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Begin New Search Topic Cold War Political Geography Soviet Union Content Type Working Paper

1. India, The United States, Australia and the Difficult Birth of Bangladesh

Author:
Ric Smith
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Australian Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
Ric Smith has masterfully woven archival material, memories of his own time as a foreign service officer, and conversations with other officers of the then Department of Foreign Affairs to recount the crisis in East Pakistan in 1971 and the difficult birth of Bangladesh. Smith highlights the Cold War incongruities of the crisis, including the Soviet Union’s support for democratic India’s position during the crisis, while the United States supported the military regime in Pakistan. The episode also stands as an example of Canberra diverging from Washington on an issue that was garnering political and media attention in Australia. Australia was able to pursue a policy toward the region that was independent from the United States, accepting early that East Pakistan was “finished” and that there was a need to address an unfolding humanitarian crisis. Smith’s book imparts important lessons about diplomacy for Australia: It is not only possible for Australia’s politicians and diplomats to take independent positions on major international problems, but they are sometimes respected by their allies when they do so.
Topic:
Cold War, Human Rights, Democracy, Geopolitics, and Military Intervention
Political Geography:
Pakistan, United States, Europe, India, Asia, Soviet Union, and Australia

2. Dancing the Cold War: An International Symposium

Author:
Lynn Granola
Publication Date:
06-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
David Caute, in The Dancer Defects, a wide-ranging volume about the Cold War struggle for supremacy in many realms of cultural activity, devotes his one chapter on dance to the high-profile defections that, beginning with Rudolf Nureyev’s “leap to freedom” in 1961, captured so many headlines. But as we will see in the next two days, there was more – far more – to the story than defections and far more even than ballet, although ballet certainly played a big part in Cold War battles for supremacy. Musicals like West Side Story and dances like the Twist belonged as much to the Cold War imaginary as events at the Bolshoi or the old Met that began with the playing of national anthems and even, on occasion, the display of national flags. Movie theaters and television were also battlegrounds, with millions of Americans tuning in to the Ed Sullivan Show for their first glimpse of real Russian dancers. Although the United States and the USSR were the main protagonists of the Cold War, they were not its only ones. The ideological struggle that was said to pit capitalist freedom against communist oppression took place on many fronts and involved allies, clients, and surrogates of those countries in different parts of the world. The two powers dueled at festivals in Africa, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Master teachers and choreographers were dispatched, and students sent to metropoles. Companies large and small embarked on long tours, spreading the gospel of dance along with a dose of ideology, earning foreign currency for their governments or budget relief for themselves, and contributing to the international visibility of the dance boom. Many breathed a sigh of relief when they returned home, but over the years the exposure to other repertories and other training regimes could be felt in the globalization of works, performance styles, and techniques. In the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds, people outside the corridors of power played a huge part. When the Moiseyev Dance Ensemble first toured the United States, the dancers were mobbed when they bought teddy bears for their children; Americans invited them home, believing that people-to-people diplomacy was the way to peace. Dancers were diplomats; in their dresses and pumps they met artists and dignitaries. They performed in opera houses and on improvised stages, giving full-scale performances and lecture- demonstrations – sometimes to people who had never glimpsed ballet or modern dance before, or witnessed performances by a company of African- American virtuosi. At a time before mass air travel, they traversed oceans and continents, encountered strange foods, languages, and customs. They became members of a global dance culture. The cultural Cold War has become a minor cottage industry. But when Naima Prevots published Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War in 1998, it was the first book to examine the phenomenon with respect to dance. Since then a number of scholars have followed in her footsteps, and several will be giving papers on their work at this symposium. Dancing the Cold War had its inception two years ago when the late and sorely missed Catharine Nepomnyashchy and I curated a symposium on Russian movement cultures of the 1920s and 1930s. The event was multidisciplinary in that it prominently featured both visual iconography and film. This time, in addition to film, photographs, and memorabilia, we will be hearing from dancers from ten US companies who took part in multiple Cold War tours, as well as Soviet-trained artists who have pursued post-Cold War careers outside Russia. We are also fortunate in being able to share Cold War images from the remarkable collection of Robert Greskovic and to show a film of Balanchine’s Western Symphony, specially loaned to us by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which was made in Paris in 1956 with Cold War dollars. Tonight we begin with another Cold War film, Plisetskaya Dances, about the legendary Bolshoi ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya. It was made in 1964 by Moscow’s Central Documentary Film Studio and introduces us to the star who blazed so brightly over the international dance firmament. In Moscow she danced Swan Lake for innumerable foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro (shown on the symposium program and poster after a performance). Abroad she danced it to ecstatic crowds. We know from her memoir, I, Maya Plisetskaya, that her path was not easy. Her father was killed in the late 1930s, and she danced her first Dying Swan (or something that approximated it) at an outdoor concert in the city of Chimkent before an audience of political exiles, including her mother. She was denied permission to take part in the Bolshoi’s 1956 tour of London because one of her father’s brothers had settled in New York, had children, and grown prosperous. None of this appears in the film, of course. What you see instead is the magnificent Bolshoi ballerina, with her outsized temperament and splendid jumps, a dancer who had scaled the heights of international fame but remained at heart deeply Russian.
Topic:
Cold War, Arts, Culture, and Dance
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, Cuba, and North America

3. U.S. Strategic Interests in the Arctic: An Assessment of Current Challenges and New Opportunities for Cooperation

Author:
Heather Conley and Jamie Kraut
Publication Date:
04-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
During the height of the Cold War, the Arctic region was considered a geostrategic and geopolitical playground for the United States and the Soviet Union, as strategic bombers and nuclear submarines crossed over and raced below the polar cap. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Arctic region significantly diminished in strategic importance to the United States. Twenty years later, senior U.S. military and diplomatic officials have turned their attention once again to the Arctic region but in a far different way than during the Cold War.
Topic:
Cold War
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

4. Managing the Challenge of Russian Energy Policies

Author:
Keith C. Smith
Publication Date:
12-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the leaders of Russia, including then-President Boris Yeltsin, searched for new methods of continuing to exert influence over the former Soviet-controlled region. The Kremlin at first used an energy blockade to the Baltic States in 1990 in an attempt to prevent their breakaway from the Soviet Union. After that failed, it then focused on the growing opposition in the former republics of the Soviet Union and in East Central Europe to its foreign and economic policies, and in particular on demands that Russian military forces withdraw from the newly independent states. The Kremlin leadership quickly recognized that short of military action, its major foreign policy tool was the denial or threat of denial of access to Russia's vast oil and gas resources. The economies of East European and Central Asian countries, and especially their rail and pipeline infrastructures, had been hardwired by Soviet leaders to assure total dependency on Moscow for their raw materials, including oil, gas, coal, and nuclear fuel.
Topic:
Cold War, Economics, Emerging Markets, Energy Policy, and Oil
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Central Asia, and Soviet Union

5. Peace support operations: The past and the future. Papers of the Ankara Seminar

Author:
Ritske Bloemendaal(ed.) and Kars de Bruijne(ed.)
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Security Studies
Abstract:
The global security situation has changed fundamentally since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. A global war between superpowers has become less likely and new security concerns have appeared on the agenda. Smaller high- and low-intensity conflicts have erupted, largely with ethnic and religious origins, and occurring overwhelmingly within, rather than between, countries. Intrastate conflict accounts for 95% of current conflicts worldwide. As a result, mechanisms to cope with these new challenges have emerged. Methods of conflict prevention, conflict management and post-conflict programmes like Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) and Security System Reform (SSR) have gained importance.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Cold War, Peace Studies, United Nations, and War
Political Geography:
Soviet Union

6. Deterring State Sponsorship of Nuclear Terrorism

Author:
Michael Levi
Publication Date:
09-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The basis of nuclear doctrine during the Cold War was deterrence. Nuclear powers were deterred from attacking each other by the fear of retaliation. Today, much of the concern over possible nuclear attack comes in the context of rogue states and terrorism. And since only states are known to possess nuclear weapons, an important question is how to deter them from letting terrorists acquire a device, whether through an authorized transfer or a security breach. Michael A. Levi analyzes this aspect of deterrence in the post–Cold War world, as well as what to do if deterrence breaks down. He suggests how to discourage states from giving weapons or nuclear materials to terrorists and how to encourage states to bolster security against any accidental transfer. The report also discusses the role of nuclear attribution—the science of identifying the origin of nuclear materials—in deterring transfers, an essential link in assigning responsibility to governments for transfers of nuclear materials.
Topic:
Conflict Prevention, Security, Cold War, Nuclear Weapons, and Nuclear Power
Political Geography:
United States and Soviet Union

7. Security Sector Reform in the Southern Caucasus

Author:
Garry Johnson
Publication Date:
02-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Austrian National Defence Academy
Abstract:
The dissolution of the Soviet Union left its former nations and those of the Warsaw Pact with a mammoth task of reform and restructuring to be carried out in all the political, social and economic spheres of national life. The fundamental challenge facing these countries was simple: could they modernise all the relevant aspects of their society well enough, and quickly enough, to claim a space in the successful community of the Western nations which had emerged strengthened from the Cold War while the window of integration opportunity remained open?
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, and Cold War
Political Geography:
United States, Central Asia, and Soviet Union

8. Baltic History and Soviet Empire: Recovering the Past in Soviet and Russian Historical Discourse

Author:
Thomas Sherlock
Publication Date:
08-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Department of Social Sciences at West Point, United States Military Academy
Abstract:
This paper is a modest effort to sketch the transformation of public memory in conditions of political transition. Specifically, it examines the recovery and interpretation of the Baltic past in Soviet and post-Soviet discourse. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part examines the desacralization of the central myths that legitimated the Soviet empire and its rule over the Baltic nationalities. The debate on Baltic history during perestroika was part of a larger - and increasingly destructive -- examination of Soviet history that shocked society with a flood of negative revelations about the past, forcing political and academic authorities to cancel secondary school exams and discard existing textbooks as virtually useless. This struggle over how to interpret the Soviet past eventually weakened the normative supports of the Soviet state, contributing to its collapse in 1991.
Topic:
Cold War and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

9. U.S. Policy Toward the Former Yugoslavia

Author:
Steven E. Meyer
Publication Date:
08-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Wilson Center
Abstract:
As long as the Cold War framed the international arena, relations between the United States and Yugoslavia were—for the most part—fairly clear and predictable. Both sides played their assigned roles well in the larger East-West drama. For the U.S., Yugoslavia—after Tito and Stalin split in 1948—was the useful, even reliable, strategically-placed, communist antagonist to the Soviet Union. Certainly, Washington complained at times about Yugoslavia's preference for nonalignment and lamented the fact that it was not part of the Western alliance. The fact that Yugoslavia was indeed a communist state that Moscow could not control, however, more than compensated for these “short comings.” As a reward, the U.S. courted Tito, provided economic aid, and paid virtually no attention to how he ran the country—even his brutal rise to power after World War II was of little consequence.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, Cold War, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, Washington, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia

10. The United States and Russia in Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran

Author:
Fiona Hill
Publication Date:
08-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
Before 1991, the states of Central Asia were marginal backwaters, republics of the Soviet Union that played no major role in the Cold War relationship between the USSR and the United States, or in the Soviet Union's relationship with the principal regional powers of Turkey, Iran, and China. But, in the 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union coincided with the re-discovery of the energy resources of the Caspian Sea, attracting a range of international oil companies including American majors to the region. Eventually, the Caspian Basin became a point of tension in U.S.-Russian relations. In addition, Central Asia emerged as a zone of conflict. Violent clashes erupted between ethnic groups in the region's Ferghana Valley. Civil war in Tajikistan, in 1992-1997, became entangled with war in Afghanistan. Faltering political and economic reforms, and mounting social problems provided a fertile ground for the germination of radical groups, the infiltration of foreign Islamic networks, and the spawning of militant organizations like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU first sought to overthrow the government of President Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, later espoused greater ambitions for the creation of an Islamic caliphate (state) across Central Asia, and eventually joined forces with the Taliban in Afghanistan. With the events of September 11, 2001 and their roots in the terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, Central Asia came to the forefront of U.S. attention.
Topic:
Cold War and Religion
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, United States, China, Europe, Iran, Central Asia, Turkey, Asia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Taliban, and Soviet Union