Jumat, 01 November 2013

Soviet Detente Gave A Cold War Author Many Literary Plots For Decades

By Marsha Klein


Immediately once World War II ended, The Soviet Union distance4d itself from the West. In particular, a deep political and diplomatic gap developed between it and the USA. That divide is the Cold War, a period of tense detente that lasted five decades. Political intrigue, diplomatic drama, international espionage and military posturing tensions marked the period, delivering rich literary material for writers of history and fiction alike. A Cold War author concentrates on the political and ideological maneuverings of those years.

During World War II, Soviet Russia fought fiercely against Nazi Germany as a valued ally with the West. Despite that alliance, the relationship between the Soviet Union and western countries was, even at that time, brittle. The relationship was burdened with distrust born out of ideological disdain. Communism and capitalism are not natural bedfellows.

During the war, Soviet Russia maintained some dialogue with western allies. However, once the war ended, it withdrew. It severely limited its diplomatic dialogue and established a deep and wide ideological gulf with the western countries.

Less than a year after the war ended, Sir Winston Churchill bemoaned Soviet detente in a speech he delivered at Westminster College in Missouri, in March 1946. Churchill described how isolationist Soviet foreign policy had brought down an Iron Curtain across Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, dividing western nations from those in the east.

All the countries to the east of that curtain were subject to a high degree of Soviet influence, if not absolute control. Eastern European nations within the Soviet sphere of influence included Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. These Soviet satellites were widely regarded to be a source of instability for peace.

The Soviets repeatedly rejected economic and diplomatic ties with the USA and other western nations. It remained deliberately distant and difficult to access politically, economically and culturally. Its economy was essentially closed to the much of the outside world. Its reluctance to engage in dialogue with the West created an information vacuum. Lacking data, the West filled that vacuum with uncertainty, doubt and suspicion regarding Soviet military ambitions.

The imagery painted and rhetoric used by Churchill in his address at Westminster College captured the attention of people all around the world. Churchill originally titled his speech Sinews of Peace but the media and scholars almost immediately dubbed it his Iron Curtain speech. It is one of the early signals marking the beginning of the Cold War.

Limited information about conditions in the Soviet Union was available to western analysts. As a result, the Central Intelligence Agency and many other analysts in the West seriously overestimated the economic wealth and military power of Soviet Russia. That serious miscalculation persisted until the 1990s when Soviet President Gorbachev introduced a set of progressive policies known collectively as Perestroika. Those policies fundamentally changed the country. They opened up the economy, dismantled many of the old communist bureaucracies and constraints and introduced market mechanisms to determine prices and guide resource allocation by decision makers. In short, Perestroika marked the beginning of the end of the intense detente that provided so much literary fodder for a Cold War author.




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