Abstract
In the introduction to his 1997 book Parting the Curtain, Walter Hixson wrote that “no systematic study exists on the efforts to use propaganda and culture as a weapon in the Cold War.”1 While this may have been the case in 1997, since then a tremendous increase has occurred in the study of Cold War rhetoric and propaganda, including the use of propaganda as a weapon in the Cold War. Since 2006 major works have appeared on the role of propaganda in the foreign policy of the US Eisenhower Administration (1953–61), the development of Britain’s anti-Communist propaganda policy, and British and American propaganda policy toward the Middle East.2 These studies built on earlier work done in the United States and Britain, most notably the path-breaking work of Walter Hixson, Philip Taylor, and Scott Lucas, all of whom stressed the vital role ideology, propaganda, and culture played in the history of the Cold War.3
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Notes
Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin Griffin, 1997), p. x.
Kenneth A. Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 2006)
Andrew Defty, Britain, America, and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953: The Information Research Department (New York: Routledge, 2004)
James Vaughan, The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Middle East, 1945–1957: Unconquerable Minds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester: Patrick Stephens, 2003)
Phillip M. Taylor, “Projection of Britain, 1945–1951,” in John Young and Michael Dockrill (eds), British Foreign Policy 1945–1956 (London: St. Martin Press, 1989)
Phillip M. Taylor, “Through a Glass Darkly? The Psychological Climate and Psychological Warfare of the Cold War,” in Gary Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (London: Macmillan, 1999)
Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York University Press, 1999)
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997)
John Gaddis, “On Starting All Over Again: A Naïve Approach to the Study of the Cold War,” in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
Douglas J. Macdonald makes this point in “Formal Ideologies in the Cold War: Toward a Framework for Empirical Analysis,” in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 183.
On the role of ideology in the Soviet policy, see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)
Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 1993)
Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, “East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War,” Cold War History, vol. 4 (2003) no. 1, pp. 1–22.
William Rugh, “Fixing Public Diplomacy for Arab and Muslim Audiences,” in Adam Garfinkle (ed.), A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004) pp. 145–62, and Derk Kinnane, “Winning Over the Muslim Mind,” The National Interest (Spring 2004), pp. 93–9.
On the American side see among others Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War; Thomas C. Sorensen, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (London: Harper and Row, 1968)
Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
On the British government’s overall propaganda efforts see Defty, Britain, America, and Anti-Communist Propaganda; Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001)
Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War: The Foreign Office and the Cold War, 1947–1977 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998).
Histories of the entire period of the Cold War include Richard Crockatt, The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics 1941–1991 (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Ralph Levering, The Cold War: A Post Cold War History (Arlington Heights, IL: Routledge, 1994)
Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History (New York: Henry Holt, 1993).
The American side of the origins of the Cold War can be found in John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972)
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 1992)
Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977)
Accounts of the history of the origins of the Cold War from a British perspective include John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944–1949 (Leicester University Press, 1993)
Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary (London: W. W Norton, 1983)
Victor Rothwell, Britain and the Cold War, 1941–1947 (London: Cape, 1982). The Soviet side of the origins of the Cold War is now well covered in Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, and Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity.
D. C. Watt, “Intelligence Studies: The Emerging British School,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 3 (1988) no. 2, pp. 338–41. Defty also covers the literature on British intelligence studies on pp. 7–9.
James Vaughan, “Cloak Without Dagger: How the Information Research Department Fought Britain’s Cold War in the Middle East 1948–1956,” Cold War Histoty, vol. 4 (2004) no. 3, pp. 56–84
Aldrich, The Hidden Hand; Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003); and Defty, British, American, and Anti-Communist Propaganda.
On the early years of the CIA see Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995)
George Kennan’s role in setting up American Cold War political warfare efforts is covered in Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 2000)
Wilson Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy 1947–1950 (Princeton University Press, 1992)
Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin. The early years of the State Departments Information programs are discussed in Edward W. Barrett, Truth is Our Weapon (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953)
John Henderson, The United States Information Agency (New York: Praeger Publishers 1969) pp. 3–48.
Literature on the Psychological Strategy Board includes Scott Lucas, “Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American Ideology, 1951–1953,” The International Historical Review, vol. 18 (1996) no. 2 and Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin, pp. 59–82.
On Eisenhower and propaganda see Osgood, Total Cold War; Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1984)
John Allen Stern, Propaganda in the Employ of Democracy: Fighting The Cold War With Words (PhD thesis, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 2002). Eisenhower’s use of rhetoric is analysed in Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publications, 2002)
Parry Giles, “The Eisenhower Administration’s Conception of the USIA: The Development of Overt and Covert Propaganda Strategies,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 24 (Spring 1994), 263–76.
Three volumes of Asa Briggs’s five-volume work on the history of the BBC discuss the BBC Russia Service: Asa Briggs, The History of the Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume III: The War of Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); The History of the Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume IV: Sound and Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1979); The History of the Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V: Competition (London: Oxford University Press, 1995)
See also Gerard Mansell, Let the Truth Be Told: 50 Years of BBC External Broadcasting (London: Weidenfeld, 1982).
A history of short-wave broadcasting in the Cold War can be found in Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997).
Also see Gary D. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: The BBC and Voice of America in International Politics, 1956–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 6–17.
The general relationship between the BBC and the IRD has been discussed in Lyn Smith, “Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department, 1947–1977,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 9 (1980) no. 1, pp. 67–83
Scott Lucas and C. J. Morris, “A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War,” in Richard Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War (London: Routledge, 1992); and Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War.
For the early years of Voice of America see Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)
Robert W. Pirstein, The Voice of America: A History of the International Broadcasts of the United States Government 1940–1962 (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1970)
Henderson, The United States Information Agency; and Alan L. Heil, Voice of America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
James Critchlow, Radio-Hole-In-The-Head: Radio Liberty: An Insider’s Story of Cold War Broadcasting (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1995)
Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (Pennsylvania State University Press 1999)
Jon Lodeesen, “Radio Liberty (Munich): Foundations for a History,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 6 (1986) no. 2, pp. 197–210
Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000)
Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983); and Sorensen, The Word War.
Victor Rosenberg, Soviet-American Relations, 1953–1960: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange During the Eisenhower Presidency (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005)
Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Hixson, Parting the Curtain.
Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
The scope of this book encompasses the years of 1945–60 so it does not include the efforts at cultural infiltration of the Détente years of the 1970s. On this topic see James Mayall and Cornelia Navari (eds), The End of the Post War Era: Documents on Great-Power Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
Vojtech Mastny, Helsinki, Human Rights, and European Security (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985)
Richard Davy (ed.), European Détente: A Reappraisal (London: Saga, 1992)
Michael B. Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente: Coming to Terms (London: Macmillan, 1991).
English, Russia and the Idea of the West; Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American—Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994)
Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Vladislav M. Zubok, “Why Did the Cold War End in 1989? Explanations of the Turn,” in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 6. A large number of scholars have attempted to define the term “propaganda.”
See for example Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Knopf, 1965)
Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001)
Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester: Patrick Stephens, 2003).
Phillip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 196.
Sir Robert Marett, Through The Back Door: An Inside View of Britain’s Overseas Information Services (London: Pergamon Press, 1968), pp. 148–52.
Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Techniques in the World War (New York: Knopf, 1927)
J. D. Squires, British Propaganda at Home and in the United States from 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935).
Robert C. Tucker, The Psychological Factor in Soviet Foreign Policy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, RM-1881, 1957).
The size of the Soviet defense budget and the share of the total Soviet economy devoted to defense spending was a constant source of controversy during the Cold War. In general, Soviet records now available indicate the CIA did an adequate job estimating the Soviet defense budget but overestimated the size of the Soviet economy, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. For the CIA view of this issue see Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950–1990 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1998)
Criticism of CIA estimates can be found in Abraham C. Becker, “Intelligence Fiasco or Reasoned Accounting? CIA Estimates of Soviet GDP,” Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 10 (1994), pp. 291–329
William Lee, “Book Review of Soviet Defense Spending,” Slavic Review, vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 262–3, no. 1.
For an interesting study of the role the Soviet Union’s unique ideology and social construction played in its interaction with the international system, see Richard Saull, Rethinking the History of the Cold War: The State, Military Power, and Social Revolution (London: Routledge, 2000).
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. xx.
On the end of the Gulag prison system see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 506–26.
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Schwartz, L.H. (2009). Introduction. In: Political Warfare against the Kremlin. Global Conflict and Security since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236936_1
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