Journal of Cold War Studies最新文献

{"title":"Cinema as Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War: U.S. Participation in International Film Festivals behind the Iron Curtain, 1959–1971","authors":"J. Frost","doi":"10.1162/jcws_a_01122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01122","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the Cold War, international film festivals proliferated on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The United States and the Soviet Union recognized these festivals as important venues for “cinematic diplomacy” and the pursuit of broader foreign policy goals. This article explores how the U.S. government, together with the U.S. motion picture industry, made use of its participation in the Moscow and Karlovy Vary International Film Festivals in the 1950s and 1960s. It confirms many of the findings of earlier studies of Cold War cultural diplomacy but also expands our historical understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, it reveals the extent of cooperation and conflict—as well as an interchangeability of roles—among public officials in Washington and private citizens in Hollywood, with implications for both the formulation at home and reception abroad of U.S. cinematic diplomacy.","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"75-100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46370464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Note","authors":"E. De Angelis","doi":"10.1162/jcws_e_01138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_01138","url":null,"abstract":"The term “global Cold War” has become fashionable over the past two decades. Scholars who use the term, including many who submit manuscripts to the Journal of Cold War Studies, evidently believe that inserting the adjective “global” enhances our understanding of what the Cold War was. In reality, the simpler phrase “Cold War” is sufficient. During most of the time the Cold War lasted, it was a global phenomenon and was perceived as such. The notion that scholars in the 1970s and later decades focused exclusively on the United States and the Soviet Union and ignored the rest of the world is absurd. Both before and after 1989, scholarly analyses of the Cold War took ample account of the East-West conflict’s global scope. Hence, the addition of “global” in “global Cold War” is redundant, roughly equivalent to calling water “wet water” or fire “hot fire.” The Cold War began in Europe at the end of World War II with the division of the continent, especially the division of Germany, and it soon spread to Northeast Asia with the division of the Korean peninsula, the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and the deepening of territorial disputes between Japan and the Soviet Union. Cold War tensions also quickly spread into the Middle East, where the formation of Israel in 1948, the rise of Arab nationalist governments in Egypt, Syria, and other countries, and the huge importance of the region for global energy supplies became catalysts for East-West conflict. The impact of key events in the Middle East from the 1950s through the 1970s—the Suez crisis of 1956, the Iraqi revolution of 1958, and Arab-Israeli wars in 1967, 1970–1971, and 1973—was greatly exacerbated by the Cold War. The Islamic revolution in Iran in early 1979, the subsequent wave of Islamic radicalism throughout the region, and the decision by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to go to war against Iran in 1980—a war that lasted eight years and killed hundreds of thousands—complicated the situation and necessitated realignments, but the Middle East remained a prime arena of superpower competition for the duration of the Cold War. Elsewhere in the world, the spread of the Cold War was facilitated by the process of decolonization and the breakup of European colonial empires in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Even though decolonization and the Cold War were separate phenomena, they greatly influenced each other at every stage. Decolonization created opportunities for the Soviet Union and other Communist states, especially the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Cuba, East Germany, and North Korea, to provide weapons, training, and financing to Communist guerrilla forces that were striving to end colonial rule and gain power. The United States, for its part, supported antiCommunist governments in former colonial areas as they waged counterinsurgency campaigns against Soviet-backed guerrillas. These developments, and the seizure of","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44532514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Making of a Cold War President","authors":"James G. Hershberg, David Greenberg, Barbara A. Perry, Luther Spoehr, Fredrik Logevall","doi":"10.1162/jcws_c_01146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_c_01146","url":null,"abstract":"Editor's Introduction: Many thousands of books—more than 40,000 by most estimates—and countless articles have appeared over the past 60 years about the short life and interrupted presidency of John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected as U.S. president. During his presidency he had to contend with two of the most severe Cold War crises—the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, both of which came perilously close to provoking war between the Soviet Union and the United States—and he also significantly escalated U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Fidel Castro's Communist regime in Cuba. Kennedy had an ambitious domestic agenda, but, except for an important tax cut, he accomplished almost none of his domestic priorities, unlike his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who accomplished a great deal, especially on civil rights. Nonetheless, when polling organizations ask the public about their assessments of U.S. presidents, Kennedy invariably is rated well above Johnson. This has less to do with Kennedy's meager achievements as president than with his handsome appearance, his charisma, and the way his life ended. The assassination of Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on 22 November 1963 preserved the image of the glamorous young president in public memory, largely omitting his egregious flaws and the paucity of his achievements in office.Fredrik Logevall, a distinguished historian of U.S. foreign policy and long-time member of the JCWS Editorial Board (and a colleague and friend of mine at Harvard), is completing an authoritative, two-volume biography of Kennedy for Random House. Because of the Kennedy administration's crucial role in the Cold War, we are publishing a special forum about the Logevall biography. We have asked four experts to write commentaries on the first volume (they will also write about the second volume once it is out), and we are pleased to include Logevall's reply to the commentaries.In 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Jill Abramson complained in The New York Times Book Review that despite the publication of some 40,000 books (and counting) devoted to the slain president since his death, there were “surprisingly few good ones, and not one really outstanding one.” Unlike Thomas Jefferson (Dumas Malone), Abraham Lincoln (David Herbert Donald, among others), Dwight D. Eisenhower (Stephen Ambrose), Lyndon B. Johnson (Robert Caro), and Richard M. Nixon (Garry Wills et al.), Kennedy the man and his presidency had yet to inspire a truly classic study. She acknowledged that many fine works had appeared, although some were hagiographic, or appeared too soon to exploit vital sources released later, or both (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, and Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy, portraits by White House aides, rushed out less than two years after Dallas, fall into this last category). Conversely, other authors aimed to rip the gauze off","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Atoms for Socialism: The Birth of a Czechoslovak-Soviet Nuclear Utopia","authors":"Michaela Šmidrkalová","doi":"10.1162/jcws_a_01161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01161","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on the popular image of the nuclear future of Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s and analyzes the push for a Czechoslovak-Soviet nuclear utopia. The article describes the foreign orientation of Czechoslovakia's nuclear research through 1955 and the first joint nuclear activities between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The article also shows how Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship was integrated in practice into the image of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and it analyzes the image of civilian nuclear activities that was presented to Czechs and Slovaks in a campaign of popularization in the mid-1950s. Soviet “nuclear assistance” to Czechoslovakia, announced in January 1955, corresponded with a change in the popular vision of the nuclear age in Czechoslovakia when a remote nuclear future was transformed into a “lived utopia.”","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty</i> by Mark G. Pomar","authors":"Thomas A. Dine","doi":"10.1162/jcws_r_01152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01152","url":null,"abstract":"U.S. international broadcasting platforms—Voice of America (VOA) in Washington, DC, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Munich and since 1995 in Prague—have been continually broadcasting to native Russian speakers in their own language from the Second World War through the Cold War into the post-Communist period, especially now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As is the case today, the Cold War period was marked by high tensions between Washington and Moscow and creative programming by the VOA and RFE/RL. The two stations transmitted sophisticated, popular broadcasts into the Soviet Union featuring current news, opinion programs, music, and cultural personalities on a daily basis.The two U.S. shortwave radios offered competing programing approaches during the Cold War, a duality that has now been reconstructed and detailed by scholar-practitioner Mark Pomar of the University of Texas in his new book, Cold War Radio: Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Having worked in high positions in both organizations, he labels VOA's Cold War Russian programing “purist journalism”—straightforward, objective journalism—and Radio Liberty's approach to be strategic, indeed confrontational journalism. Both approaches amounted to “war by non-military means” against Communist ideology and autocratic Soviet governance.Other Western-oriented, anti-Communist radios included the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from London, Radio France International (RFI) from Paris, West Germany's Deutsche Welle (DW) from Bonn, and Israel's Kol Yisrael (KL) from Tel Aviv. These broadcasters offered similar twin approaches.Individually and in the aggregate, Western broadcasters provided Soviet audiences with news and information they could not otherwise obtain, and they thus helped to erode the Soviet regime's grip on its population. One significant reason for the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and fall of the Iron Curtain was the cumulative impact of international broadcasting.The Russian services of VOA and RL were separate from each other in programing, personnel, funding, and space. Both radios, however, targeted Russian speakers throughout the Soviet Union and successfully attracted large, important, diverse, and loyal audiences despite expensive, systematic jamming by the Soviet state security apparatus and Communist Party. Analytic practitioners L. Eugene Parta and A. Ross Johnson published a book in 2010 discussing the estimated sizes of the broadcasts’ audiences, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Kremlin authorities forbade people to listen, and the regime spent many millions of rubles trying to block listeners from hearing the broadcasts. But behind apartment doors and walls, inside bathrooms, under bed blankets, and in forested dachas, Soviet citizens who wanted accurate information about the world persistently listened to the shortwave radio channels.More than three decades af","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Soviet Policy in Xinjiang: Stalin and the National Movement in Eastern Turkistan</i> by Jamil Hasanli","authors":"Justin M. Jacobs","doi":"10.1162/jcws_r_01166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01166","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, scholarship on Xinjiang (or East Turkestan) has undergone remarkable changes. Whereas previous scholars were limited to a source base consisting chiefly of Anglo-American consular archives, published Chinese newspaper accounts, and the memoirs of exiled Turkic refugees, a new generation of historians has been able to make ample use of Chinese and Russian archives, along with rare collections of Uyghur documents preserved abroad. Of these three new source bases, however, the Russian archives clearly still offer the greatest untapped potential. Because the Soviet Union played a pivotal role in political developments within Xinjiang throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this is not a negligible lacuna.In part for this reason, Jamil Hasanli's new study of Soviet influence in Xinjiang has been met with great expectations in the field. Focusing on the period of preeminent Soviet involvement in the politics of Chinese-ruled Xinjiang (1930–1949), Hasanli's book is chock full of statistical data and previously classified top-level reports from the Russian archives. The majority of these highly sensitive archival sources have not yet been consulted by any other scholar. This fact alone is cause for celebration. All future scholarship on Xinjiang must consult this book. Hasanli has uncovered archival gems for nearly every major political development during the turbulent reigns of Chinese warlords Jin Shuren (1928–1933) and Sheng Shicai (1933–1944), along with the short but crucial administration of the Nationalist government (1944–1949). Readers will learn, for instance, new details about the fate of the Hui warlords Ma Zhongying and Ma Hushan, who opposed Sheng Shicai for many years in the 1930s, as well as prominent Uyghur politicians such as Khoja Niyaz Haji, who joined Sheng's government in 1934 and was later executed. Perhaps the most precious new insights relate to the visit of Sheng and his wife to Moscow in 1938 to meet with Joseph Stalin and other top Soviet leaders. Hasanli provides a detailed record of the various meetings in which Sheng took part, including his shocking, repeated requests to join the Communist Party, secede from the Republic of China, and overthrow the government of Chiang Kai-shek. After discussing how Sheng fell from political grace in 1944, Hasanli regales the reader with extraordinary detail on the Kazak rebel Osman Batur's meetings with Mongolian leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan, the political career of the Turkic leader Elihan Tore and Soviet battlefield maneuvers on behalf of the East Turkestan Republic.Despite this rich material, the book has several grave shortcomings. Fascinating as all the new political revelations and narrative details are, Hasanli rarely integrates them into an organized analysis of the bigger picture, nor does he engage seriously with the insights of scholars who have made use of Chinese archives over the past decade. (Most egregious in this regard, especially in li","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979</i> by Galen Jackson","authors":"William B. Quandt","doi":"10.1162/jcws_r_01165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01165","url":null,"abstract":"The vast majority of Americans alive today who have no first-hand memories of the years 1965 to 1980 may nonetheless have some awareness of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam, the opening to China in 1971–1972, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the related Arab oil embargo, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974, the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the subsequent taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages by the virulently anti-American leaders of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Those with a bit more interest in international affairs might also be aware of the easing of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry in the détente of the early 1970s, a policy that was nearly discredited by the end of the decade. This latter puzzle is the topic of Galen Jackson's deeply researched book, A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979.For scholars of this period, the challenge is not the lack of availability of original source material. In fact, a goldmine of formerly classified documents have been released, particularly from U.S. archives, including the tape-recorded conversations of President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Taping may have ended with Nixon's departure, but by now most of the records from the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC), and even many from key intelligence agencies, have been released, and scores of the participants in policymaking have written memoirs, published their diaries, and given extensive interviews. The sources are rich not only from U.S. archives but also, increasingly, from Israel and the former Soviet Union, along with a few accounts from seemingly reliable Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, and other Arab sources. In short, researchers have been nearly overwhelmed with the immense abundance of sources.The challenge for scholars has been to master this huge amount of material while finding a distinctive angle to develop. Jackson has done this well in a relatively short but thoroughly footnoted book, the major thesis of which is that the policy of détente espoused by Nixon in the early 1970s fell victim to a stubborn U.S. Cold War mindset, particularly but not exclusively represented by Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Kissinger's disinclination to work with the Soviet Union for an overall Arab-Israeli peace was aggravated by well-known features of the U.S. political system, such as the electoral cycle, the influence of pressure groups, and the role of Congress. In Jackson's view, the result was the Carter administration's abandonment of its initial search for a comprehensive peace and its shift to brokering an Egyptian-Israeli agreement as the more realistic, but less consequential, alternative. Jackson claims that the U.S. government's desire to “expel” the Soviet Union from the Middle East, or at least to weaken Moscow's influence there, was more important than Soviet rigidity and unwillingness to cooper","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War</i> by Stephanie L. Freeman","authors":"Matthew A. Evangelista","doi":"10.1162/jcws_r_01164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01164","url":null,"abstract":"Histories of the end of the Cold War have credited a range of actors, from leaders and diplomats to grassroots activists in peace and human-rights movements, some of whom engaged in collaboration across state borders. Stephanie Freeman's Dreams for a Decade is unusual in its focus on both top political figures and transnational movements. She places them all in the category of “nuclear abolitionists” and argues that their commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons helped bring the Cold War and the U.S.-Soviet arms race to an end and contributed to the emergence (at least temporarily) of a reunified, peaceful, and democratic Europe. Freeman excavates an impressive range of English-language primary and secondary sources, from archives of popular movements to declassified records of U.S. National Security Council deliberations. She relies on copies of materials from the National Security Archive (a private repository in Washington, DC) and the Vitalii Kataev collection at the Hoover Institution Archives for insights into the Soviet side.The book opens by citing The Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race, the document drafted mainly by Randall Forsberg, founder of the Boston-based Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), which launched the campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Freeman then introduces a parallel initiative, promoted in England by historian E. P. Thompson and political scientist Mary Kaldor, among others, that led to the formation of the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement for a nuclear-free Europe. Freeman has worked in the archives of the Freeze movement at Swarthmore College and of END at the London School of Economics. One of the book's most valuable contributions is her detailed recounting of the internal debates within the movements that produced distinct but complementary policies.Another key contribution is Freeman's focus on the level of national political leadership in the United States and the Soviet Union, where she identifies two leading abolitionist leaders: U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Among their achievements was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in December 1987, the first agreement that led to the elimination of entire classes of nuclear weapons—intermediate and shorter-range nuclear missiles. Freeman's archival research on the U.S. side is particularly impressive, as she traces the impact of the Freeze and END movements on the internal deliberations of the Reagan administration. Popular pressure spurred the administration to propose arms talks with the USSR much sooner than it would otherwise have done and to introduce numerous initiatives, such as the “zero option” for INF, and, paradoxically, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to create a system of defenses against ballistic missiles. SDI, dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, nearly derailed the process of nuclear disarmament that both Reagan and Gorbachev endorsed. T","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Would You Believe . . . the Helsinki Accords Changed the World? Advancing Global Human Rights and, for Decades, Security in Europe</i> by Peter L. W. Osnos with Holly Cartner","authors":"Vojtech Mastny","doi":"10.1162/jcws_r_01163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01163","url":null,"abstract":"Has Russia's invasion of sovereign Ukraine, with its attendant atrocities, relegated the 1975 Helsinki agreement and its advocacy of human rights to the dustbin of history? Two very different books, both by former Moscow correspondents of major Western newspapers, disagree. Peter Osnos, a former correspondent for The Washington Post, wants us “to believe [that] the Helsinki accords changed the world” by advancing both human rights and security. Richard Davy, who was a correspondent for The Times of London, is not so certain.The first book is primarily a memoir highlighting the contributions by the author, his wife, and his father-in-law, U.S. ambassador Albert W. Sherer, to the shaping of the Helsinki process and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in its early stages. It includes little on CSCE that is not already known but sheds light on the trajectory of the Helsinki Watch group, a non-governmental organization (NGO) in which Osnos has been deeply involved and which was instrumental in helping to transform dissent within the Soviet bloc into a political force, thus helping to undermine the Soviet system and facilitating the Cold War's peaceful resolution. The book includes two chapters by Helsinki Watch's former director, Holly Cartner, reminiscing about the NGO's transformation after its “Helsinki connection became less important . . . and the ambitions of the organization became increasingly global” (p. 128), with activists pursuing more self-centered agendas.Rebranded as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and serving as a watchdog of human rights anywhere, the group raised eyebrows when it “aligned itself with the position of far-right politicians” (p. 129) and again when it accepted Saudi money and “crossed . . . the threshold” by naming Israel “an apartheid state” (p. 132). After HRW chose “neutrality” by “not picking sides in [the Russia-Ukraine] war or ascribing blame for starting it” (p. 136), Osnos came to wonder whether “it is possible to denounce violence of all kinds when one side is defending itself and the other is intent on maximum destruction” (p. 135). Yet, he still regards HRW as “far and away the most important global human rights and social justice organization in history,” confident that its “scale . . . and the endowment (rare among NGOs) and a record of sustained achievement, assures that it will remain a pillar of human rights” (pp. 65, 140).Davy's study is refreshingly free of such ruminations. Although the book does not add much to what is already known about the Helsinki process, it provides a reliable overview and adds to a better understanding of it as a unique experiment in multilateral diplomacy. Based on solid command of the voluminous secondary literature and salient primary sources, Davy poses the right questions, without necessarily offering final answers, leaving it up to readers to form their own judgments. In explaining the road to Helsinki, he attributes key importance to the rise of détente","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"63 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Note","authors":"","doi":"10.1162/jcws_e_01155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_01155","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}