Cold War Frequencies: CIA Clandestine Radio Broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by Richard H. Cummings

Abstract

relationships with Third World states—did find ways to further its own interests in a Communist bloc dominated by the Soviet Union and China. The North Koreans fostered strategic friendships with India, Malaysia, and Singapore, for example, to stem the spread of “Maoist extremism” in the face of China’s Cultural Revolution (p. 32). Later, North Korea joined the NAM over Soviet protests and used it to “cozy up to” another Communist outlier, Yugoslavia (p. 92). The demise of East European Communism in 1989 came as a bitter blow to Pyongyang. The North Koreans lost their erstwhile leverage from relationships with Third World states. North Korea expunged all reference to Marxism-Leninism from its official party line in 1980 but, as Young’s book shows, socialist internationalism extended far beyond questions of official doctrine. From construction sites to aerial bombardment, from gymnastics performances to newspaper columns, the venues for and material traces left by North Korea’s socialist internationalism share important commonalities with its Eastern European equivalents. If what Young calls “speaking Juche” did not employ the “new vocabulary” of Albanian Communism quite word for word, then this language was at least strikingly mutually comprehensible. Were these languages of autonomy and anti-colonialism spoken only by “renegade” Communist states or also, in country-specific forms, by the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe? Young’s comprehensive and accomplished lexicon invites researchers to decide.