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The Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, The Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, The Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin, The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities William R. Ferris, The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lawrence M. Small, The Secretary of Education Roderick R. Paige, The Secretary of Health & Human Services Tommy G. Thompson.

PRIVATE CITIZEN MEMBERS:
Carol Cartwright, John H. Foster, Jean L.
Hennessey, Daniel L. Lamaute, Doris O.
Matsui, Thomas R. Reedy, Nancy M.
Zirkin

THE WILSON COUNCIL

B. B. Andersen, Cyrus A. Ansary, Charles F. Barber, Lawrence E. Bathgate II, Joseph C. Bell, Esq., Thomas J. Buckholtz, Conrad Cafritz, Nicola L. Caiola, Raoul L. Carroll, Scott Carter, Albert V. Casey, Peter B. Clark, William T. Coleman, Michael D. DiGiacomo, Donald G. Drapkin, F. Samuel Eberts III, I. Steven Edelson, J. David Eller, Sim Farar, Susan R. Farber, Barbara Hackman Franklin, Morton Funger, Chris G. Gardiner, Eric Garfinkel, Bruce S. Gelb, Jerry P. Genova, Alma Gildenhorn, Joseph B. Gildenhorn, David F. Girard-diCarlo, Michael B. Goldberg, William E. Grayson, Raymond A. Guenter, Verna R. Harrah, Carla A. Hills, Eric Hotung, Frances Humphrey Howard, John L. Howard, Darrell E. Issa, Jerry Jasinowski, Brenda LaGrange Johnson, Dennis D. Jorgensen, Shelly Kamins, Anastasia D. Kelly, Christopher J. Kennan, Michael V. Kostiw, Steven Kotler, William H. Kremer, Denny LeVett, Harold O. Levy, David Link, David S. Mandel, John P. Manning, Edwin S. Marks, Robert McCarthy, C. Peter McColough, Stephen G. McConahey, James D. McDonald, J. Kenneth Menges, Jr., Philip Merrill, Jeremiah L. Murphy, Martha T. Muse, Della M. Newman, Paul Hae Park, Gerald L. Parsky, Michael J. Polenske, Donald Robert Quartel, Jr., J. Steven Rhodes, John L. Richardson, Margaret Milner Richardson, Edwin Robbins, Jr., Otto Ruesch,

B. Francis Saul, III, Timothy R. Scully, J. Michael Shepherd, George P. Shultz, Raja W. Sidawi, Deborah Siebert, Thomas L. Siebert, Ron Silver, William A. Slaughter, Timothy E. Stapleford, Norma Kline Tiefel, Mark C. Treanor, Christine M. Warnke, Pete Wilson, Deborah Wince-Smith, Herbert S. Winokur, Jr., Joseph Zappala

ASSISTANT EDITOR/PRODUCTION MANAGER: RICHARD E. THOMAS
ASSISTANT EDITOR/BULLETIN ADMINIStrator: NANCY L. MEYERS
ADVISORY EDITOR: JAMES G. HERSHBERG

The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) was established at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in 1991 with the help of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War, and seeks to disseminate new information and perspectives on Cold War history emerging from previously inaccessible sources on "the other side”the former Communist bloc-through publications, fellowships, and scholarly meetings and conferences. Within the Wilson Center, CWIHP is under the Division of International Studies, headed by Dr. Robert S. Litwak. The Director of the Cold War International History Project is Christian F. Ostermann, and the Project's Administrator is Nancy L. Meyers. CWIHP is overseen by an advisory committee chaired by Prof. William Taubman (Amherst College) and consisting of Michael Beschloss; Dr. James Billington (Librarian of Congress); Prof. Warren I. Cohen (University of MarylandBaltimore); Prof. John Lewis Gaddis (Yale University); Prof. James G. Hershberg (George Washington University); Dr. Samuel F. Wells, Jr. (Woodrow Wilson Center); and Prof. Sharon Wolchik (George Washington University). Readers are invited to submit articles, documents, letters, and other items to the Bulletin. Publication of articles does not constitute CWIHP's endorsement of authors' views. Copies are available free upon request, or by downloading them at cwihp.si.edu.

Photographs: Mikhail Gorbachev with Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov. Source: Archie Brown, The
Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford UP, 1996). Other photographs and maps submitted by the authors or from the
National Archives.

Director's Note

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n December 1989, following the dramatic collapse of

I communist regimes throughout much the Soviet virt

Union's empire in Central and Eastern Europe, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush met on board warships of the two countries off the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean. Though the course of events was largely outside the control of the two leaders, the summit, given its timing, went down in the history books as symbolizing the end of the Cold War. Sensing the dawn of a new era, Gorbachev, according to the now accessible Soviet transcript of the meeting, told Bush that it was "very important for us to talk with you about what conclusions can be drawn from past experience, from the 'Cold War."" What had happened, the Soviet leader stated, "remained in history: Such, if you will, is the privilege of the historical process. However, to try to analyze the course of previous events--this is our direct responsibility."

With this issue of its Bulletin, the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), now in its tenth year, seeks to contribute to a fuller understanding of the Cold War "experience"-in fact, of the very events that Bush and Gorbachev were witnessing as they sojourned under the Mediterranean sun. This issue features a set of documents that highlights findings and insights from a conference series on the "The Collapse of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe," sponsored by the National Security Archive (George Washington University), CWIHP, and their international partners ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The documents provide a unique glimpse behind the "Iron Curtain" at the beginning of the end of the crisis-ridden Soviet empire: the culmination of a succession of upheavals, beginning with the 1953 uprising in East Germany and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and including the 1968 Prague Spring and the 1980/81 Polish Crisis. Assembled by an international team of scholars, these documents detail the ultimately futile scramble by the communist parties of Central and Eastern Europe to stay in power in 1989-evidence that explains in the actual words of the communist leaders and the opposition forces at the time how the Soviet empire gave way in the face of popular protest, largely without violent repression.

The issue is also the culmination of a multi-year, multiarchival and multi-conference project and a series of Bulletin issues presenting new evidence on these Cold War "flashpoints."3 To be true, the documents represent only a small selection from our massive database of thousands of newly-available and translated documents. Largely focused on the communist parties' perspectives on the tumultuous events of 1988-89, they do not claim to give a comprehensive account of the collapse of communism in Europe. But these documents, most of which are pub

lished here in English for the first time, provide a greater sense of the unpredictability, contingency, and complexity of the events of 1989-events driven by the people in Central and Eastern Europe in daring challenge to the ruling, though weakening, elites in Moscow, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and

Berlin. They also speak to the power of history, memory and ideas--and to the role of personalities, above all the ambiguities of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The documentation presented here includes minutes of key meetings between Gorbachev and Eastern-bloc leaders as well as Western statesmen; verbatim transcripts of Eastern European opposition and national "roundtable" meetings; transcripts of controversies within the communist parties and bureaucracies; security police plans, and notes by one of Gorbachev's closest and most loyal aides, Anatoly Chernyaev, who recorded his thoughts concerning the events of the fateful year 1989 in his diary. Capturing the sense of the fundamental change that was occurring, Chernyaev wrote, after a meeting between Gorbachev and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, that he "felt physically that we are entering a new world, where class struggle, ideology, and in general polarity and enmity are no longer determinate. And something all-human is taking the upper hand.”

By contrast, ideology and polarity were very much at issue in the secret conversations between Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1958-59, transcripts of which are published for the first time in this Bulletin issue. With both Communist giants staring down the abyss of the emerging Sino-Soviet break, these records of conversations are among the most illuminating and significant documents yet to emerge from the former Communist-world archives. This document edition builds on CWIHP's earlier publications documenting the talks between Mao and Joseph Stalin, the lead-up to the Korean War, and the rise of the Sino-Soviet alliance."

Other highlights of this issue include a long statement on relations with China by the Vietnamese Workers' Party General Secretary Le Duan. The document is highly illustrative of the North Vietnamese mindset shortly after the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese military clash. Presented first at CWIHP's January 2000 conference at Hong Kong University on "New Evidence on China, Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War," the document created considerable controversy among some of the Chinese and Vietnamese participants as to its provenance and significance. We hope that publication of this document will broaden the debate further.

Several document sets published in this Bulletin show the remarkable range of archival opportunities for historians of the Cold War and reflect CWIHP's continued efforts to pry open archives and bring new documentation to public attention. Thus, this Bulletin also presents the first Warsaw Pact war plan to be found in the archives, the 1964 Czechoslovak War Plan (obtained through a multilateral effort to document the history of the Warsaw Pact) as well as new Russian documents on Khrushchev's 1959 missile deployments in East Germany (published in collaboration with a German-Russian research team). We are thrilled to also provide samples from an archival "gold mine" for historians of the early Cold War that has been discovered on the fringes of the former Soviet Union, the archives in Baku. The documents which have become available in the context of the CWIHP/National Security Archive initiative on "The Caucasus in the Cold War" are the first installment of top-level documentation on one of the first Cold War crises the Iran Crisis of 1944-1946. They include Stalin's 1945 instructions to encourage separatism in Northern Iran in his reach for Iranian oil. Similarly, the 1954 Tito-Khrushchev correspondence, fresh from the archives in Belgrade, introduces CWIHP's new "Yugoslavia Initiative," co-sponsored with the London School of Economics and Political Science. The initiative supports the integration of scholars and archives of the former Yugoslavia into the international research on the Cold War.

As several of the research and conference reports in this Bulletin demonstrate, CWIHP continues to monitor opportunities for research in the former communist-world archives and to support the collaborative exploration of our recent international past, reaching across national, language, and disciplinary barriers to "globalize" what just a decade ago was a rather narrow field of research focused almost exclusively on the superpower confrontation. Together with a network of longstanding and new partner institutions around the world, the Project has launched several new documentation initiatives. In addition to those mentioned above, CWIHP's initiative on "North Korea in the Cold War" is collecting, translating and publishing documentation from the Eastern-bloc archives on North Korea. CWIHP's initiative on "New Evidence on Latin America and the Cold War," co-sponsored with Yale University's Latin American Studies Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center's Latin American Program and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (Mexico City) has begun to involve researchers and archivists from Latin America, the former communist world and the United States in joint efforts to document the Cold War throughout Latin America. Besides efforts to facilitate dialogue over new archival documentation in the war-torn Southern Caucasus, to create linkages between American and Vietnamese scholars, and to gain access to Russian, Chinese and Eastern European archives on the "Détente" years, CWIHP plans to explore the Cold War in South Asia and Africa.

8

Conferences remain an essential part of CWIHP's

activities. Besides those mentioned above, CWIHP recently (co-)sponsored a number of international conferences, including "Stalin and the Cold War, 1945-1953" (New Haven, CT, September 1999); "Documents on the Cold War," (declassification workshop, Hanoi, Vietnam, January 2000); "Cold War in the Balkans: History and Consequences," (Plovdiv, Bulgaria, May 16-18, 2000);9 "New Evidence on the Korean War," (Washington, DC, June 2000); "Cold War Archives in the Decade of Openness" (Washington, June 2000);10 "Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the Cold War," (Tbilisi, October 2000); 11 "Mauerbau and Mauerfall-Lessons of the Wall" (Berlin, June 2001);12 and a major international "summit" to celebrate the Project's tenth anniversary (March 2001). CWIHP cooperated on, or participated in, several other meetings, including "The Twentieth Century International System" (for scholars from Russian regional universities, held in Moscow, June 2000);13 "The End of the Cold War," (Columbus, OH, October 1999),1 "Forty Years of Cold War? Issues, Interpretations, Periodizaton," (Rome, June 2000);15 "Changing Chinese-American-Soviet Relations and the Transition of the Cold War," (Shanghai, June 2001);16 and a historic conference on "The Bay of Pigs-40 Years Later," (Havana, March 2001),17 at which some 400 pages of Cuban archival documentation were made available. 18 In order to involve military archivists and historians from former Warsaw Pact countries further into the Cold War research community-and to enhance access to military archives-CWIHP also hosted a series of archival workshops for the Archives Working Group of the Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Strategic Studies Institutes. 19

In addition to providing a forum to Washington's policy and scholarly community for the discussion of important new documentation, CWIHP is broadening its outreach to college and high-school teachers and students. In July 2001, for example, the Project co-hosted the National History Day Summer Institute for high-school teachers;20 other recent activities in this area include cosponsorship of a summer school on the new Cold War history, hosted by George Washington University; cooperation with the University of Maryland's College Park Scholars Program; joints ventures with C-SPAN and the Close-up Foundation; and a Cold War colloquium at the History Faculty of Cambridge University (UK).

We are also expanding CWIHP's website, featured in the September/October 2001 Foreign Policy issue ("Net Effects"), to incorporate translated Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Eastern European documents in addition to those presented here. The Project is also actively engaged in developing a web-based catalogue to digital archival collections.

"This is not a project, but a movement," a colleague recently exclaimed at the Project's March 2001 Ten-Year Anniversary Summit that showcased many of these findings and activities. Indeed, the Project's success is really the success of its remarkable, ever-growing, interna

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