IMPORTANT techniques of Soviet foreign policy, still remain almost unexamined. One of these is the complex amalgam of propaganda, deception, and sometimes mutually profitable transactions with non-Soviet states that is herein described as Cultural Diplomacy. Soviet Cultural Diplomacy represents what from a non-communist point of view usually seems to be a perversion of cultural exchange and intercultural communication. This is an effort to project...

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) was a politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953-1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958-1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in...

"More than any other conflict, the Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. And, nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its legacy still endures-not only in our politics, but in our own thoughts and fears. Drawing on a vast array of untapped archives and unseen sources, Martin Sixsmith vividly recreates the tensions and paranoia of the Cold War, framing it for the first time from a psychological perspective. Revisiting...

From merchantman to man-of-war... William Richardson was always certain he would be a seaman. His father and all his brothers were mariners so it was not unusual that he should go to sea in his turn. By the last part of the eighteenth century Richardson was an accomplished and experienced young mariner who had made steady progress in promotion and who had travelled sea-routes across the globe, including time served in the notorious slave trade. These...

The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable--the acclaimed author of Stalin's Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia...

"The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. [This book] dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found new documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to. The British knew this, but didn't share their...

Using recently uncovered archival materials, personal interviews, and a broad familiarity with Russian history and culture, two young Russian historians have written a major interpretation of the Cold War as seen from the Soviet shore. Covering the volatile period from 1945 to 1962, Zubok and Pleshakov explore the personalities and motivations of the key people who directed Soviet political life and shaped Soviet foreign policy. They begin with the...