popular support for their policies at home and abroad. Groups on either side of the Iron Curtain pushed visions of endangered, abandoned, and segregated children to indict the enemy's state and its policies.

This collection of essays inverts the way we see the Cold War by looking at the conflict from the perspective of the so-called developing world, rather than of the superpowers, through the birth and first decades of India's life as a postcolonial nation. ogether, the essays demonstrate how India became a powerful symbol of decolonization and an advocate of non-alignment, disarmament, and global governance as it stood between the United States and the Soviet Union, actively fostering dialogue and attempting to forge friendships without entering into formal alliances.

At the height of the Cold War, Soviet ideologues, policymakers, diplomats, and military officers perceived the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the future reserve of socialism, holding the key to victory over Western forces. The zero-sum nature of East-West global competition induced the United States to try to thwart Soviet ambitions. The result was predictable: the two superpowers engaged in proxy struggles against each other in faraway, little-understood lands, often ending up entangled in protracted and highly destructive local fights that did little to serve their own agendas.

In Cold War in Universities: U.S. and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, 1945-1990 Natalia Tsvetkova recounts how the United States and the Soviet Union aspired to transform overseas academic institutions according to their political aims during the Cold War. The book depicts how U.S. and Soviet attempts to impose certain values, disciplines, teaching models, structures, statutes, and personnel at universities in divided Germany, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, both Vietnams, and Cuba as well as Guatemala were foiled by sabotage, ignorance, and resistance on the part of the local academic elite, particularly professors.

It aims at providing an essentially European point of view on the cultural Cold War, providing fresh insight into little known connections and cooperation in different artistic fields. Chapters of the volume address photography and architecture, popular as well as classical music, theatre and film, and fine arts. By examining different actors ranging from individuals to organizations such as universities, the volume brings new perspective on the mechanisms and workings of the cultural Cold War.

A person strapped to a polygraph machine. Nervous eyes, sweaty brow, the needle trembling up and down. Few images are more evocative of Cold War paranoia. learer Than Truth demonstrates that what began as quick-fix technology promising a precise test of honesty and allegiance eventually came to embody tensions in American Cold War culture between security and freedom, concerns that reach deep into the present day.

Performing Peace and Friendship tells the story of how the Soviet Union succeeded in utilizing the World Festival of Youth and Students in its cultural diplomacy from late Stalinism through the early Khrushchev period. Pia Koivunen discusses the evolution of the youth gathering into a Soviet cultural product starting from the first festival held in Prague in 1947 and ending with the Moscow 1957 gathering, the latter becoming one of the most frequently referred moments of Khrushchev's Thaw.

Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Mark Kramer and V t Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.