Reluctant Cold Warriors
Reluctant Cold Warriors

Author: Vladimir Kontorovich

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-09-02

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0190868139

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Scholars attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the militarization of its economy. But during the Cold War, economic studies of the USSR largely neglected the military sector of the Soviet economy-its dominant and most successful part. This is all the more puzzling in that academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was specifically created to help fight the Cold War. If the rival superpower maintained the peacetime war economy, why did experts fail to tell us when it mattered? Vladimir Kontorovich shows how Western economists came up with strained non-military interpretations of several important aspects of the Soviet economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. Such "civilianization" suggests that the neglect of the military sector was not forced on scholars of the Soviet economy by secrecy; it was their choice. The explanation of this choice in Reluctant Cold Warriors raises many questions about the internal workings of economic Sovietology and its intellectual and political background. Are peripheral academic fields mimicking the agenda of the discipline's mainstream more likely to produce faulty scholarship? Did the search for the essence of socialism distract researchers from the actual Soviet economy? Were economic Sovietologists under political pressure, and if so, in what direction? This book answers these questions in a way that has broad relevance for national security uses of social science today.

Reluctant Cold Warriors
Reluctant Cold Warriors

Author: Vladimir Kontorovich

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-09-02

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0190868147

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Scholars attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union in part to the militarization of its economy. But during the Cold War, economic studies of the USSR largely neglected the military sector of the Soviet economy-its dominant and most successful part. This is all the more puzzling in that academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was specifically created to help fight the Cold War. If the rival superpower maintained the peacetime war economy, why did experts fail to tell us when it mattered? Vladimir Kontorovich shows how Western economists came up with strained non-military interpretations of several important aspects of the Soviet economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. Such "civilianization" suggests that the neglect of the military sector was not forced on scholars of the Soviet economy by secrecy; it was their choice. The explanation of this choice in Reluctant Cold Warriors raises many questions about the internal workings of economic Sovietology and its intellectual and political background. Are peripheral academic fields mimicking the agenda of the discipline's mainstream more likely to produce faulty scholarship? Did the search for the essence of socialism distract researchers from the actual Soviet economy? Were economic Sovietologists under political pressure, and if so, in what direction? This book answers these questions in a way that has broad relevance for national security uses of social science today.

Cold Warriors
Cold Warriors

Author: Suzanne Clark

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780809323029

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Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West returns to familiar cultural forces—the West, anticommunism, and manliness—to show how they combined to suppress dissent and dominate the unruliness of literature in the name of a national identity after World War II. Few realize how much the domination of a “white male” American literary canon was a product not of long history, but of the Cold War. Suzanne Clark describes here how the Cold War excluded women writers on several levels, together with others—African American, Native American, poor, men as well as women—who were ignored in the struggle over white male identity. Clark first shows how defining national/individual/American identity in the Cold War involved a brand new configuration of cultural history. At the same time, it called upon the nostalgia for the old discourses of the West (the national manliness asserted by Theodore Roosevelt) to claim that there was and always had been only one real American identity. By subverting the claims of a national identity, Clark finds, many male writers risked falling outside the boundaries not only of public rhetoric but also of the literary world: men as different from one another as the determinedly masculine Ernest Hemingway and the antiheroic storyteller of the everyday, Bernard Malamud. Equally vocal and contentious, Cold War women writers were unwilling to be silenced, as Clark demonstrates in her discussion of the work of Mari Sandoz and Ursula Le Guin. The book concludes with a discussion of how the silencing of gender, race, and class in Cold War writing maintained its discipline until the eruptions of the sixties. By questioning the identity politics of manliness in the Cold War context of persecution and trial, Clark finds that the involvement of men in identity politics set the stage for our subsequent cultural history.

Warren Robinson Austin: A Reluctant Cold Warrior
Warren Robinson Austin: A Reluctant Cold Warrior

Author: Ronald Colin MacNeil

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Senator Warren Robinson Austin (R-VT) was appointed by President Harry S. Truman to be the US Representative to the United Nations in June 1946. While a member of the US Senate, Austin had been a great advocate for internationalism and the United Nations. His tenure as Representative lasted until January 1953. The growing pains of the new organization were complicated by myriad contentious problems, not the least of which was the dawning of the Cold War. Austin was caught between the Soviet delegation, who were bent on opposing virtually all US initiatives at the UN, and members of the Truman Administration who were adamantly anti-communist/anti-Soviet. This thesis examines the role that anti-communism played in establishing an atmosphere of distrust leading, at least partly, to the Cold War; and Austin's role at the United Nations as regards three representative issues that confronted the international organization during his tenure. The first issue was how the Soviets and the Western Powers disagreed over the question of unanimity of the permanent five members in the Security Council. Next, I will show how irreconcilable differences between the United States and the Soviets thwarted the functioning of the Atomic Energy Commission of the Security Council. Lastly, the Korean War is examined as the first use of a military response by the United Nations to international aggression. Austin dutifully represented the administration at the United Nations, but often expressed his own less confrontational views in meetings, speeches outside the UN, and in letters to friends and loved ones. He held the United Nations to be a positive force for peace, while other members of the administration were stridently anti-Soviet and found the United Nations to be the perfect ideological battleground while acting unilaterally outside the organization. I will show how Austin had an idealistic view of the United Nations and maintained that it was the best vehicle for the maintenance of peace. Also how he was, initially, more even-handed in dealing with the Soviet delegation than his overseers in the Truman administration. He eventually grew weary of Soviet tactics and their alleged aggression in Korea leading him to harden his outlook.

Unwilling Warrior
Unwilling Warrior

Author: Andrea Boeshaar

Publisher: Charisma Media

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1599799855

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Amid the looming spiritual and political crisis in Hawaii, Eden Derrington and Rafe Easton are thrust into a conflict that will forever change their beloved Hawaii and threaten to derail their future marriage.

Reluctant Crusaders
Reluctant Crusaders

Author: Colin Dueck

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2008-03-17

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1400827221

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In Reluctant Crusaders, Colin Dueck examines patterns of change and continuity in American foreign policy strategy by looking at four major turning points: the periods following World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He shows how American cultural assumptions regarding liberal foreign policy goals, together with international pressures, have acted to push and pull U.S. policy in competing directions over time. The result is a book that combines an appreciation for the role of both power and culture in international affairs. The centerpiece of Dueck's book is his discussion of America's "grand strategy"--the identification and promotion of national goals overseas in the face of limited resources and potential resistance. One of the common criticisms of the Bush administration's grand strategy is that it has turned its back on a long-standing tradition of liberal internationalism in foreign affairs. But Dueck argues that these criticisms misinterpret America's liberal internationalist tradition. In reality, Bush's grand strategy since 9/11 has been heavily influenced by traditional American foreign policy assumptions. While liberal internationalists argue that the United States should promote an international system characterized by democratic governments and open markets, Dueck contends, these same internationalists tend to define American interests in broad, expansive, and idealistic terms, without always admitting the necessary costs and risks of such a grand vision. The outcome is often sweeping goals, pursued by disproportionately limited means.

Cold Warriors
Cold Warriors

Author: Duncan White

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2019-08-27

Total Pages: 569

ISBN-13: 0062449826

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In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield. In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.

Cold Warriors
Cold Warriors

Author: Rebecca Levene

Publisher: Abaddon Books

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9781906735364

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At the start of the Cold War, the British secret services formed the Hermetic Division, an agency charged with using supernatural means to defend the nation. Two of the divisions most senior agents are sent on the trail of a corrupt Russian oilgarch.