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was established to promote the exchange of information between the historical offices of DoD and various U.S. government agencies and other countries' official history programs. In August and September 1994, the committee sponsored the visits to the United States of 15 military historians and archivists from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, Romania, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Canada to conduct shortterm research on Cold War topics. That winter the first issue of the committee's Cold War History Newsletter was published."

Although several private commercial ventures had been undertaken to microfilm materials in former Sovietbloc countries, a model program existed close at hand within the U.S. Government. In 1992 the Department of Defense and the Library of Congress had begun collaborating to microfilm rare books, manuscripts, and pamphlets in libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg,' and subsequently in Vilnius. Building on the experience gained from this program, the DoD historical offices. approached several military archives in 1995 with formal proposals to begin joint microfilm projects.

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They cover such subjects as “Operation Vistula" (the suppression of underground resistance in the period 194648); General Staff organizational and planning files, directives, and instructions, 1945-60; and records of the Polish representative on the Neutral Nation Supervisory Commission and Korean Repatriation Commission, 195354. Some World War II records have also been microfilmed, including files of General Zygmunt Berling, Commander of the 1st Polish Army, relating to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and records of the Polish General Staff in London, 2nd Bureau, on support for the Home Army in Poland. A list of the contents of the first 55 Polish reels is on LC's website at lcweb.loc.gov/rr/european/archiwum/ archiwum.html.

For 1998-99 agreement has been reached to film (1) additional World War II records concerning the outbreak of war in 1939 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, (2) records relating to Operation "Dunaj"-the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, (3) portions of the previously classified 30-volume (11,000-page) internal history, "Development of the Polish People's Armed Forces, 1945-1980," written during the mid-1980s, (4) selected reports of Polish military attaches in Washington, 1945-50, and (5) records relating to the reduction of Polish armed forces after the Korean War.

Two comments are in order about the Polish records scheduled for filming. First, while the heavy ideological slant to the 30-volume internal history diminishes its value as a scholarly work, its numerous footnotes make it an indispensable guide to the location of important

documents in the archive. Second, the relatively small collection of attache reports held by the Central Military Archive generally deal with routine meetings and ceremonial and administrative matters (the main body of substantive reports are held by another archive), but there are bits of information in these reports useful to scholars. The Library of Congress has also received records inventories from the Polish Central Military Archive. Reels 63 and 64 contain inventories for 15 collections of Cold War records, including the Office of the Minister of National Defense, 1945-49; the Finance-Budget Department, 1945-49; the Finance Department, 1950-56; the Organization and Planning Department, 1944-50; and most of the 2,200-page inventory for the General Staff records, 1945-50. In addition, LC has received duplicate printed copies of the 1961 Inwentarz Akt Ludowego Wojska Polskiego z lat 1943-45: Jednostki Bojowe [Inventory of the Records of the Polish People's Army, 1943-45: Fighting Units] (3 parts, 780 pages).

Finally, the Central Military Archive published in 1996 a comprehensive guide (154 pages) to its holdings, thought to be the first such publication issued by a former Soviet-bloc military archive, entitled Informator o Zasobie [Informational Guide to the Holdings]. A copy of the informational guide, as well as a 28-page supplement, Zimna Wojna w Wojskowym Zasobie Archiwalnym [The Cold War in Military Archival Holdings], have been given to the Library of Congress.

Romanian National Defense Ministry Archive

Since work began in February 1997, the Romanian National Defense Ministry Archive has produced 234 microfilm reels. They focus exclusively on records of military elements connected with the Romanian Commission for the Terms of the Armistice and the Peace Treaty, 1942-47. The reels are being catalogued and soon will be available to researchers. LC intends to post a list of the contents of the Romanian microfilm on its website." Future microfilming will include selected records of the information, i.e. intelligence, section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1944-48, and the records of the Superior Directorate of the Armed Forces, 1945-65. The Library of Congress has received photocopies of two major inventories: the 90-page inventory to the fond Marele Stat Major, Sectia 2-Informatii (Joint Chiefs of Staff, Section 2-Information), 1944-49, and the 306-page inventory to the fond Consiliul Politic Superior al Armitei (Superior Directorate of the Armed Forces), 1945-48.

Hungarian Archive for Military History

The last of the three archives to begin filming, the Archive for Military History in Budapest, since August 1997 has filmed 44 reels of records from the Ministry of Defense Central Files for the year 1949. The 1949 records cover the Ministry of Defense Secretariat, the Ministry's Chief Directorate for Political Matters, and the General Staff's Organizational and Mobilization Section,

Directorate for Materiel Planning, and 2nd Directorate. The Hungarian reels at LC are still being processed and are not yet open for research. LC also intends to post a list of the contents of the Hungarian microfilm on its website. The plan is to continue filming selected portions of files for the period 1949-56, to be followed by documents and reminiscences related to the 1956 Revolution (about 9,300 pages) and the Ministry of Defense's Presidential Directorate register books for 1945-49 (about 8,300 pages). Time and resources permitting, records of the Hungarian Royal Chief of Staff and of the Presidential Section of the Royal Ministry of Defense for the period 1938-45 will be filmed last.

At present there are no plans to film inventories in the Hungarian Archive for Military History.

Further information regarding the microfilm from the three archives can be obtained from LC's European Division specialists; Ron Bachman (Poland), 202-7078484, Grant Harris (Romania), 202-707-5859, and Ken Nyirady (Hungary), 202-707-8493.

Since 1987 Ronald D. Landa has been a member of the Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense. From 1973 to 1987 he worked as a historian at the Department of State, where he was one of the editors of the documentary series, Foreign Relations of the United States.

1 Regarding the holdings of the Slovak Military Historical Archive at Trnava, which administratively is under the Military History Institute, see Pavel Vimmer, "Miesto a hlavne ulohy VHA v systeme vojenskeho archivnictva" [The Place and Main Tasks of the VHA (Military Historical Archive) in the Slovak Military Archival Structure], Vojenska Historia, vol. 1, no. 2 (1997), pp. 74-81. A short description of the Russian Central Naval Archive is in Patricia Kennedy Grimsted et al, eds., Archives in Russia, 1993: A Brief Directory (Washington, DC: International Research & Exchanges Board, 1992), p. C-5.

2 P. J. Simmons, “Report from Eastern Europe," Cold War International History Project [CWIHP] Bulletin, no. 1 (Spring 1992), p. 12. The article is condensed from Simmons' longer paper, "Archival Research on the Cold War Era: A Report from Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw," CWIHP Working Paper No. 2, May 1992.

3 Brooke Nihart, "Soviet Military Museum Leaders Tour Historical Center," Fortitudine, vol. XVIII, no. 3 (Winter 198889), pp. 9-11, and "Military Museum Heads Visit Russian Counterparts," ibid., vol. XVIII, no. 4 (Spring 1989), pp. 16, 23; Henry I. Shaw, Jr., "Hungarian Military Historians Visit Center," ibid., vol. XIX, no. 2 (Fall 1989), p. 21; Burton Wright III, "International Military History Exchanges: The Hungarian People's Army Visits Washington, D.C.,” Army History, no. 14 (April 1990), pp. 17-18, and “International Military History Exchanges: Soviet Military Historians Visit Washington, D.C.," ibid., no. 15 (Summer 1990), p. 28; Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “U.S.

Military Historians Find Warm Welcome in Poland,"
Fortitudine, vol. XX, no. 1 (Summer 1990), pp. 15-18; Frank N.
Schubert, "The Exchange Program with the Hungarian Military
Institute and Museum," Army History, no. 18 (Spring 1991), p.
17. See also Daniel R. Mortensen, "Downed Aircrew over
Europe: Revival of Polish Affection at the End of the Cold War,"
Air Power History, vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 44-51, and
Richard A. Russell, “A Return to Russian Naval History,” Pull
Together, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1995), pp. 4-6.

* See Judith Bellafaire, “The Cold War Military Records and History Conference," Army History, no. 31 (Summer 1994), p. 36. An account of the conference by a Slovak participant, Miloslav Pucik, is in his "The Cold War International History Projekt,” Vojenska Historia, vol. I, no. 1 (1997), pp. 142-44.

For the papers presented at the conference, see William W. Epley, ed., International Cold War Military Records and History: Proceedings of the International Conference on Cold War Military Records and History Held in Washington, D.C., 21-26 March 1994 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1996). Papers that describe former Soviet-bloc archives and their holdings include V. V. Mukhin, “The Military Archives of Russia,” pp. 185-92; N. P. Brilev, “The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation," pp. 193-202; Vladimir Pilat, "Cold War Military Records in Czech Military Archives and Possibilities of Their Study," 21317; Adam Marcinkowski and Andrzej Bartnik, “Polish Military Records of the Cold War: Organization, Collections, Use, and Assessment," pp. 219-31; Andras Horvath, "The System of Distrust: The 'Top Secret' Document Management System in the Hungarian People's Army, 1949-1956," pp. 233-45; and Alexandru Osca, “The Romanian Military Archives: An Important Source for the Detailed Study of the Cold War," pp. 247-54. The U.S. Army Center of Military History is considering placing the conference proceedings on its website at http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg.

U.S. Department of Defense Cold War Historical Committee Cold War History Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1995). A description of the program that brought the 15 researchers to the United States in the summer of 1994 is on pp. 2-3.

7 James H. Billington, "Bear and Eagle," Civilization, April/ May 1998, p. 90.

8

A brief description of the Polish project and the 20 May 1996 inaugural ceremony held at the Central Military Archive, attended by U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Rey, is in Zdzislaw G. Kowalski, "Wspolpraca archiwistow wojskowych [Cooperation of Military Archivists]," Polska Zbrojna, 18 June 1996.

9 Working as a volunteer for the Library of Congress, a retired Foreign Service officer, Ernest Latham, prepared a detailed finding aid to the first 96 reels of Romanian microfilm. See Donna Urschel, “Romanian Specialist Creates Finding Aid in English," Library of Congress Gazette, vol. 9, no. 18 (8 May 1998), p. 10.

"Pacifistic Blowback"?

New Evidence on the Soviet Peace Campaign in the Early 1950s

By Nigel Gould-Davies

I

t has been argued by Columbia University political scientist Jack Snyder and others that imperial powers can suffer from ideological "blowback:" an excessive belief among a population in the imperial propaganda disseminated by political elites. The following document, dating from the Soviet peace campaign of the early 1950s, suggests that the opposite can occur: that peace propaganda directed at the outside world can take root, even within so regulated a society as the Soviet Union, to a degree that evokes alarm among the leadership.

By the end of the 1940s Soviet foreign policy had suffered a series of reverses as relations with the West hardened into a pattern of Cold War confrontation. Neither Soviet diplomacy nor the use of "class" relations between communist parties had succeeded in halting the consolidation of unity and purpose within the Western camp, culminating in the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949. The Soviet Union responded to the failure of both arms of its traditional "dual foreign policy" by fashioning a third: it organized a massive peace campaign to exert the pressure of broad, non-communist public opinion on Western governments against rearmament. The first World Peace Congress was held in Paris in April 1949, and the first mass signature campaign, the Stockholm appeal, was launched in March 1950. Its organizers subsequently claimed the signature of 15 million French and 17 million Italians, as well as those of the entire Soviet adult population, among the 500 million collected world-wide. While the use of peace propaganda and front organizations was by no means new to Soviet foreign policy, the scale of these efforts distinguished them from earlier attempts to mobilize Western opinion.

However, apparently not only Western opinion was affected. The draft resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik) (CC VKP(b)) printed below sharply criticized Soviet media that "inadequately mobilize Soviet people to raise their vigilance against the intrigues of imperialist aggressors" with "pacifist arguments," that ignore the “aggressive measures and plans" of imperialism, and neglect "Marxism-Leninist teaching on the character, sources and causes of war." It is shot through with a concern that by emphasizing the common danger of war, the peace campaign distracts attention from the true nature of the struggle between ideological systems exactly the intended effect of this campaign in capitalist countries. A letter dated 16 September 1952 proposing this resolution, addressed to Mikhail Suslov, the CC VKP(b) Secretary responsible for supervising the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, is even more explicit and cites several

examples of "superficial and even harmful materials." Special hostility is reserved for those in which "the magic power of the white dove, as the savior of the world, is glorified." One author of an article about such doves is accused of coming out “as a pacifist, against war in general... He argues as if 'not one war has benefited a single people."" (Rossiski Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (RTsKhIDNI), Moscow, fond 17, op. 132, d. 507, 11. 13-17.)

It is a familiar argument that the Soviet Union enjoyed an asymmetric advantage during the Cold War in being able to disseminate propaganda among the more open societies of its adversaries without having to worry about internal public opinion. This document, however, suggests the existence of "pacifistic blowback" of such propaganda, sufficient to concern the leadership, within the Soviet Union itself; it also points to flaws and limitations in ideological control over the mass media, even under Stalinism, that made this possible.

Document

[September 1952]

DRAFT

RESOLUTION OF THE CC VKP(b)

On shortcomings in the treatment of the struggle for peace by the press

The CC VKP(b) notes that serious shortcomings and mistakes have been permitted of late in the coverage of the struggle for peace in a series of central and local newspapers and journals.

Comprehensive and thorough propaganda of the struggle for peace and of the successes of the movement of supporters of peace is frequently substituted in the press by the publication of superficial materials full of pacifist arguments. The movement of supporters of peace is often portrayed in these materials as an organization of people who hate all war, and not as a force that is capable of averting imperialist war and of giving a decisive rebuff to imperialist aggressors. Certain newspapers and journals, in explaining the peaceful character of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, inadequately mobilize Soviet people to raise their vigilance against the intrigues of imperialist aggressors, weakly link the struggle for peace with the might of the Soviet Union, and are carried away by outward symbols, publishing images of doves, primitive drawings and pacifistic stories and poems that have little value.

In the press the basic theses of Leninism on the origin and character of wars under imperialism are explained in insufficient depth, the designs of the Americo-English imperialists who are conducting an aggressive policy of unleashing a new war are poorly unmasked, and the profound contradictions in the camp of the imperialist aggressors are not properly reflected.

The CC VKP(b) resolves:

1. To oblige the editorial staff of the central and local newspapers, and also the staff of social-political and literaryartistic journals, to eliminate the shortcomings in the propaganda of the struggle for peace noted in this resolution. 2. To require the editorial staff of newspapers and journals to improve the coverage of the struggle for peace, bearing in mind the necessity of raising the political and labor activity of the masses and their vigilance against the intrigues of imperialist aggressors, and of mobilizing the workers to selfless labor, overfulfilment of production plans, and improvement of work in all spheres of economic and cultural construction. In the press it is necessary to unmask the criminal machinations of the war hawks - their mendacious, ostensible peacefulness in word, their aggressive measures and plans in deed. The successes of the movement of supporters of peace and the growth of the forces of the international camp of peace, democracy and socialism should be fully reflected in the pages of newspapers and journals. It is necessary to explain that the Soviet peace-loving foreign policy relies on the might of the Soviet state and, that reinforcing its might with their creative labor, Soviet people are strengthening the security of the people of our country and the cause of peace in the whole world, and that a new world war, if it is unleashed by the imperialist aggressors, can lead only to the collapse of the capitalist system and its replacement by the socialist system.

3. To instruct the Department of Propaganda and Agitation. of the CC VKP(b) and the Foreign Policy Commission of the CC VKP (b) to carry out the following measures: a) to conduct a meeting of editors of central newspapers and of social-political and literary-artistic journals, to discuss measures for eliminating shortcomings in the coverage in

the press of the struggle for peace.

b) jointly with the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge to organize the reading of lectures explaining the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the character, sources and causes of wars, on the significance of an organized front of peace in the struggle for the preservation of peace against those who seek to ignite a new war, on the sharpening of the general crisis of capitalism in the post-war period, and on other subjects.

4. To oblige Gospolitzdat in the next one to two months to publish in mass editions works of Lenin and Stalin devoted to Marxist-Leninist teachings on wars, on the defence of the fatherland and on the struggle for peace.

[Source: RTsKhIDNI, Fond 17, op.132, d.507, ll.18-19; obtained and translated by Nigel Gould-Davies.]

Nigel Gould-Davies is Lecturer in Politics at Hertford
College, Oxford University. He is completing a study on
"The Logic of Ideational Agency: the Soviet Experience in
World Politics".

NEW CWIHP FELLOWS

THE COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE AWARD OF CWIHP
FELLOWSHIPS for the 1998-1999 ACADEMIC YEAR TO

MRS. LI DANHUI (doctoral candidate, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing), “Sino-Soviet Relations and the Vietnam War"

MR. KRZYSZTOF PERSAK (PhD candidate and junior fellow at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences), "The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland"

DR. JORDAN BAEV (Senior Fellow at the Institute of Military History, Sofia), "The Cold War and the Build-up of Militry-Political Alliances in the Balkans, 1945-1990.”

Between Solidarity and Neutrality:

The Nordic Countries and the Cold War, 1945-1991

By Valur Ingimundarson

A

ny attempt to point out the similarities in the Nordic experience during the Cold War is futile without taking into account the differences. For one thing, Sweden and Finland (despite its treaty obligations with the Soviet Union) opted for neutrality in the East-West struggle, but Denmark, Norway, and Iceland for NATO membership. Some saw this diversity as a unifying strand, arguing that what became euphemistically known as the "Nordic Balance" gave the Nordic countries some freedom of action within the sphere of low politics and mitigated Cold War tensions in Northern Europe. The Nordics were reluctant Cold Warriors and tried, with varying degrees of success, to assume some sort of a "bridgebuilding" function in the Cold War. But there were many things that set the Nordic countries apart. All efforts to create a Nordic bloc in the military, economic, and political field were doomed to fail. Despite shared cultural values, the Nordic countries were simply too small, too diverse, and too weak to offer a credible alternative. Yet the only way to grasp their importance in the Cold War is to put them in a broader Nordic framework-to pay attention to common characteristics, as expressed in interlocking relationships, interactions, and mutual influences.

In recent years a major scholarly reassessment has been undertaken over the role of the Nordic countries in the Cold War. Numerous books and articles have attracted much scholarly and public attention. The Cold War International History Project, the London School of Economics, and the Historical Institute of the University of Iceland brought together about 30 scholars and officials, in Reykjavik, to discuss these new findings at an international conference 24-27 June 1998. To put the topic in a broader international context, the Reykjavik conference began with a lively roundtable on the "New Cold War History" with the participation of John Lewis Gaddis (Yale University), Geir Lundestad (Norwegian Nobel Institute), Odd Arne Westad (London School of Economics), James Hershberg (George Washington University), and Krister Wahlbäck (Swedish Foreign Ministry). Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History has stirred up the scholarly community, and the roundtable centered-to a large degree-on his argument about the role of Soviet conduct and ideology in the origins of the Cold War. Taking issue with Gaddis's line of reasoning, Lundestad argued that the "New Cold War History" is too moralistic and too much preoccupied with questions of guilt and Communist ideology. Odd Arne Westad stressed, however, that ideology was an important element in Soviet foreign policy, as evidenced by Stalin's

belief, in the 1940s, that the Chinese nationalists were better suited to rule the country than the Communists because of the historical-developmental state of China. To James Hershberg, the verdict is still out on the question of ideology in Soviet (and particularly Stalin's) foreign policy until more archival evidence is uncovered.

Within the Nordic context, most participants at the Reykjavik conference seemed to agree that Soviet policy vis-a-vis the Nordic countries was determined by a mixture of Realpolitik and ideology. On the basis of the evidence presented, one can detect several strands in Soviet foreign policy during the early Cold War. First, the Soviets pursued a cautious, if erratic course in the Nordic region. An "expansionist tendency" was curbed by "one that was soberly pragmatic," as Alexei Komarov (Russian Academy of Sciences) put it. While the Soviets never saw Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden as belonging to their sphere of influence, they showed considerable interest in the Nordic area based on their historical experience and ideological outlook. They made, for example, territorial demands on Norway and Finland. Buoyed by the imminent defeat of Nazism, in 1944, they insisted on a joint Norwegian-Soviet condominium over the Norwegian archipelago of Spitzbergen. According to the armistice agreement, the Finns had to cede the Petsamo region to the Soviets and to accept a 50-year Soviet lease on a naval base at Porrkala. At the same time, the Soviets made conciliatory moves by withdrawing their military forces from Northern Norway in 1945 and the Danish island of Bornholm in 1946. And when the Norwegian rejected the Soviet claim to Spitzbergen, the Soviets abandoned it in 1947.

The Finnish-Soviet Treaty of Friendship (FCMA) of 1948 was, of course, concluded under strong Soviet pressure. Kimmo Rentola (University of Helsinki) showed, however, that after encouraging the Finnish Communist Party to go on the offensive in the spring of 1948, the Soviets suddenly changed course after the FCMA was signed. Whether the Finnish Communists were, in fact, prepared to go as far as staging a coup from above (as om Czechoslovakia shortly before) is a matter of debate among Finnish historians. Yet the Communist Party was clearly intent on raising the stakes in its efforts to assume a predominant role in Finnish political life.

Rentola and Maxim L. Korobochkin (Russian Academic of Sciences) credited skillful Finnish "diplomacy of consent" with achieving semi-neutral status for Finland in the late 1940s.3 The Soviets initially wanted to conclude a military treaty with Finland akin to those signed by Hungary and Romania that would reaffirm

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