The Cold War: The Major Players

Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event of the recent past - as a case study, this text engages students in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation and explanation. In exploring the question posed by the title, the author introduces and applies such organizing concepts as great power conflict, imperial decline, revolution, ethnic conflict, colonialism, economic development, totalitarian ideology, and transition to democracy in a most accessible way. Questions and controversies, and extracts from documentary and literary sources, anchor the text at key points. This book is intended for use in history and political science courses on the Soviet Union or more generally on the 20th century.

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In The Gulag after Stalin, Jeffrey S. Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a "progressive" system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Reeducation proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan "The camp is not a resort" and succeeded in reimposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counterreform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis. Discussions of Soviet modernity have tended to see the Soviet state either as an archaic holdover from the Russian past, or as merely another form of conventional modernity. David-Fox instead considers the Soviet Union in its own light--as a seismic shift from tsarist society that attracted influential visitors from the pacifist Left to the fascist Right. By reassembling Russian legacies, as he shows, the Soviet system evolved into a complex 'intelligentsia-statist' form that introduced an array of novel agendas and practices, many embodied in the unique structures of the party-state. Crossing Borders demonstrates the need for a new interpretation of the Russian-Soviet historical trajectory--one that strikes a balance between the particular and the universal.

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One of the great surprises in modern military history was the collapse of the Soviet Armed Forces in 1991 - along with the party-state with which it was inextricably intertwined. In this book, a distinguished United States Army officer and scholar traces the rise and fall of the Soviet military, arguing that it had a far greater impact on Soviet politics and economic development than was perceived in the West.

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After hostilities officially ceased, what drove American policy towards Germany in 1944-1949? While Soviet policies came under closer inspection, Western policies have rarely been subjected to critical review. This book deals with the Morgenthau Plan and its impact on American postwar planning. Conventional accounts of Western postwar policies occasionally mention the Morgenthau Plan, describing it as a plan developed in the Treasury Department designed to deindustrialize or "pastoralize" the German nation. These accounts are chiefly characterized by their brevity, at most admitting that "[it] and its temporary and partial adoption ... was an unfortunate but small chapter in American diplomatic history." Conventional accounts state that the Plan was adopted by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944, and that, when President Roosevelt was informed of its impracticality, he immediately abandoned it and stated that he had initialed the plan "without much thought." Contrary to what is often reported in history books, the Morgenthau Plan had a major impact on post war planning. This book traces the role of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, in the planning for the post war world, with close attention to the discussions leading up to the Second Quebec Conference where Winston Churchill's acceptance of the plan was obtained. It follows the devastating consequences of the policies based on the plan, and their contribution to the post war collapse of the European economy. Damning evidence shows that the Allies intentionally brought starvation and disease to large civilian populations. "This is a startling, important book which I hope will rattle the bones of the comfortable court historians of the USA, such as Stephen Ambrose, who have spent their careers shading and evading the truth that the world and their students deserve, and do not get."

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All Shook Up examines major natural and man-made disasters in the Soviet Union. Specifically, it compares disasters in separate Soviet epochs, adding to our understanding of Soviet politics in discrete eras and of important transitions during periods of Soviet rule. The study analyses the 1927 earthquake in the Crimean peninsula shortly before Stalin came to power, the devastating earthquake in 1948 in Ashkhabad during high Stalinism, and the Tashkent earthquake in 1966, two years after Brezhnev took power, the Chernobyl explosion, and the Armenian earthquake in 1988. Based on archival research in Russia and Ukraine, All Shook Up shows the radical shifts in disaster policy from one leader to the next. While Soviet disasters have been studied from a scientific perspective, much less attention has been paid to the social, cultural and political dynamics that emerged in the aftermath of these tragedies. Gaining inspiration from disaster theorists such as Kenneth Hewitt and sociologists such as Erik Klinenberg, the book embeds each disaster within a specific context: changes brought about by disasters depended upon the specific cultural and political environment in which they occurred. While they did not affect everyone equally, disasters almost always evoked societal flux: in different forms, from active participation in recovery operations to the donation of money, citizens had an opportunity to act outside the regular parameters of Soviet life. Since disasters required the spontaneous mobilization of vast resources, they provide critical insights into the nature of the Soviet state. In these trying times, Soviet residents had an opportunity to craft their own worldview while the authoritarian Soviet state struggled to return a situation to normal. Moreover, this perspective reveals a dynamic rather than static Soviet Union in which individuals had ample room for improvisation.

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Through a series of essays on key events in recent years in Russia, the western ex-republics of the USSR and the countries of the one-time Warsaw Pact, John Besemeres seeks to illuminate the domestic politics of the most important states, as well as Moscow's relations with all of them. At the outset, he takes some backward glances at the violent suppression of national life in the 'bloodlands' of Europe during World War II by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which helps to explain much about the region's dynamics since. His concern throughout is that a large area of Europe with a combined population well in excess of Russia's could again be consigned by the West to Moscow's care, not this time by more and less malign forms of collusion, but by distracted negligence or incomprehension.

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The author analyzes modern Russian history from a new perspective. Due to the ideological heritage of the XIX and XX century, the social settings of the sociopolitical history of the USSR (1917-1945) have not been fully identified. Detailed examination of ideological and political concepts shows that the revolution of 1917 became not a middle class, proletarian movement, but rather a plebeian one. The misjudgment by the new power enabled growth but caused tremendous losses of human lives and material damages. Socialization of economy and strict centralization led to a new social structure and established terror as an instrument for social reorganization. WWII revealed the necessity of a correction of these developments, but the events of the Cold War circumvented any further considerations.

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This is an English translation of a memoir by Myroslav Marynovich, a Ukrainian dissident who was imprisoned-and later exiled-during the Brezhnev years because of his membership in the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Defense Group (UHG), which sought to make public the human rights conditions that existed in Soviet-controlled Ukraine. Born in Halychyna (a European-oriented western region of Ukraine, also known as Galicia) just after World War II, and educated in Soviet schools, the author describes in his memoir the influence of his Galician family in developing his position of resistance to totalitarian regimes. The narrative depicts life in Soviet-occupied Kyiv during the epoch of the Helsinki movement, describing the activities of the UHG and its members, their arrests, and the Soviet abuse of justice. The author shares details of the political prisoners' life in concentration camps and clarifies the circumstances of his exile to Kazakhstan. A significant amount of the memoir is dedicated to describing the author's personal spiritual growth; his perspective is that of a deeply religious person, a devoted Christian, and this, as one of the readers points out, is one of the features that makes his story noteworthy: "Marynovych belongs to another underrepresented group: dissidents driven by Christian faith who nonetheless joined the broader movement for civil and human rights - a movement dominated by secular, metropolitan intellectuals, many of them scientists of one kind or another." (The first underrepresented group, per this reader, is dissidents from Ukraine, of whom much less has been written about than their counterparts elsewhere in the Soviet Union.)

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This monograph, based on newly declassified sources from Western and Russian archives as well as on communist texts about international law and neutrality, is the first English-language account of Soviet policy towards neutral yet capitalist Austria during the Cold War. In order to make neutrality a model for the West, the Kremlin presented the unique Soviet-Austrian relationship as "a good example of peaceful coexistence" and a showcase for the benefits a Western state might reap by declaring neutrality. This honor, however, had strings attached: The communist doctrine of neutrality contained obligations that were expected to make it possible to exploit neutral states as instruments of Soviet policy and bring them nearer the socialist bloc.

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Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America's future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China's importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America's long and varied preoccupation with China. China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, sought Chinese laborers to build the West, and prized China's art and decor. China was revered for its ancient culture but also drew Christian missionaries intent on saving souls in a heathen land. Its vast markets beckoned expansionists, even as its migrants were seen as a 'yellow peril' that prompted the earliest immigration restrictions. A staunch ally during World War II, China was a dangerous adversary in the Cold War that followed. In the post-Mao era, Americans again embraced China as a land of inexhaustible opportunity, playing a central role in its economic rise. Through portraits of entrepreneurs, missionaries, academics, artists, diplomats, and activists, Chang demonstrates how ideas about China have long been embedded in America's conception of itself and its own fate. Fateful Ties provides valuable perspective on this complex international and intercultural relationship as America navigates an uncertain new era.

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Dan Ling, a patriotic young engineer eager to help build a new China, falls afoul of the authorities and spends 17 years as a political prisoner. Rehabilitated after Deng Xiaoping came to power, Dan returns to work with unflagging determination to help provide a good life for himself and his people after enduring prison, work camps and work farms, and the primitive life of the social outcast breaking new ground on the frozen northern frontier. Lings personal story is interwoven with glimpses of rural and urban life from the 1950s to the 1970s as China fought to make the wrenching leap from a feudalistic to a modern society. Ancient practices alternate with breath-taking and misguided experimentation as the common man is called upon to stride boldly into the unknown but no doubt glorious future. Scenes of naivety, brutality, generosity and pettiness, personal bonds and vendettas, illustrate how peasants, workers and intellectuals survived in the evolving Communist system. This is an expose written without rancor, and a heartening story of faith in man's ability to progress.

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In the fall of 1964, sinologist Erik Zürcher traveled for the first time to China, a country he had been studying since 1947. A collection of Zürcher's personal writings from his trip, including letters and diary entries, Three Months in Mao's China offers not only new insights about the great scholar, but also a rich picture of communist China, which was in those days still almost completely inaccessible to Westerners. During a tumultuous time in world politics, as Nikita Khrushchev was deposed, Lyndon Johnson won the US presidential election against Barry Goldwater, and China became a nuclear power, Zürcher experienced the reality of China under Mao Zedong. Only recently discovered, these documents portray through an expert's eye a land in the midst of its own massive political, social, and economic change. Both a fascinating account by an informed outsider and a reminder of just how much China and the rest of the world have changed over the last fifty years, this is essential reading for anyone interested in East Asia and Asian history as a whole.

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In China in the World, Ban Wang traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning "all under heaven," has constantly been updated into modern outlooks that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as key to overcoming interstate conflict, social fragmentation, and ethnic divides. Instead of geopolitical dominance, China's worldviews stem as much from the age-old desire for world unity as from absorbing the Western ideas of the Enlightenment, humanism, and socialism. Examining political writings, literature, and film, Wang presents a narrative of the country's pursuits of decolonization, national independence, notions of national form, socialist internationalism, alternative development, and solidarity with Third World nations. Rather than national exceptionalism, Chinese worldviews aspire to a shared, integrated, and equal world.

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Dr. Hu Shih (1891-1962) was one of China's top scholars and diplomats and served as the Republic of China's ambassador to the United States during World War II. As early as 1941, Hu Shih warned of the fundamental ideological conflict between dictatorial totalitarianism and democratic systems, a view that later became the foundation of the Cold War narrative. In the 1950s, after Mao's authoritarian regime was established, Hu Shih started to analyze the development and nature of Communism, delivering a series of lectures and addresses to reveal what he called Stalin's "grand strategy" for facilitating the International Communist Movement. For decades-and today to a certain extent-Hu Shih's political writings were considered sensitive and even dangerous. As a strident critic of the Chinese Communist Party's oligarchical practices, he was targeted by the CCP in a concerted national campaign to smear his reputation, cast aspersions on his writings, and generally destroy any possible influence he might have in China. This volume brings together a collection of Hu Shih's most important, mostly unpublished, English-language speeches, interviews, and commentaries on international politics, China-U.S. relations, and the International Communist Movement. Taken together, these works provide an insider's perspective on Sino-American relations and the development of the International Communist Movement over the course of the 20th century.

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Western music reached China nearly four centuries ago, with the arrival of Christian missionaries, yet only within the last century has Chinese music absorbed its influence. The emergence of "Westernized" music from China -concurrent with the technological advances that have made global culture widely accessible - has not established a prominent presence in the West. China and the West brings together essays on centuries of Sino-Western musical exchange by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists from around the world. It opens with a look at theoretical approaches of prior studies of musical encounters and a comprehensive survey of the intercultural and cross-cultural theoretical frameworks-exoticism, orientalism, globalization, transculturation, and hybridization-that inform these essays. Part I focuses on the actual encounters between Chinese and European musicians, their instruments and institutions, and the compositions inspired by these encounters, while Part II examines theatricalized and mediated East-West cultural exchanges, which often drew on stereotypical tropes, resulting in performances more inventive than accurate. Part III looks at the musical language, sonority, and subject matters of "intercultural" compositions by Eastern and Western composers. Essays in Part IV address reception studies and consider the ways in which differences are articulated in musical discourse by actors serving different purposes, whether self-promotion, commercial marketing, or modes of nationalistic-even propagandistic-expression.

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Graduate students have traditionally learned a good part of what they know about sources and research aids on modern China through hearsay and serendipity, in unsystematic and unreliable bits and pieces. The field has now developed to the point where this need not and ought not to be so. It is now possible for beginning researchers to start with some shared basic knowledge of research aids and documentary resources. This research guide is meant to provide that knowledge. The user of this guide is envisaged as an American graduate student in history or the social sciences who is already familiar with the major English-language secondary literature on modern China and is about to begin original research, either for a seminar paper or for a dissertation.

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The Chinese Communist system was from its very inception based on an inherent contradiction and tension, and the Cultural Revolution is the latest and most violent manifestation of that contradiction. Built into the very structure of the system was an inner conflict between the desiderata, the imperatives, and the requirements that technocratic modernization on the one hand and Maoist values and strategy on the other. The Cultural Revolution collects four papers prepared for a research conference on the topic convened by the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies in March 1968. Michel Oksenberg opens the volume by examining the impact of the Cultural Revolution on occupational groups including peasants, industrial managers and workers, intellectuals, students, party and government officials, and the military. Carl Riskin is concerned with the economic effects of the revolution, taking up production trends in agriculture and industry, movements in foreign trade, and implications of Masoist economic policies for China's economic growth. Robert A. Scalapino turns to China's foreign policy behavior during this period, arguing that Chinese Communists in general, and Mao in particular, formed foreign policy with a curious combination of cosmic, utopian internationalism and practical ethnocentrism rooted both in Chinese tradition and Communist experience. Ezra F. Vogel closes the volume by exploring the structure of the conflict, the struggles between factions, and the character of those factions.

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Afterlives of Chinese Communism includes essays from over 50 world-renowned scholars in the China field, from different disciplines, and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the intellectual legacies of the Mao era shape Chinese politics today. The volume addresses the question: What lessons does the Chinese Revolution have for leftist thinking in the present? As a volume, the essays speak to each other by answering this question. Across the various approaches, there is a sensitivity to the potentials, enthusiasms, and resistances to domination that Maoist concepts once generated. Each essay provides an introduction to a concept or keyword in Chinese politics, its origins in the Mao era, uses in the present, and potential futures. Participating in an emerging conversation on the futures of communism, the edited volume is designed as an archive of the political vocabulary of Maoism, and a legend to the lost political cartographies of the past and any potential utopian futures.

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Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, "the intellectual" was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals. The appearance of such subjects profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities in Chinese society and new forms of organization and association. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the legacy of which still affects ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and feeling in what is now a globalized China.

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This title examines an important historic event--the Berlin Wall's division of the city of Berlin, Germany, from the building of the wall to its destruction.

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Combining the tools of political, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Consumption and Violence : Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany explores strategies of legitimization developed by advocates of militant resistance to certain manifestations of consumer capitalism. The book contributes to a more sober evaluation of West German protest movements, not just terrorism, as it refrains from emotional and moral judgments, but takes the protesters' approaches seriously, which, regarding consumer society, had a rational core. Political violence is not presented as the result of individual shortcomings, but emerges in relation to major societal changes, i.e., the unprecedented growth of consumption. This new perspective sheds important light on violence and radical protest in post-war Germany, as previous books have failed to examine to what extent these forms of resistance should be regarded as reactions to changing regimes of provision. Continuing the recently growing interest in the interdependence of countercultures and consumer society, the focus on violence gives the argument a unique twist, making the book thought-provoking and engaging.

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Queer Lives across the Wall examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s. Andrea Rottmann explores how certain spaces--including homes, bars, streets, parks, and prisons--facilitated and restricted queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that characterized both German postwar states. By examining both public and private urban spaces, the book draws a complex picture of how queer lives were lived, going beyond previous histories that focus on state surveillance and the persecution of male homosexuality. With a theoretical toolkit informed by feminist, queer, and spatial theories, the book combines previously unknown sources from the archives of the feminist and LGBTIQ* movements in police, Stasi, and prisoner files. As an intersectional history of lesbian, trans, and gay male lives in East and West Berlin, Queer Lives across the Wall illuminates the entanglements of gender, sexuality, and class.

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This study of East German fantasies of material abundance across the border, both before and after the fall of communism, shows the close and intricate relation between ideology and fantasy in upholding social life. In 1989, news broadcasts all over the world were dominated for weeks by images of East Germans crossing the Berlin Wall to West Germany. The images, representing the fall of communism and the democratic will of the people, also showed East Germans' excitement at finally being able to enter the western consumer paradise. But what exactly had they expected to find on the other side of the Wall? Why did they shed tears of joy when for the first time in their lives, they stepped inside West German shops? And why were they prepared to pay more than 10 percent of their average monthly wage for a pineapple? Drawing on fifteen months of research in the fast-changing post-communist East Germany, Veenis unravels the perennial truths about the interrelationships of fantasies of material wealth, personal fulfillment and social cohesion. She argues persuasively that the far-fetched socialist and capitalist promises of consumption as the road to ultimate well-being, the partial realization and partial corruption thereof, the implicit social and psychological interests underlying the politicized promises in both countries form the breeding ground for the development of materialist, cargo-cult-like fantasies, in which material well-being came to be seen as the place of "fulfillment and ultimate arrival".

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Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives.

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Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s. The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

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The Holocaust is considered a singularly atrocious event in human history, and many people have studied its causes. Yet few questions have been asked about the ways in which West Germans have "forgotten," unlearned, or reconstructed the racial beliefs at the core of the Nazi state in order to build a democratic society. This study looks at ethnic drag as one particular kind of performance that reveals how postwar Germans lived, disavowed, and contested "Germanness" in its complex racial, national, and sexual dimensions. Using engaging case studies, Ethnic Drag traces the classical and travestied traditions of Jewish impersonation from the eighteenth century onward to construct a pre-history of postwar ethnic drag. It examines how shortly after World War II mass culture and popular practices facilitated the repression and refashioning of Nazi racial precepts. During a time when American occupation authorities insisted on remembrance and redress for the Holocaust, the Wild West emerged as a displaced theater of the racial imagination, where the roles of victim, avenger, and perpetrator of genocide were reassigned.

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Providing an approach to the study of modern Korea, this collection traces the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Korea's transformation since the late nineteenth century. It discusses the interrelated elements of Korea's modernization within agriculture, business and the economy, the ideology and culture, and the family.

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North Korea Today covers the history of the secretive nation and its leaders, North Korean weapon and missile development programs, and the government's efforts to seize Western tourists and journalists as hostages.

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The Korean War and The Vietnam War is just one title in this 5 book series that gives readers a detailed look into America's military history. Military legacies are not just about dates and timelines; they're about our strengths and weaknesses, ignorance and brilliance, and desire for peace or dominance. Students will discover the underlying motivations, causes and consequences of military engagement throughout America's history. Written for high school and college students, these image-studded volumes are a must-read for anyone interested in understanding America's experience in the crucible.

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This book explores the causes of and events leading to the Korean War. It discusses major battles and key figures of the war and the technology and weapons used during the war. Readers will discover the experiences of soldiers and people on the home front.

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Of all the horrors human beings perpetrate, genocide stands near the top of the list. Its toll is staggering: well over 100 million dead worldwide. Why Did They Kill? is one of the first anthropological attempts to analyze the origins of genocide. In it, Alexander Hinton focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge in order to explore why mass murder happens and what motivates perpetrators to kill. Basing his analysis on years of investigative work in Cambodia, Hinton finds parallels between the Khmer Rouge and the Nazi regimes. Policies in Cambodia resulted in the deaths of over 1.7 million of that country's 8 million inhabitants--almost a quarter of the population--who perished from starvation, overwork, illness, malnutrition, and execution. Hinton considers this violence in light of a number of dynamics, including the ways in which difference is manufactured, how identity and meaning are constructed, and how emotionally resonant forms of cultural knowledge are incorporated into genocidal ideologies.

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Open hostilities in the Korean War ended on the 27th of July 1953. The armistice that was signed at that time remains the poignant symbol of an incomplete conclusion of a war that retains a distinct possibility of resuming at short notice. So what did Australia contribute to the Korean War from June 1950 to July 1953? What were the Australians doing there? How significant was the contribution and what difference did it make? What has that meant for Australia since then, and what might that mean for Australia into the future? Australians served at sea, on land and in the air alongside their United Nations partners during the war. They fought with distinction, from bitterly cold mountain tops, to the frozen decks of aircraft carriers and in dogfights overhead. This book includes the perspectives of leading academics, practitioners and veterans contributing fresh ideas on the conduct and legacy of the Korean War. International perspectives from allies and adversaries provide contrasting counterpoints that help create a more nuanced understanding of Australia's relatively small but nonetheless important contribution of forces in the Korean War. The book finishes with some reflections on implications that the Korean War still carries for Australia and the world to this day.

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One of the most contentious theatres of the global conflict between capitalism and communism was Southeast Asia. From the 1920s until the end of the Cold War, the region was racked by international and internal wars that claimed the lives of millions and fundamentally altered societies in the region for generations. Most of the 11 countries that comprise Southeast Asia were host to the development of sizable communist parties that actively (and sometimes violently) contested for political power. These parties were the object of fierce repression by European colonial powers, post-independence governments and the United States. Southeast Asia communist parties were also the object of a great deal of analysis both during and after these conflicts. This book brings together a host of expert scholars, many of whom are either Southeast Asia-based or from the countries under analysis, to present the most expansive and comprehensive study to date on ideological and practical experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Southeast Asia. The bulk of this edited volume presents the contents of these revolutionary ideologies on their own terms and their transformations in praxis by using primary source materials that are free of the preconceptions and distortions of counterinsurgent narratives. A unifying strength of this work is its focus on using primary sources in the original languages of the insurgents themselves.

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The debate in South Korea over the government's engagement policy toward North Korea (the so-called "sunshine" policy) did not start with Pyongyang's recent admission that it has been secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program in violation of multiple international commitments. However, the evolution of the debate will be an important determinant of how the South Korean and broader international response to this latest North Korean challenge ultimately ends. Examining the public South Korean debate over dealings with North Korea, this book reviews the relevant historical background, focusing on the evolution of "engagement" as the goal of South Korean policy toward the North. It examines the critical assumptions and central concepts motivating the new policy adopted by President Kim after his inauguration and analyzes the key issues in the public debate over this new policy. It also identifies the major actors and describes their respective positions on the government's approach to North Korea, as well as how these actors have affected public debate over government policy. The book concludes by assessing the sources of public controversy existing today, the likely short-term effects on South Korean policy, and the potential longer-term implications for South Korea, the United States, and U.S.-South Korean relations.

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Analyzes economic, political, and security issues associated with Korean unification. Considers how the North Korean system might unravel, leading to possible unification would be under differing circumstances and assumptions. Compares points of relevance and nonrelevance between the German experience with the unification in the 1990s and what might occur in Korea.

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A North Korean government collapse would have serious consequences in North Korea and beyond. At the very least, a collapse would reduce the already scarce food and essential goods available to the population, in part due to hoarding and increasing costs. This could lead to a humanitarian disaster. Factions emerging after a collapse could plunge the country into civil war that spills over into neighboring countries. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could be used and even proliferated. This report examines ways of controlling and mitigating the consequences, recognizing that the Republic of Korea (ROK) and its U.S. ally will almost certainly need to intervene militarily in the North, likely seeking Korean unification as the ultimate outcome. But such an intervention requires serious preparation. North Koreans must be convinced that they will be treated well and could actually have better lives after unification. The allies need to prepare to deliver humanitarian aid in the North, stop conflict, demilitarize the North Korean military and security services over time, and secure and eventually eliminate North Korean WMD. Potential Chinese intervention must be addressed, ideally leading to cooperation with ROK and U.S. forces. Plans are needed for liberating North Korean political prisons before the guards execute the prisoners. Property rights need to be addressed. The ROK must sustain its military capabilities despite major reductions in force size due to very low birthrates. And ROK reluctance to broadly address North Korean collapse must be overcome so that plans in these areas can move forward.

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In this innovative and persuasive volume, Sonia Ryang offers new ways to think about North Korea and how truth emerges over decades from within a dominant discourse. It explores four discrete yet mutually related domains of discourse: North Korea's literary purge of the 1950s-1960s; its state-initiated linguistic reforms of the 1960s-1980s; stories from a people's chronicle, more than one hundred volumes in length, documenting interactions with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung; and the multivolume memoirs of the Great Leader himself, published in the 1990s. These texts are heterogeneous in terms of authorship, style, purpose, and genre, and many have never before been explored in Anglophone studies of North Korea. All have contributed to consolidating a North Korean regime of truth, bringing into existence a set of assumptions and shared understandings that have been regarded as true over the last half century. Basing her work on a study of these linguistic and discursive domains, Ryang explores the ways in which power, truth, and self are indissolubly connected by function as well as efficacy and how language plays a key role in sustaining their validity. The Kim Il Sung era, from 1945 to Kim's death in 1994, forms the basis of the book, but the way truth emerged and was sustained during these decades provides important insight into how we can comprehend North Korea today. Rather than view the country as an ideological entity in order to expose its falsehood, so to speak, thinking critically about what it sees as true yields a far more productive outcome for scholarly analysis as well as general understanding. Language and Truth in North Korea will find a ready audience among those interested in North Korea from a wide variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, history, philosophy, and theology.

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For forty years the Cuban Revolution has been at the forefront of American public opinion, yet few are knowledgeable about the history of its enemies and the responsibility of the U.S. government in organizing and sustaining the Cuban counterrevolution. Available in English for the first time, this outstanding study by Cuban historian and former diplomat Jesus Arboleya traces the evolution of the counterrevolutionary movement from its beginnings before 1959 to its transformation into the Cuban-American groups that today dominate U.S. policy toward Cuba.

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This is a comprehensive, interpretative history of the Cuban Revolution, from the time of Batista's 1952 coup to the present. The book offers a balanced perspective on the revolution by recognizing its accomplishments, pointing out its shortcomings, and denouncing its excesses.

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Cuba is nearing the end of the Castro era. When that end arrives, the government that succeeds Fidel Castro, as well as the Cuban people themselves, will need answers to the following questions: How is Castro's more than four-decade rule likely to affect a post-Castro Cuba? What are the political, social, and economic challenges that Cuba will have to confront? What are the impediments that will need to be surmounted if Cuba is to develop economically and embark on a democratic transition? To answer those questions, the authors examine Castro's political legacies, Cuba's generational and racial divisions, its demographic predicament, the legacy of a centralized economy, and the need for industrial restructuring. They conclude by offering policy guidelines for the United States to foster a stable and prosperous post-Castro Cuba.

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The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a profound episode in twentieth-century American history, impacting not just Florida, but the entire country. During the first twenty days of the boatlift, with little support from the federal government, the state of Florida coordinated and responded to the sudden arrival in Key West of more than thirty thousand Cuban refugees, the first wave of immigrants who became known as " Marielitos." Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona, and Kristen Cifers combine the insights of expert observers with the experiences of actual participants. The authors organize and present a wealth of primary sources, first-hard accounts, archival research, government records, and interviews with policy-makers, volunteers, and refugees that bring into focus the many far-reaching human, political, and cultural outcomes of the Mariel Boatlift that continue to influence Florida, the United States as a whole, and Cuba today.

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When a popular revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, it provoked the wrath of the American political establishment but fueled intense interest within the multiracial American Left. In this groundbreaking work, Teishan Latner contends that as Americans studied Cuba's achievements, Havana in turn looked to the US Left as a collaborator in the global battle against inequality and imperialism.

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October 9, 1967. World-renowned revolutionary Che Guevara is dead at the age of thirty-nine. The charismatic Argentinian revolutionary had been leading guerilla fighters in the jungles of Bolivia and was captured by the Bolivian army. Mario TerAn, a sergeant in the Bolivian army, volunteered to execute the prisoner. He carried out the bloody assignment with nine point-blank shots to Guevara's body. Around the globe, reactions to the assassination were mixed. In Cuba, where Guevara had helped overthrow a brutally repressive dictatorship in 1959, more than one million people mourned openly. But in the United States and elsewhere, many business leaders and government officials were relieved. Guevara's anti-capitalist movement sought to strip big businesses of their land and power. He wanted to set up socialist systems to spread wealth and resources among ordinary workers'in Latin America and all around the world. To the rich and powerful, Guevara was a dangerous threat. In this chronicle of an assassination, find out what inspired the myth of Che Guevara and what brought him to this bloody crossroads of history.

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With the end of the global Cold War, the struggle for human rights has emerged as one of the most controversial forces of change in Latin America. Many observers seek the foundations of that movement in notions of rights and models of democratic institutions that originated in the global North. Challenging that view, this volume argues that Latin American community organizers, intellectuals, novelists, priests, students, artists, urban pobladores, refugees, migrants, and common people have contributed significantly to new visions of political community and participatory democracy. These local actors built an alternative transnational solidarity from below with significant participation of the socially excluded and activists in the global South. Edited by Jessica Stites Mor, this book offers fine-grained case studies that show how Latin America's re-emerging Left transformed the struggles against dictatorship and repression of the Cold War into the language of anti-colonialism, socioeconomic rights, and identity.

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The Surrendered is the English translation of José Carlos Agüero acclaimed memoir, his story as the son of two Shining Path militants executed by the Peruvian state. It moves from his parents' political trajectory and life as guerrillas to his own childhood, often spent on the run. The book also examines and contributes to debates about memory and forgiveness, human rights, and reconciliation. In addition to the translation of Agüero's preface and main text, this English edition includes an editors' introduction that explains the hybrid nature of the book and the complex history of the Shining Path. It also contains an extensive interview with Agüero (translated from the Spanish) in which Lazzara and Walker invite him to elaborate on the book's themes and to reflect on its reception and his life as a public intellectual.

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In recent years, child migrants from Central America have arrived in the United States in unprecedented numbers. But whilst minors from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador make the perilous journey to the north, their Nicaraguan peers have remained in Central America. Nicaragua also enjoys lower murder rates and far fewer gang problems when compared with her neighbours. Why is Nicaragua so different? The present government has promulgated a discourse of Nicaraguan exceptionalism, arguing that Nicaragua is unique thanks to heritage of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. This volume critically interrogates that claim, asking whether the legacy of the revolution is truly exceptional. An interdisciplinary work, the book brings together historians, anthropologists and sociologists to explore the multifarious ways in which the revolutionary past continues to shape public policy - and daily life - in Nicaragua's tumultuous present.

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Book in Spanish highlighting Cuba's relationship with the rest of Latin America.

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Book in Spanish highlighting the Soviet Union's relationship with Chile in the early 1970s.

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Book in Spanish highlighting Cuban-Soviet relations.

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Book in Spanish

An assessment of Cuba's development strategies since the 1960s, and of the tradeoffs of its dependent relationship on the former communist world. Economic openings of the 1990s alongside efforts to maintain single-party political system could prove untenable in today's global context; recommends that Communist party move to the sidelines and compete for power and support.

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More is known about Nikita Khrushchev than about many former Soviet leaders, partly because of his own efforts to communicate through speeches, interviews, and memoirs. (A partial version of his memoirs was published in three volumes in 1970, 1974, and 1990, and a complete version was published in Russia in 1999 and will appear in an English translation to be published by Penn State Press.) But even with the opening of party and state archives in 1991, as William Taubman points out in his Foreword, many questions remain unanswered. In this book Sergei tells the story of how the Cold War happened in reality from the Russian side, not from the American side, and this is his most important contribution.

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When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system's gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America's arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev's unique character that, by Gorbachev's own admission, make him 'difficult to understand.' Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

An analysis of Winston Churchill's enigmatic religious convictions, his use of biblical and religious rhetoric, and how his beliefs helped shape his objectives and policies.

A major reassessment of Winston Churchill that examines his lasting influence in politics and culture. Churchill is generally considered one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century, if not the greatest of all, revered for his opposition to appeasement, his defiance in the face of German bombing of England, his political prowess, his deft aphorisms, and his memorable speeches. He became the savior of his country, as prime minister during the most perilous period in British history, World War II, and is now perhaps even more beloved in America than in England. And yet Churchill was also very often in the wrong: he brazenly contradicted his own previous political stances, was a disastrous military strategist, and inspired dislike and distrust through much of his life. Before 1939 he doubted the efficacy of tank and submarine warfare, opposed the bombing of cities only to reverse his position, shamelessly exploited the researchers and ghostwriters who wrote much of the journalism and the books published so lucratively under his name, and had an inordinate fondness for alcohol that once found him drinking whisky before breakfast. When he was appointed to the cabinet for the first time in 1908, a perceptive journalist called him "the most interesting problem of personal speculation in English politics." More than a hundred years later, he remains a source of adulation, as well as misunderstanding. This revelatory new book takes on Churchill in his entirety, separating the man from the myth that he so carefully cultivated, and scrutinizing his legacy on both sides of the Atlantic. In effervescent prose, shot through with sly wit, Geoffrey Wheatcroft illuminates key moments and controversies in Churchill's career-from the tragedy of Gallipoli, to his shocking imperialist and racist attitudes, dealings with Ireland, support for Zionism, and complicated engagement with European integration. Charting the evolution and appropriation of Churchill's reputation through to the present day, Churchill's Shadow colorfully renders the nuance and complexity of this giant of modern politics.

Opening with the full text of the address Churchill delivered in Fulton and concluding with Margaret Thatcher's fiftieth-anniversary address surveying the challenges facing Western democracies in this post-cold war climate, the book brings together essays that reflect on the past fifty years, recognizing Churchill's speech as a carefully conceived herald of the cold war for the Western democracies.

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