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The role of the International Olympic Aide Commission (IOAC) in the political life of countries in Africa and Asia during the 1950s and 1960s is examined. The IOAC was an organization that was founded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This article addresses how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) saw the decolonization process and the Cold War as related to the USSR's ability to expand its influence beyond its borders. According to the article, the USSR believed that their Olympic activities helped to counter American, British and French foreign policy. The IOAC was a partner in the aid policy of the USSR during this period, according to some historians.

The article presents information on the Cold War consensus. The consensus refers to public opinion towards the Soviet Union which was constructed between 1946 and 1950 in the U.S. The propositions proposed reflected on the Soviet Union and the notion that the Soviets who were out of world domination could only be restrained through superior Western military power. It discusses how the consensus died down and how and why it revived again. Information on how foreign policy makers reacted and argued towards the revival of the consensus is presented.

The Black Sea Basin has seen a dramatic change both in geographical extent and systemic sense after the Cold War. Completion of the Cold War induced the collapse of the political substructure which is fictionalised by the USSR for shaping the relations between the countries of the basin. Articulation of the basin into the competition that obtains within the scope of the international system has created conflict oriented scenery, when it's converged with the historical problems, social tension and political challenges that the countries of the basin had already interiorised. This study will probe the conflictual disposition of the Black Sea Basin within the context of the theory of Securitization, which based on the theory of social constructivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich's trip to the U.S. in 1949 and his participation in the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. It examines the purposes of Shostakovich's trip, his anxiety concerning the trip, and the attitude of creative artists from Communist countries during the Cold War. The article attempts to utilize Shostakovich's experiences to examine the contradictions between his official role at the conference and his private thoughts about the conference and relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The article discusses the history of diplomatic relations between Spain and the Soviet Union, focusing especially on the period from 1978 to 1986 when Yuri Dubinin served as Russian ambassador to Spain. It discusses Spain's democratization after the death of dictator Francisco Franco and the subsequent installation of King Juan Carlos I under a constitutional monarchy. Some of the subjects considered include commercial treaties and economic cooperation between the countries, the Cold War, and the 1984 visit of state by the Spanish king to the Soviet Union.

The article explores how the development of the Soviet bloc, the relationship between China and the Soviet Union and Cold War was shaped by the Soviet Union's post World War II desire to develop a nuclear bomb. It examines industrial development in the territories gained by the Soviet Union following the war, including defense-related industries in the German zone and the mining of uranium in Czechoslovakia. The article discusses collaboration among members of the socialist bloc during the 1950s and explores how this period influenced the Sino-Soviet relationship.

The article reviews the state of scholarly research on Soviet society of the Cold War period 1947-1991. Areas examined include foreign travel by Soviet citizens, participation in international congresses, international tours undertaken by Soviet artists, transnational student exchanges, and the social impact of such international contacts. The article examines several post-Soviet era works on the Cold War, publications on Soviet relations with regions of the Third World, and internal records of social development within the context of what such social research is available and where gaps may still exist.

The article focuses on how the Korean War influences contemporary international relations between Russia, the United States, and North Korea. It considers the influence of the World War II victories of the U.S. and Soviet Union upon the countries' respective economies and international political influence. Other subjects considered include the Cold War and nuclear proliferation; Soviet, Chinese, and American military and diplomatic relations within Asia; and military escalation. The author considers the effect of the Korean War on the international balance of power.

The Editors of the journal Cold War History have the pleasure to present this paper as the winner of the Best Paper Award at the last Graduate Conference on the Cold War, jointly organised every year by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the George Washington University, Washington DC, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, London. It is not often that a paper, as was the case with this one, won unanimous endorsement from prominent Cold War scholars from all three institutions, present at the Conference. The last Conference was organised in April 2009, at LSE, in London and the host of the next one to be held on 22-24 April 2010 will be the George Washington University. By continuing with the practice we inaugurated last year, we wish to underline our commitment to promoting and encouraging new and substantive research of the Cold War by young scholars. As the colonial system collapsed quicker than anticipated in the post-Second World War period, the Soviet Union found itself unprepared, and it hurriedly tried to build the institutions necessary to conduct an active foreign, economic and military policy in the newly emerging states. The development of the Sino-Soviet split triggered a Chinese challenge to this Soviet push for influence, with Beijing portraying the USSR as another white, imperialist power that valued relations with the West over the cause of national liberation. Moscow was consequently forced to adapt its policy, particularly by taking a more militant approach, in order to neutralise the Chinese threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting out to assess Soviet policy toward Syria and Israel in the two years that preceded the Six Day War, this article argues that the Soviets were trying to implement a policy of detente in the Middle East. Therefore, they were wary of war between Israel and Syria and did their best, albeit clumsily at times, to prevent it from erupting. Their policy moved in cross-purposes to Syrian needs and little by little they lost control over their ally. This story should be read against the backdrop of the rebellion of radical regimes in the Third World against Soviet detente policy, thus emphasizing the ability of actors in the periphery of the Cold War to undermine superpower designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the origins and early history of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), focusing on the Cold War political context of its formation and major paradigms in its first years. The primary goals of the IFIP are discussed, particularly its efforts to facilitate cooperation between Eastern and Western nations in computer science research. The challenges which the IFIP faced in reconciling and separating geopolitics from scientific computing are addressed during several episodes of tension and negotiation between the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union.

Though now seen as a key turning point in the Cold War, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act provoked considerable opposition in the United States. The principal line of criticism was that the United States had given away too much in the negotiations and had required little of the Soviets. The Helsinki Final Act initially was unpopular domestically with Eastern European ethnic groups as well as members of Congress due to concerns about its implications for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe. At the root of many of these complaints was a larger critique of United States President Gerald Ford's policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Understanding the sources of opposition to the Helsinki Final Act in the United States illuminates the potential conflict between foreign policy formulation and domestic politics, and it reflects the Ford administration's inability to explain his support for the agreement to the American public. Furthermore, the controversy engendered by the Helsinki Final Act illustrates how contentious Cold War politics remained even in an era of supposed détente with the Soviet Union and demonstrates the extent to which the pact's long-term benefits were unforeseen by participants at the time. The Ford administration was never able to counter condemnation of the Helsinki Final Act sufficiently, enhancing existing skepticism about his leadership and policy toward the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will add an important detail to our knowledge of Wroe Alderson's life, namely his journey to Russia at the height of the cold war and the subsequent intelligence gathering efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) following Alderson's return from Russia in 1955. It does this by situating the text (AFSC 1956) that resulted from the journey in its historical context, connecting the trip to Russia with the Quaker value system that motivated the expedition. These values are, in turn, related to the files of the FBI via a brief review of the relevant volumes of FBI files that referred to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)--the group that Alderson traveled to Russia with. Using the Quaker publication coauthored by Alderson that details the journey to Russia, this article reconstructs the arguments found in that text. Finally, the author examines why Alderson attracted the attention of the FBI. His characteristic willingness to critique the assertions of a party of Soviet individuals with whom he met, as well as support for Alderson from an unknown Quaker associated with the FBI, would ensure that his credentials as an American patriot were never in danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of the Cold War have been the subject of numerous debates among international historians. On different occasions, historians have looked at International Relations Theory for insights and concepts to help understanding why and how the Cold War originated. While the postrevisionist paradigm was inspired by realism, for the last decade and a half, running parallel with broader theoretical developments in IR, large parts of the debate on the origins of the Cold War have focused on the role of ideas, ideology, and culture. However, the imported innovations had the effect of fragmenting our theoretical understanding of the origins of the Cold War, rather than offering a workable, coherent synthesis. Moreover, these accounts do not always sufficiently address problems of agency and causality. The debate on the origins of the Cold War, therefore, is in need of coherent theoretical frameworks which are capable of remedying these problems. This article argues that a possible way of generating such a framework is taking a closer look at hermeneutics and constructivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the collapse of former Soviet Union, while bipolar international system lost its validity, intellectual debate about possible structure of new international system emerged. At these debates, scholars stressed the US's absolute superiority, lack of capability of other great powers that possibly would balance existing US power and establishment of unipolar international system under the US hegemony. But in the course of time the concerns about the system moved from unipolarity to multipolarity, because the 2003 Iraqi operation has weakened the US's economic and military power capabilities. Separately Russia, China, and the European Union do not fulfill all requirements of being a great power mentioned by the structural realism, such as having great military, economic and political capabilities, pursuing global policies, and ability of changing attitudes of their allies. While the United States still supports unipolar structure, Russia, China and the European Union prefer to see establishment of multipolar one. At the end it is possible to see that in the post - Cold era a multipolar structure with several regional centers will be formed and the relations among the actors will be loose rather than tight ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many important ways the history of modern international relations (IR) begins at the point when the international order collapses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, the withering of communism in Central and Eastern Europe followed by the break–up of the USSR two years later, posed what many in the field saw then (and continue to regard now) as a series of problems to which the hitherto dominant paradigm in IR—realism—had no ready or easy answers. This article neither seeks to defend nor criticize realism. Rather it shifts the debate about the end of the cold war—and why most experts failed to anticipate it—away from the field of IR to the more specific study undertaken in the West of the Soviet system. It goes on to argue that the source of so much academic embarrassment may be better explained not through a rehearsal of realism's supposed flaws as an international theory, but rather through a detailed examination of the different ways that different writers understood, or more precisely failed to understand, the operation of the Soviet system itself. The conclusion reached is that few analysts could have predicted what happened between 1989 and 1991. In fact, as the article seeks to show, their often complicated and diverse theories about the USSR as the living alternative to market capitalism led most of them (with one or two notable exceptions) to the conclusion that whatever problems faced the Soviet Union as a power in the 1980s, the system as such was likely to endure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on theories of international relations (IR) and comparative politics, this article explains why the cold war ended in 1989 rather than 1953. Numerous scholars have used IR theory to discuss the end of the cold war, but most of the circumstances they highlight were also present in the spring of 1953, right after the death of Joseph Stalin. This article presents three broad theoretical approaches that deal with the connection between domestic politics and international relations, and it then shows how these approaches can help us understand the similarities and differences between 1953 and 1989. In particular, the article emphasises the importance of time. In the spring of 1953, the window of opportunity was very brief—only a few months, which was insufficient for the two main cold war antagonists to overcome their deeply entrenched suspicions and make far-reaching adjustments in their policies. In the latter half of the 1980s, by contrast, the sweeping reorientation of east–west relations occurred over several years, giving policy-makers on both sides sufficient leeway to adapt and to ‘learn’ new ways of interacting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effects of a global financial and economic crisis in 2009 on international relations. The author claims that the financial crisis has officially put an end to the Cold War by causing the Russian people to abandon the Soviet Union's ideology that justified the country's involvement in starting a worldwide revolution. The author details the confrontational structure of international relations in the Cold War period, which he says assured European civilization with a place in global politics.

This article examines the role of the Soviet Union in the establishment and execution of the Nuremberg Trials. The author argues that traditional narratives of the episode ignore the role of the Soviet Union. She contends that Nuremberg was a key moment of pre-Cold War tension between the Soviets and the West. Although, the United States proved far more adept at shaping the trials for propaganda purposes, the Soviet Union learned important lessons that shaped its worldview and led to decades of tensions.

USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea on 23 January 1968. U.S. government officials believed at the time that the incident was part of an escalating series of harassments related to global issues. However, North Vietnam and the Soviet Union had nothing to do the incident. Rather, the Cultural Revolution in China and the Sino-Soviet split externally, and economic underachievement and unstable 'Juche' practices domestically, represented deadly serious threats to the Kim Ill-sung regime and the existence of North Korea itself. The background and purpose of North Korea's military adventurism was therefore to overcome all challenges to North Korea. The Pueblo was a target of opportunity to achieve their purpose. Initially American responses to the incident took dual courses of action, a show of force without actually engaging in military conflict and a diplomatic engagement with the UN, the USSR, and other related nations. But those American efforts ended in failure to release the vessel and its crew, primarily due to uncertainty as to the ship's position before the incident. Therefore American officials had to accept North Korea's proposal to private meetings between the North Korea and the US, while controlling South Korea's retaliatory actions with regard to the North Korea, and to beg for Soviet cooperation to return the ship and its crew through its influence on North Korea. The American government had to accept the limitations on its capacity to control the situation. Therefore the crucial factor was the behavior among the relevant nations, especially the US and the USSR They appeared to act in concert was extraordinary. That was basically a representation of the logic of the Cold War system. Therefore, the Pueblo crisis needs to be re-evaluated in terms of another possible conception of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the conflict that emerged regarding the so-called US-USSR “cultural contacts” during the Cold War within the exile community of American Latvians. While most of the American political and cultural elites saw cultural exchanges with the Soviets as beneficial, the reactions of the émigrés were much more controversial and polarizing. This study reveals the unrecognized side of the Cold War politics as experienced by the refugee groups. The study employs American, Latvian and Soviet publications, memoirs, interviews and archival materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not unusual to credit certain individuals with having put and end to the Cold War. This essay discusses some of the most important of these people, focusing on their role in the Polish crisis of 1980?82: Mikhail Gorbachev, John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Lane Kirkland. The author arrives at the conclusion that the question of the extent to which individuals can be held responsible for the victory over the Soviet Union is wrong, because it neglects underlying processes, such as the economic crisis in the Eastern Bloc and East?West contacts established during the d?tente of the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author examines the cultural element contained in the Cold War during the administration of U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower. The author notes that the American racial tensions and violence that took place during the Eisenhower years were exploited for anti-U.S. propaganda by the Soviet Union and its communist allies. In order to counter this and to boost America's prestige and popularity in non-aligned nations the U.S. government employed well-known jazz musicians who toured internationally as cultural ambassadors.

During the 1950s, many observers regarded the expansion of Soviet oil exports as a serious threat to Western political and economic interests. Finland was the first non-communist European country that started to buy Soviet oil on a large scale. This made the country vulnerable to Soviet political pressure. An examination of the Finnish case indicates that Anglo-American governments adopted a much more complex attitude towards the emergence of the Soviet Union as an exporter of oil than the Cold War rhetoric would suggest. The US and British governments were not automatically willing to support their oil companies or to try to block Soviet oil exports. Instead of seeing Soviet oil exports to Finland simply as a threat to Western interests, the Foreign Office and the State Department considered the precise implications that Finnish purchases of Soviet oil would have on Western strategic interests on a case-by-case basis. Many other government departments were more interested in promoting their own departmental interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues, on the basis of a close examination of archival sources (including Politburo minutes) and the numerous memoirs of leading Soviet political actors, that an interdependent mixture of new leadership, new ideas, and long-standing institutional power in the Soviet Union was primarily responsible for the Cold War ending when it did. While acknowledging that the ‘Reagan factor’ was important in some ways, he rejects the view that the Reagan administration played the decisively important role in ending the Cold War, and he contests various arguments which have been advanced in the attempt to sustain a Realist interpretation of its ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the content and provenance of the Soviet Information Bureau Photograph Collection of Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. It is a valuable primary source for studying everyday life in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War (1947-1949). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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El proceso que culminó con la desaparición de la URSS estuvo muy influenciado por la incapacidad de ésta de mantener el nivel tecnológico alcanzado por Estados Unidos en la carrera de armamentos. Bajo las circunstancias de deterioro del poder ruso que se han venido produciendo desde 1991 y dada la precariedad que afecta a sus fuerzas armadas, el armamento nuclear se ha convertido en el elemento central de la estrategia de seguridad nacional de la Federación Rusa. En el presente artículo se exponen, en primer lugar, las causas que han llevado a dicho imperativo nuclear en la estrategia de seguridad de Rusia; y, en segundo lugar, se presenta la consecuencia más relevante, y preocupante, que dicha dependencia ha generado como es la revisión a ia baja del umbral necesario para el uso de las armas nucleares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the history of espionage during the Cold War period between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Details of the counterspies Venona Project of the U.S.; Efforts of scholars to access the KGB telegrams.

Addresses the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War. Correlation of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union with ideology; Description of the end of Cold War; Factors that contribute to the end of Cold War.

Ponders on the role of ideas in bringing about the change in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union in the late 1980's. Etymology of ideas; Influence of ideas on policy change; Analysis of the boundary between the material and the ideational explanation of the end of the Cold War.

The surprising end of the Cold War has led to a debate within international relations (IR) theory. Constructivists have argued that the end of the Cold War is best explained in terms of ideas and agency—specifically Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's new thinking. A few realists have countered that Soviet material decline was “endogenous” to the new ideas. Can these two theoretical perspectives be reconciled with respect to this case? They can be partially integrated with a path-dependent strategy that places an emphasis on “institutions.” Nevertheless, explaining the end of the Cold War largely requires a theory of Soviet foreign policy and its relation to the state. As a former or ossified revolutionary state, Soviet foreign policy for at least several years was largely based on the principle of externalization: outside threats were used to rationalize radical centralization, repression, and the dominance of the Party. In using the USSR's institutionalized legacy as a revolutionary state, Gorbachev acted as a counterrevolutionary and reversed this process with his revolution in foreign policy. In creating a new peaceful international order, he sought—through the “second image reversed”—to promote radical decentralization, liberalization, and the emergence of a new coalition. The case examines how Gorbachev's domestic goals drove his foreign policy from 1985 to 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article debates over the Cold War. It is important to ascertain when the Cold War ended because such a determination can help to indicate what the Cold War was all about. Its demise is commonly associated with the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in late 1989 or with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of Communism in 1991. However, judging from the public rhetoric and actions of important observers and key international actors at the time, the Cold War essentially ended in the spring of 1989, well before these momentous events took place. If this proposition is true, it suggests that the Cold War was principally about an ideological conflict in which the West saw the Soviet Union as committed to a threateningly expansionary ideology.

Presents formerly secret Communist Party of the Soviet Union documents from the holdings of the Russian State Archive in social and political history. Way in which the documents are considered peculiar; Motive for the creation of a council on foreign policy propaganda chaired by Andrei Zhdanov; Position of the Soviet Union on foreign-policy propaganda issues during the early Cold War.

The Cold War (1947-1989/92) was not a war in the proper sense of the term, but it could have turned into a hot war at several instances. Whereas traditional wars were limited with respect to their aims and their military potentials, world politics experienced a dramatic totalization of both aims and the destructiveness of weapons within the deterrence constellation. The mutual threat of annihilation, however, paralyzed foreign policy with the consequence of self-deterrence. To escape the dilemma of self-deterrence a continuous search for graduated and limited nuclear war scenarios and weapon potentials, respectively, could be observed throughout the Cold War period. The escape from self-deterrence equaled a process of pathological learning which, due to its size and diversification, engendered a tremendous impetus of its own. This growth process became to a large extent autistic, and it came to an end by the exit of the Soviet Union from this constellation. To analyze the Cold War period and by implication the deterrence constellation, retrospectively, may convey some deeper insights into less conspicuous constellations of the security dilemma characterizing international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US and British intelligence assessments regarding the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War contained substantial differences despite the remarkable level of cooperation and information sharing that existed between the respective services in the period. Using NSC-68 as a "pivot", this article examines these discrepancies as well as those similarities that did exist, considering their significance and evolution in an effort to understand what factors drove and shaped intelligence analysis on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the economic and social condition in the U.S. after the end of the Second World War. It mentions that after the end of the war, U.S. emerged with a very strong and powerful position in the world with plenty of material and natural resources and labor force and the citizens were provided with stable environment for growth and the developing nuclear power. It also mentions about the Cold war between the U.S. and Soviet Union and also discusses the various factors which started the Cold War.

The article discusses the consequences of end of the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union. It mentions that with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and Great Britain emerged as the most powerful countries in the world with U.S. being far ahead than any other due to the establishment of powerful military, founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and changing foreign policy. It further mentions that Soviet Union on the other hand struggled to develop a new economic direction with reduced focus on heavy and military-related industry after the death of its leader Joseph Stalin.