Mind-Sets and Missiles: a First Hand Account of the Cuban Missile Crisis

This chronology provides details and analysis of the intelligence failures and successes of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suggests the applicability of lessons learned to the collection, analysis, and use of intelligence in strategic decisionmaking. The author describes how the crisis unfolded using the author’s personal recollection, declassified documents, and many memoirs written by senior CIA officers and others who were participants. Lessons learned include the need to avoid having our political, analytical and intelligence collection mind-sets prevent us from acquiring and accurately analyzing intelligence about our adversaries true plans and intentions. When our national security is at stake, we should not hesitate to undertake risky intelligence collection operations including espionage, to penetrate our adversary’s deceptions. We must also understand that our adversaries may not believe the gravity of our policy warnings or allow their own agendas to be influenced by diplomatic pressure.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1351/thumbnail.jp

Reforming The Cold War State: Economic Thought, Internationalization, And The Politics Of Soviet Reform, 1955-1985.

This dissertation explains how, as the USSR’s narrative of the Cold War shifted from the military-industrial competition envisioned by Stalin to Khrushchev’s “peaceful socioeconomic competition of the two systems,” economics began to tackle the challenge of transforming the Soviet economy from one focused on mobilization and production to one that could deliver well-being and abundance. Soviet economics changed from a field that only justified the state’s actions to a “science” whose practitioners could use their “expertise” to propose and critique domestic government policy. This opening allowed Soviet theorists to engage with the emerging issues of global economic interdependence and post-industrialism, which also challenged the post-war economic consensus in the West in the 1970s and the 1980s. Economists and scientists from East, West, and South created a transnational community gathered around institutions such as the United Nations, the Club of Rome, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to adapt the institutions of the postwar state to the conditions of nascent globalization. By documenting these engagements, I challenge the prevailing historiographical narrative that so-called Soviet “liberals” “learned from the West” and instead show that reform-minded economists became equal partners in trans-European intellectual communities that hoped to reconcile the institutions of national economic planning to the conditions of globalization. I argue that to understand the politics of the post-Stalin USSR, one must understand the “Cold War Paradigm” in Soviet economic thought and policy making and how it allowed for the consolidation of a conservative hegemony under Brezhnev. Further, I suggest that despite fraying between 1985 and 1993, the conservative direction in economic thought continues to structure contemporary Russian and Post-Soviet politics. This work is based on primary research in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Science, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, the Central Archive of the City of Moscow, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center and the MIT Institute Archives and the Harvard University Archives

Intellectual Culture: The End of Russian Intelligentsia

No group cheered louder for Soviet reform, had a bigger stake in perestroika, and suffered more in its aftermath than did the Russian intelligentsia. Today, nearly a decade after Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled his plan to reform Soviet society, the mood among Russian intellectuals is decidedly gloomy. The intelligentsia has carried perestroika on its shoulders, laments Ury Shchekochikhin, so why does it feel so forlorn, superfluous, forgotten ? G. Ivanitsky warns that the intellectual strata has become so thin that in three or four years the current genocide against the intelligentsia would surely wipe it out. Andrey Bitov, one of the country\u27s finest writers, waxes nostalgically about the Brezhnev era and the golden years of stagnation when . . . people could do something real, like build homes, publish books, and what not

Comrade consumer: Economic and technological images of the West in the definition of the Soviet future 1957-1969

The goal of the Soviet government in the 1950s and 1960s was not to emulate the political or economic system of the Western capitalist democracies; it was to overtake them in terms of the provision of wealth; a wealth that was to be equitably distributed and to which social programmes were implicitly understood to belong. Positive statements about the economic and technological successes of the West, particularly as they pertained to the Soviet future, were means by which individuals and the state could share a language and established a common ground for discussion while pursuing interests that met and diverged. Criticism of the current material reality within the USSR fell within the realm of permitted dissent. Thus, consumption served as both a prime motivational factor and a safety valve for releasing the pressure of discontent. Soviet failure to maintain the belief that the communist system was capable of providing a socially acceptable level of consumerism while the government still purported Marxist ideology, resulted in the social acceptance of modernisation and consumerism, both intrinsically linked with the West, as the most favourable objective but devoid of the belief that the Soviet system was best able to achieve this. The positive information about the West which was intended to motivate Soviet citizens, instead served to provide them with an alternative means of achieving their future objectives. The de-stabilising effect of Party permitted information affected Soviet society on multiple levels and was introduced through numerous means. This study is an examination of the introduction of the economic and technological ideas as they entered Soviet discourse through official statements in the form of speeches, newspaper articles, books etc.; through cultural diplomacy in the form of exhibitions; and through science and technology, specifically the SCST and the turn key factory AVTOVAZ. Taken together, these image conduits resulted in the creation of a mythical other: that is to say externally and internally constructed image of the West that was to challenge the economic legitimacy of the Party's leadership and to call into question the goals of the communist system

St Antony's College Record, 1992

The College Record is our annual report of the year including news from the Warden, Bursar, and the College Centres

Britain and the Soviet Union: The search for an interim agreement on West Berlin November 1958-May 1960.

This thesis analyses British and Soviet policy towards negotiations on an Interim Agreement on Berlin, from November 1958 until May 1960. It emphasises the crucial role played by the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan and the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, both of whom viewed the Berlin problem within the wider context of their mutual objectives of achieving detente and disarmament. The opening chapter analyses Soviet motivation for reactivating the Berlin question, and emphasises two factors behind Soviet policy: the maintenance of the status quo in Germany and Eastern Europe, and Soviet fears of the nuclearisation of the Bundeswehr. The next two chapters reassess Britain's response to the Soviet Note of 27 November 1958, the impact of British policy on Berlin on the Western Alliance and the subsequent emergence of a British initiative on Berlin which culminated in Harold Macmillan's visit to Moscow in February 1959. Fresh insights into Soviet policy on Berlin and European Security are offered. The fourth chapter reappraises Macmillan's visits in March 1959 to Paris, Bonn and Washington to persuade his Allies of the benefits of his initiative. This chapter also deals with the British contribution both to the Allied debate on contingency planning for Berlin and to the discussions on Germany, European Security and Berlin, which took place in the Four Power Working Group from January until May 1959. The ensuing chapter analyses British and Soviet attitudes to the East-West negotiations on an Interim Agreement on West Berlin at the Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference, May-August 1959, and considers whether the British Government was correct in its perception that the Soviet Government wished to establish a modus vivendi on Berlin. Chapter six traces the evolution of Soviet and Western policies towards the forthcoming summit conference from August 1959 until May 1960. The final chapter examines Soviet and Western reactions to the U-2 Incident of 1 May 1960 and seeks to demonstrate that Khrushchev left for Paris prepared to negotiate on an Interim Agreement on Berlin, and hopeful that he would achieve the East-West Detente for which he and Macmillan had striven

Recent Soviet development debates : the 'third world' and the USSR

This thesis investigates three layers of Soviet debate since the mid 1960s about problems of development. A protracted debate about the importance of 'socialist orientation' in the third world is considered principally as a dispute between conservative officials and liberal critics about the significance for Soviet foreign policy of dependent allies in a global struggle with imperialism. A parallel debate about the prospects for a capitalist transformation of the third world is evaluated mainly as the first phase of a substantial discussion amongst leading scholars searching for an adequate theory of the developing world. A subterranean debate about the nature of modem Soviet society is presented as an example of the profound criticism of Brezhnev's regime which some leading scholars were able to make in print during the 'years of stagnation'. These empirical interpretations are based on two theoretical arguments, which establish the main historical contexts of Soviet development debates and the position of an outside reader as someone necessarily concerned with the same questions as the participants in the debates. The thesis demonstrates the intellectual achievements of a group of committed Soviet scholars, whose thought was not constrained by a dogmatic system of censorship. By showing the openness of Soviet discussions to a foreign interpreter, it questions the view that 'Marxism-Leninism' has constituted the language of recent development debates in the USSR