eBook PDF Download Digital Library
Author: Gertrude Enderle-Burcel
Publisher: Wydawnictwo UJ
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 310
ISBN-13: 832338066X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume explores relations between socialist planned economies of Central and East European countries and capitalist market economies of neutral states in Europe dyring the Cold War. It focuses on the significant role of neutral countries as path-breakers in building East-West contacts.
Author: Bruce L. Brager
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 173
ISBN-13: 0791078329
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Visiting Central Europe, in 1962, a visitor would not see a real "Iron Curtain." There was no huge piece of grim drapery splitting Europe between Communist dictatorships and democracies. The Iron Curtain represented the Central European part of the Cold War, the generally peaceful, but highly dangerous, forty-year competition between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. The Iron Curtain symbolically represented the attempt to permanently, artificially, and arbitrarily split one part of Central Europe from the other. Although there was no real iron curtain, there was lots of steel in the form of barbed wire, ground radar, watchtowers, and machine guns in the hands of troops willing to use them. The boundary between democracy and totalitarianism was clear. This book tells the story of the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War it so vividly represented, from the start of World War II to its end with the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Book jacket.
Author: Central Intelligence Agency
Publisher: Central Intelligence Agency
Published: 2014-05-16
Total Pages: 56
ISBN-13: 9780160899720
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the mid-1950s the US faced the first real challenge since World War II to its strategic superiority over any nation on earth. The attempt to collect intelligence on the Soviets began with an initial period of poor collection capabilities and consequent limited analysis. With few well-placed human sources inside the Soviet Union, it was only with the CIA's development of, what can only be called, timely technological wizardry--the U-2 aircraft and Corona Satellite reconnaissance program--that breakthroughs occurred in gaining valuable, game-changing intelligence. Coupled with the innovative use of aerial and satellite photography and other technical collection programs, the efforts began to produce solid, national intelligence. (from the CIA website at www.cia.gov )
Author: Central Intelligence Agency
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2019-03-13
Total Pages: 60
ISBN-13: 9781090422910
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the mid-1950s the US faced the first real challenge since World War II to its strategic superiority over any nation on earth. First it seemed that the Soviet Union was challenging us by producing and deploying a large strategic bomber force. Then, even as that perception was disproved, it became evident that the Soviets were placing their major effort toward developing strategic missiles against which, once launched, there was no defense. As the Eisenhower Administration strove to formulate policy to address the new circumstances, the Intelligence Community provided no clear picture of the scale, rate of production or breadth of deployment of Soviet missiles. The perceived missile gap that ensued was based on a comparison between US ICBM strength as then programmed, and reasonable, although erroneous estimates of prospective Soviet ICBM strength that were generally accepted by responsible officials. The administration increasingly turned to the CIA with assignments to collect, produce, and disseminate missile intelligence to policymakers. It was a challenging mission that put CIA up against a Soviet Union, a country from which little information, clues, secrets, or whispers emanated, and any that did might only be intended to deceive. The goal was not only to guess what was behind the curtain, but also to find all ways possible to approximate with ever greater certainty. These papers provide an enhanced analysis by and for scholars interested in that important, historic controversy. On the way to the solution, the process became overshadowed and sidelined by competing political, corporate, diplomatic, technological, and intelligence goals, providing us today with a fascinating template that is not far afield of the complexities facing modem intelligence missions and acts.
Author: Friederike Kind-Kovács
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2014-11-01
Total Pages: 520
ISBN-13: 9633860237
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division. It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history . Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.
Author: Fraser J. Harbutt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1988-10-13
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 0195363779
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →It was forty-two years ago that Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain." This speech, according to Fraser Harbutt, set forth the basic Western ideology of the coming East-West struggle. It was also a calculated move within, and a dramatic public definition of, the Truman administration's concurrent turn from accommodation to confrontation with the Soviet Union. It provoked a response from Stalin that goes far to explain the advent of the Cold War a few weeks later. This book is at once a fascinating biography of Winston Churchill as the leading protagonist of an Anglo-American political and military front against the Soviet Union and a penetrating re-examination of diplomatic relations between the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. in the postwar years. Pointing out the Americocentric bias in most histories of this period, Harbutt shows that the Europeans played a more significant part in precipitating the Cold War than most people realize. He stresses that the same pattern of events that earlier led America belatedly into two world wars, namely the initial separation and then the sudden coming together of the European and American political arenas, appeared here as well. From the combination of biographical and structural approaches, a new historical landscape emerges. The United States appears at times to be the rather passive object of competing Soviet and British maneuvers. The turning point came with the crisis of early 1946, which here receives its fullest analysis to date, when the Truman administration in a systematic but carefully veiled and still widely misunderstood reorientation of policy (in which Churchill figured prominently) led the Soviet Union into the political confrontation that brought on the Cold War.
Author: Yuliya Komska
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-02-02
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 022615422X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Iron Curtain did not exist—at least not as we usually imagine it. Rather than a stark, unbroken line dividing East and West in Cold War Europe, the Iron Curtain was instead made up of distinct landscapes, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. This book traces a genealogy of one such landscape—the woods between Czechoslovakia and West Germany—to debunk our misconceptions about the iconic partition. Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europe’s oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two long-standing German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the century’s most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germany’s quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtain’s better-known segments. Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.
Author: Poul Villaume
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 8763525887
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cold War history research of the recent years suggests that the East-West detente process of the 1970s was a more significant element than previously believed in understanding and explaining the processes, on both sides of the East-West divide, which led to the peaceful end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. This anthology is a contribution to this research. The dozen articles elucidate the European detente process from grass-root - as well as diplomatic - levels, including the Helsinki Conference Final Act of 1975 on respect of human rights and human contacts across the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. The articles are based on recently opened state and private archives from West and East Europe, as well as the US. They are written by a mix of internationally distinguished senior scholars and younger promising researchers from the US, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, and Denmark.
