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This book presents the ups and downs of the Soviet-Turkish relations during World War II and immediately after it. Hasanli draws on declassified archive documents from the United States, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan to recreate a true picture of the time when the 'Turkish crisis' of the Cold War broke out. It explains why and how the friendly relations between the USSR and Turkey escalated into enmity, led to the increased confrontation between these two countries, and ended up with Turkey's entry into NATO. Hasanli uses recently-released Soviet archive documents to shed light on some dark points of the Cold War era and the relations between the Soviets and the West. Apart from bringing in an original point of view regarding starting of the Cold War, the book reveals some secret sides of the Soviet domestic and foreign policies. The book convincingly demonstrates how Soviet political technologists led by Josef Stalin distorted the picture of a friendly and peaceful country_Turkey_into the image of an enemy in the minds of millions of Soviet citizens.

This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted in Romania on Stalin's personal advice to the Hungarian Szekely community in the summer of 1952. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthenwith Soviet assistanceits political legitimacy among different national and social groups. The communist national policy followed an integrative approach toward most minority communities, with the relevant exception of Germans, who were declared collectively responsible for the German occupation and were denied political and even civil rights until 1948. The Hungarians of Transylvania were provided with full civil, political, cultural, and linguistic rights to encourage political integration. The ideological premises of the Hungarian Autonomous Region followed the Bolshevik pattern of territorial autonomy elaborated by Lenin and Stalin in the early 1920s. The Hungarians of Szekely Land would become a ';titular nationality' provided with extensive cultural rights. Yet, on the other hand, the Romanian central power used the region as an instrument of political and social integration for the Hungarian minority into the communist state. The management of ethnic conflicts increased the ability of the PCR to control the territory and, at the same time, provided the ruling party with a useful precedent for the far larger ';nationalization' of the Romanian communist regime which, starting from the late 1950s, resulted in ';ethnicized' communism, an aim achieved without making use of pre-war nationalist discourse. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, repression affected a great number of Hungarian individuals accused of nationalism and irredentism. In 1960 the HAR also suffered territorial reshaping, its Hungarian-born political leadership being replaced by ethnic Romanian cadres. The decisive shift from a class dictatorship toward an ethnicized totalitarian regime was the product of the Gheorghiu-Dej era and, as such, it represented the logical outcome of a long-standing ideological fouling of Romanian communism and more traditional state-building ideologies.

It is well known that the Soviet Union strongly influenced China in the early 1950s, since China committed itself both to the Sino-Soviet alliance and to the Soviet model of building socialism. What is less well known is that Chinese proved receptive not only to the Soviet economic model but also to the emulation of the Soviet Union in realms such as those of ideology, education, science, and culture. In this book an international group of scholars examines China's acceptance and ultimate rejection of Soviet models and practices in economic, cultural, social, and other realms. The chapters vividly illustrate the wide-ranging and multi-dimensional nature of Soviet influence, which to this day continues to manifest itself in one critical aspect, namely in China's rejection of liberal political reform.

Using recently declassified Soviet documents, Jamil Hasanli examines Soviet involvement in the anti-China rebellion in East Turkistan during the 1930's and 1940's.

Drawing on previously classified Soviet archival sources, this study challenges prevailing hypotheses on Stalin's motives behind the arrest of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and the Soviet apparatus' handling of his case.

This collection of interviews, diaries, and scholarly analyses is the first comprehensive look at Russian sentiments in the wake of the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It features the reflections of Russian soldiers, dissidents, and journalists.

This book investigates an important episode in opposition to the Communist regime in Romania. Using fresh evidence gathered through archival research and oral history, the author examines the student protests in the city of Timisoara that broke out in 1956 following the Hungarian uprising of the same year.

This study examines US relations with Spain during its political transition to democracy after 1975. The author focuses on the US military presence in the country and analyzes how the Spanish democratic government's perception of the state's own recent past affected its aims and actions in the post-Franco period.

Based on extensive archival research, the contributions in this collection examine the nuances of neutrality leading up to and during the Cold War. The contributors demonstrate the importance of the Soviet Union to the neutral states of Europe during the Cold War and vice versa.

In the twenty-first century, students of Cold War history are fortunate to have the fruits of several major works on the Sino-Soviet split by European and American scholars. What is lacking in English literature, however, is a book based on international documentation, especially Chinese archival documents that tell the story from the Chinese perspective.Based on archival materials from several countriesparticularly Chinaand more than twenty years of research on the subject, two prominent Chinese historians, Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia, offer a comprehensive look at the SinoSoviet split from 1959, when visible cracks appeared in the Sino-Soviet alliance, to 1973, when China's foreign policy changed from an ';alliance with the Soviet Union to oppose the United States' to ';aligning with the United States to oppose the Soviet Union.' Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 19591973: A New History is a reevaluation of the history of the Sino-Soviet split and offers the first comprehensive account of it from a Chinese perspective.This book, together with its prequel Mao and the SinoSoviet Partnership, 19451959: A New History, is important because any changes in Sino-Soviet relations at the time affected, and to a great extent determined, the fate of the socialist bloc. More importantly, it directly impacted and transformed the international political situation during the Cold War. These two books promise to be a reevaluation of the history of the Sino-Soviet alliance from its birth to its demise. These fascinating books will be a crucial resource for all those interested in the topic and will stand as the definitive work on the Sino-Soviet alliance for years to come.

This study provides a comprehensive examination of the East-West occupation of Austria from the end of World War II to the signing of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. Examining US, Soviet, British, French, and Austrian sources, the authors trace the complex negotiation process that led to the signing of the treaty.

Through a reading of major publications, this book recreates a postwar mood sympathetic to radical social change, thus casting doubt on the standard view of the communists' rise to power. It also raises questions about the relationship between war and radical social change, the communist takeover of the region, and the role of intellectuals.

Through research and interviews Castle examines the causes and consequences of Poland's collapse as a communist state and explores how today's leaders confront some of the legacies of transition.

Yugoslav military cooperation with West emerged after the country's split with the U.S.S.R. and its allies in 1948. It came as a surprise for many, since Yugoslavia used to be one of the staunchest followers of Soviet politics. However, faced with possible military escalation of the ideological, political, and economic worsening of relations with the East, the Yugoslav leadership quickly turned to their former ';class enemies.' For the United States, it presented an opportunity to acquire many unexpected political benefits. Yugoslav alienation from the Kremlin provided territorial consolidation of the southern flank of NATO, denial of direct approach to the Adriatic Sea and Northern Italy to Soviet troops, and dealt a strong political blow to the homogeneity of the Eastern bloc. While not insisting on changing the ideological nature of Yugoslav state, the United States provided much needed material and financial aid, developing the base for entering into sphere of military cooperation. It had two main categoriesdirect support for Yugoslav forces through shipments of military equipment, as well as Yugoslavia entering into defensive, military alliance (the Balkan Pact) with Greece and Turkey, already full members of NATO. Such trends, aiming towards closer Yugoslav bonding with Western military and political structures, ended in the mid-1950s with Stalin's death, the outbreak of the Trieste crisis, and Tito's reconciliation with Soviet leadership. Developing the new policy of non-alignment with either of the confronting blocs, Yugoslavia stepped out from the program of Western military aid, while the Balkan Pact slowly faded in growing animosity between Greece and Turkey.

This book examines the dynamic evolution of Western detente policies which sought to transform Europe and overcome its Cold War division through more communication and engagement. Kieninger challenges the traditional Cold War narrative that detente prolonged the division of Europe and precipitated America's decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Rather, he argues that policymakers in the U.S. Department of State and in Western Europe envisaged the stability enabled by detente as a precondition for change, as Communist regimes saw a sense of security as a prerequisite for opening up their societies to Western influence over time. Kieninger identifies the Helsinki Accords, Lyndon Johnson's bridge building, and Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik as efforts aimed at constructive changes in Eastern Europe through a multiplication of contacts, communication, and cooperation on all societal levels. This study also illuminates the longevity of America's policy of peaceful change against the background of the nuclear stalemate and the military status quo.

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.Using a wealth of recently declassified sources, this book tells the complex story of Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa, a narrowly defined geographic entity torn by the rivalry of two large countries (Ethiopia and Somalia), from the beginning of the Cold War until the demise of the Soviet Union. At different points in the twentieth century, this regionarguably one of the poorest in the worldattracted broad international interest and large quantities of advanced weaponry, making it a Cold War flashpoint. The external actors ultimately failed to achieve what they wanted from the local conflictsa lesson relevant for U.S. policymakers today as they ponder whether to use force abroad in the wake of the unhappy experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet secret police installed ten special camps in the Soviet occupation zone, later to become the German Democratic Republik. Between 1945 and 1950, roughly 154,000 Germans were held incommunicado in these camps. Whether those accused of being Nazis, spies, or terrorists were indeed guilty as charged, they were indiscriminately imprisoned as security threats and denied due process of the law. One third of the captives did not survive. To this day, most Germans have no knowledge of this postwar Stalinist persecution, even though it exemplifies in a unique way the entangled history of Germans as perpetrators and victims.How can one write the history of victims in a ';society of perpetrators?' This is only one of the questions Displaced Terror: History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany raises in exploring issues in memory culture in contemporary Germany. The study begins with a detailed description of the camp system against the backdrop of Stalinist security policies in a territory undergoing a transition from war zone to occupation zone to Cold War hot spot. The interpretation of the camps as an instrument of pacification rather than of denacification does not ignore the fact that, while actual perpetrators were a minority, the majority of the special camp inmates had at least been supporters of Nazi rule and were now imprisoned under life-threatening conditions together with victims and opponents of the defeated regime. Based on their detention memoirs, the second part of the book offers a closer look at life and death in the camps, focusing on the prisoners self-organization and the frictions within these coerced communities. The memoirs also play an important role in the third and last part of the study. Read as attempts to establish public acknowledgment of violence suffered by Germans, they mirror German memory culture since the end of World War II.

From Berlin to Bucharest, from Warsaw to Sofia, Soviet tanks crossed national borders across East Central Europe at the end of the Second World War. The arrival of the Red Army marked an important turn in history. Within only a few years, the often unpopular communist parties developed into political organizations with mass followings. They managed to seize power, eliminate political opposition to their rule, and purge the state apparatus of undesirable personnel.In Securing the Communist State, Liesbeth van de Grift provides a new understanding of these organizations using recently disclosed material from the communist archives in Berlin and Bucharest. She reveals how these communist parties gained control over the security apparatus after 1945 in East Central Europe from a transitional justice perspective, focusing on purges and personnel policies. This book shows that the personal break after 1945 was not as radical as is often thought.

In the early years of the Atlantic Alliance, no bilateral relationship was more important than that between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. Even so, the West German-American alliance was taxing for both sides during much of the first two decades of the Cold War. Ultimately, despite frequent, significant challenges to the alliance from without and within, the two allies managed to achieve a positive and productive relationship - Eisenhower and Adenauer explains how they did so. In both capitals, the top foreign policy makers were deeply involved in the conduct of what they viewed as a vital bilateral alliance, with both President Dwight Eisenhower and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer taking the lead in his own government. For the Americans, a rearmed FRG tightly bound to the West was the bedrock of any European security policy that could contain the Soviet Union for the long-term. For the West German government, their relationship with the United States was the bedrock of rehabilitation and, indeed, survival as an independent country. In this book, their alliance is closely analyzed to form new knowledge on the West German-American relationship during the Cold War.

Drawing on recently declassified Soviet archival sources, this book sheds new light on how the division of Europe came about in the aftermath of World War II. The book contravenes the notion that a neutral zone of states, including Germany, could have been set up between East and West. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was determined to preserve control over its own sphere of German territory. By tracing Stalins attitude toward neutrality in international politics, the book provides important insights into the origins of the Cold War.

Based on Chinese archival documents, interviews, and more than twenty years of research on the subject, Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia offer a comprehensive look at the Sino-Soviet alliance between the end of the World War II and 1959, when the alliance was left in disarray as a result of foreign and domestic policies. This book is a reevaluation of the history of this alliance and is the first book published in English to examine it from a Chinese perspective.

This book draws a subtle picture of Warsaw Pact economic and military cooperation by presenting a complete branchthe military industryfrom the perspective of a smaller member-state, Hungary. It demonstrates that the military industry's cooperation played a crucial role in the development of economic integration within the Soviet Bloc, and it was in this sector that the strongest, most efficient integration was established. The book builds on recently declassified documentation from Soviet-led international economic organizations to give insight into the backstage debates of partner states, to shed light on the intensive conflicts and clashes of interests between the nations, and to highlight the bureaucratic decision making of the Eastern bloc's supranational organ. The transnational analysis is supplemented by the presentation of the national viewpoint: how Hungary intended to vindicate its interests, what measures Budapest took to optimize international cooperation, and what kind of new markets were discovered outside the Warsaw Pact.

On February 25, 1956, Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev delivered the so-called ';secret speech' in the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in which he denounced Stalin's transgressions and the cult of personality around the deceased dictator. Replete with sharp criticism of the Terror of the late 1930s, the unpreparedness of the USSR for the Nazi invasion, numerous wartime blunders, and the deportation of various nationalities, the speech reverberated throughout the subordinate Soviet republics. For republics such as Azerbaijan, the speech was an unmistakable signal to readjust the entire political orientation and figure out ways to redefine governance in post-Stalin era. Previously frozen under the mortal threat of Stalinist persecution, various forms of national self-expression began to experience rapid revival under the Khrushchev thaw. Encouraged by the winds of change at the Center, the Azeris cautiously began to reclaim possession of their administrative domain. Among other local initiatives, the declaration of the Azerbaijani language as the official language was one step that stood out in its audacity, for it was not pre-arranged with the Kremlin and defied the modus operandi of the Soviet leadership. Somewhat reformist in his intentions yet ignorant of the non-Slavic peripheries, Mr. Khrushchev had not foreseen the scenarios that would unfold as a result of its new tone and the developments that would come to be interpreted as the rise of nationalism in the republics. Jamil Hasanli's research on 1950s' Azerbaijan sheds light on this watershed period in Soviet history while also furnishing the reader with a greater understanding of the root causes of the dissolution of the USSR.

Based on interviews and a broad array of sources from Russian and Austrian archives, this collection provides a comprehensive analysis of the Soviet occupation of Austria from 1945 to 1955. The contributors examine a wide range of topics, including Soviet occupation policies, violence and everyday life, and the image of "the Russians."

This collection of interviews, diaries, and scholarly analyses is the first comprehensive look at Russian sentiments in the wake of the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It features the reflections of Russian soldiers, dissidents, and journalists.

This study examines the origins, evolution, and goals of Polish and Estonian diaspora communities in Sweden during the Cold War. The author analyzes their links with both their host and homeland societies and investigates their clandestine efforts to undermine the communist regimes of their homelands.

At the beginning of June 1961, the tensions of the Cold War were supposed to abate as both sides sought a resolution. The two most important men in the world, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, met for a summit in Vienna. Yet the high hopes were disappointed. Within months the Cold War had become very hot: Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall and a year later he sent missiles to Cuba to threaten the United States directly. Despite the fact that the Vienna Summit yielded barely any tangible results, it did lead to some very important developments. In The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History international experts use new Russian and Western sources to analyze what really happened during this critical time and why the parties had a close shave with catastrophe.