Perforating the Iron Curtain

Perforating the Iron Curtain
Author: Poul Villaume
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 8763525887
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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.

The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain
Author: Bruce L. Brager
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2004
Genre: Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961-1989
ISBN: 0791078329
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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.

The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain
Author: Fraser J. Harbutt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 1988-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195363779
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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.

Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain
Author: Patrick Wright
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199239681
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'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . .' With these words Winston Churchill famously warned the world in a now legendary speech given in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. Launched as an evocative metaphor, the 'Iron Curtain' quickly became a brutal reality in the Cold War between Capitalist West and Communist East. Not surprisingly, for many years, people on both sides of the division have assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain began with Churchill's 1946 speech.In this fascinating investigation, Patrick Wright shows that this was decidedly not the case. Starting with its original use to describe an anti-fire device fitted into theatres, Iron Curtain tells the story of how the term evolved into such a powerful metaphor and the myriad ways in which it shapedthe world for decades before the onset of the Cold War. Along the way, it offers fascinating perspectives on a rich array of historical characters and developments, from the lofty aspirations and disappointed fate of early twentieth century internationalists, through the topsy-turvy experiences of the first travellers to Soviet Russia, to thetheatricalization of modern politics and international relations. And, as Wright poignantly suggests, the term captures a particular way of thinking about the world that long pre-dates the Cold War - and did not disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain

Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain
Author: Jim Willis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2013-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0313397635
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This compelling book describes how everyday people courageously survived under repressive Communist regimes until the voices and actions of rebellious individuals resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. Part of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain enables today's generations to understand what it was like for those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, particularly the period from 1961 to 1989, the era during which these people-East Germans in particular-lived in the imposing shadow of the Berlin Wall. An introductory chapter discusses the Russian Revolution, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the Socialist state, clarifying the reasons for the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many historical anecdotes bring these past experiences to life, covering all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, including separation of families and the effects on family life, diet, rationing, media, clothing and trends, strict travel restrictions, defection attempts, and the evolving political climate. The final chapter describes Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the slow assimilation of East into West, and examines Europe after Communism.

Retracing the Iron Curtain: A 3,000-Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War

Retracing the Iron Curtain: A 3,000-Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War
Author: Timothy Phillips
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1615199659
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Across 3,000 miles and over eight decades, this epic new people’s history of the Cold War makes eye-opening sense of a defining 20th-century conflict—and how it continues to shape our world today. Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of World War Two, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. It divided Europe from north to south for a staggering forty-five years. Crossing it in either direction was always a political act; in many cases, it was a crime to even talk about doing so. New generations have grown up since these borders came down, freed from the restrictions of the Cold War era. But what has the Iron Curtain left in its wake? Timothy Phillips travels its full 3,000-mile route—from inside the Arctic Circle to where Armenia meets Azerbaijan and Turkey—to craft this epic new people’s history of a defining 2oth-century conflict. Here, in the borderlands where a powerful clash of civilizations took form in concrete and barbed wire, he uncovers the remarkable stories of everyday people forever imprinted by life in the Curtain’s long shadow. Some look back on the era with nostalgia, even affection, while others despise it, unable to forgive the decades of hardship their families and nations endured. A director recalls the astonishing night his movie premiered in East Germany—November 9, 1989, the very night the Berlin Wall fell. And a railroad worker recounts the 1951 hijacking of a passenger train from Czechoslovakia that breached the Curtain, granting those aboard immediate asylum in the West. These narratives, by turns harrowing and heartening, paint a vivid portrait of the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. Phillips reveals the Iron Curtain’s profound impact on our world today—even as he punctures the fault lines we draw. Publisher’s note: This book was published in the UK under the title The Curtain and the Wall.

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War
Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007-08-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780271046679
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Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Operation Rollback

Operation Rollback
Author: Peter Grose
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780618154586
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Discusses America's secret plan known as Rollback that was designed to subvert and sabotage the Soviet grip on its satellite countries after the collapse of Nazi power in 1945.

Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain

Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain
Author: Mark Kramer
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2013-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739181866
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The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Rise of Non-Traditional Security Threats

The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Rise of Non-Traditional Security Threats
Author: Dominik Kalweit
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 29
Release: 2008
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3638886638
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Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: B+, University of Malta (University of Malta - Faculty of Arts / International Relations), course: European Security and Defence II (IRL2095), 24 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The socio - political developments of the outgoing 1980s and beginning 1990s to the greatest extent in Europe initiated the rise of a new era, impacting various political, societal and economic levels drastically throughout the world. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, i.e. the drowning of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its split into (semi-) independent states, the breakdown of East Germany (GDR) and its unification with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the turn up of the United States of America (USA) as the only liable superpower, the final act of the forty years lasting Cold War era found its cumulating closure. The paradigm of the West versus the East, of democracy versus communism was determined, and new patterns had and - since this redefinition appears to be an ongoing process - have to be rethought. In terms of security, the school of the political scientist Barry Buzan presented a structural cluster for the understanding of new evolving threats, resulting from the dissolution of the bipolarity with Russia and USA as having been oppositional poles of more or less equal strength. Apart from the military - related aspects that have dominated the thinking of conflict research throughout the period of the Cold War, this approach includes the means of politics, society, economy and environment as inter-relating and equally impacting issues of high importance for the analysis of security politika. This analysis strives to present the main issues which characterise the transformation of the European security system from the 1990s until today. Hereby, conceptual approaches regarding a theoretical framework of th