Editor's Note

Home , Moscow Conference (1945)

Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Andrew L. Yarrow discussing the shifting messages in U.S. public diplomacy during the early Cold War. Yarrow scruti- nizes the content of U.S. publications targeted at foreign audiences, especially readers in the Soviet bloc and the Third World. He argues that in the late 1940s the dominant message conveyed by U.S. print propaganda was the idealism of U.S. liberal democ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/11/4/1/1627611/jcws.2009.11.4.1.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 racy. By the late 1950s, however, the emphasis was far more on the technological dy- namism and prosperity of U.S. capitalism, reºected in the wide range of consumer goods available to ordinary Americans. Yarrow points to both domestic and foreign factors that spurred U.S. print outlets by the late 1950s to focus more on the growth of living standards than on the value of democratic freedoms. Some domestic develop- ments in the 1950s—the rise of McCarthyism and the protests against racial discrimi- nation—had made it harder to convince foreign audiences that the United States was devoted to fundamental liberties. Meanwhile, Soviet propaganda emphasizing the Communist bloc’s supposed material achievements gave U.S. ofªcials an incentive to highlight the genuine bounty and technological sophistication of the U.S. economy, thus undercutting the Soviet messages. These converging trends accounted for the im- portant, albeit largely unheralded, shift of U.S. public diplomacy in the mid-to-late 1950s. The second article, by Artemy Kalinovsky, explores Soviet decision-making during the prolonged war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Numerous scholars have consid- ered why the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in December 1979, and Kalinovsky does not seek to rehash that much-explored subject. Instead, he sets out to explain why the Soviet Union persisted with the war for nearly a decade afterward. Al- though a few ofªcials in Moscow privately contemplated a relatively early withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, this idea never gained any traction prior to the ar- rival of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). After examining evidence that has emerged from the former Soviet archives, Kalinovsky contends that decision-making about the war from 1979 on re- mained concentrated in a small group of CPSU Politburo members, who believed that ultimately the Soviet Army and Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) could es- tablish a viable Communist state in Afghanistan. These ofªcials, and many others in the Soviet armed forces, the KGB, and the Soviet Foreign Ministry, feared that an early withdrawal followed by the collapse of the Afghan Communist regime would cause irreparable damage to the Soviet Union’s reputation as leader of the world Com- munist movement and champion of pro-Soviet guerrilla forces and governments in the Third World. The prolongation of Moscow’s involvement in Afghanistan in- creased the potential damage that a withdrawal might do to the Soviet Union’s stand- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 11, No. 4, Fall 2009, pp. 1–2 © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1 Editor’s Note ing in the world, thus reinforcing Soviet leaders’ determination to see the war through to the end. Not until the ascendance of Gorbachev, who after taking power soon came to regard the war as an onerous burden, was a withdrawal from Afghanistan politically feasible. The third article, by Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, examines the role of the Chi- nese Communist Party (CCP) in the November 1957 conference of world Commu- nist parties, held in Moscow. Shen and Xia argue that the Chinese leader, Mao

Zedong, was instrumental in organizing the conference and was able to exert crucial Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/11/4/1/1627611/jcws.2009.11.4.1.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 inºuence on the proceedings. In the aftermath of Iosif Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the CPSU’s Twentieth Congress in Feb- ruary 1956, ªssures had begun to surface in the world Communist movement. Khrushchev was interested in reestablishing a body that could replace the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), which had been formally disbanded in April 1956. When the Cominform was set up in September 1947, its purpose was to coor- dinate the world’s Communist parties under Soviet domination (though this function steadily eroded after the bitter Soviet-Yugoslav rift emerged in 1948). CCP leaders did not welcome the idea of a new Cominform, and they proposed instead to hold a ma- jor gathering in Moscow of high-level delegations from Communist parties around the world. After some initial demurrals, Soviet leaders eventually accepted this pro- posal. Khrushchev and Mao had somewhat different conceptions of what should hap- pen at the conference, but CCP leaders relied on persistence and cunning to get most of their preferences realized. Although Shen and Xia overstate their case in arguing that the Moscow Conference allowed China to become “co-leader of the socialist camp,” there is no question that the gathering brought prestige and visibility for Mao and the CCP.The conference represented the high point of the Sino-Soviet alliance in the post-Stalin era, but it was not enough to prevent the alliance from breaking down only a year-and-a-half later. The ªnal article, by Janusz Kavmierczak, discusses how the Communist authori- ties in Poland used political propaganda in the 1950s to oppose and discredit West European integration, especially integration in the military sphere. Focusing on political posters and political cartoons from the 1950–1954 period, Kavmierczak shows how the propaganda was tailored to suit speciªc objectives. The proposed European Defense Community (EDC), pushed by French Prime Minister René Pleven, was a target of particular hostility. The propaganda output in Poland was part of a coordi- nated effort by the Soviet-bloc countries to derail the EDC and oppose West Euro- pean integration more generally. The Polish case is useful in demonstrating how spe- ciªc themes were chosen to accord with national sensitivities and Marxist-Leninist ideology. Although the East-bloc propaganda was hardly the decisive factor in thwart- ing the EDC, it did contribute, at least at the margins, to the ultimate failure of the proposed defense community. The propaganda had no effect, however, on economic integration in Western Europe, which proceeded steadily in the 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s. The issue concludes with a brief exchange on the Nixon administration’s policy in Vietnam and with twelve book reviews.