Cold War

Tensions between the three victorious western powers and the Soviet Union had always existed. But the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union broke out “officially,” when Stalin decided in 1948 to blockade the three western sectors of Berlin; it ended in 1989, when the German people decided to tear down the Berlin wall. Papers listed in this section deal with this post-war era, which was, in a way, foreseen by Goebbels in February 1945, when he stated that a Soviet iron curtain would descend across Europe.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific head of the U.S. atomic-bomb project during World War II. Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist whose contributions were essential for the successful development of the atomic bomb. Despite his outstanding performance in the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer’s reputation has been tainted by allegations that he knowingly passed secrets of the atomic bomb to Soviet agents. This article discusses the possible truth of these allegations.

The present unraveling of the Soviet empire is proceeding so quickly that it seems to have left political and historical analysts breathless. One of the gruesome epochs of history seems to be evaporating from the scene, like an evil miasma, almost as abruptly and unaccountably as it arrived, three-quarters of …

One of the more interesting escapades of the Cold War was the publication in the early 1970s of the book Khrushchev Remembers. The circumstance surrounding the publication of the memoirs of [then-retired former Soviet premier] Nikita Khrushchev under the guidance of Time, Inc., were mysterious and mystifying. Khrushchev's thoughts had …

Investor's Business Daily is a widely read and very influential mainstream financial publication in the United States. In the February 11, 2004, issue, p. A 14, there is an editorial about the North Korean Communist regime of Kim Jong-Il. The story it tells is strikingly similar to the "Hitler-Nazi gas …

Communist propaganda has successfully turned black into white in most areas of human activity. Why then should the West uncritically believe Soviet claims concerning their space projects? The writer of the following article has spent many years in studying Soviet space claims, and his findings are that they must be …

Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia University graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954) and a Fulbright exchange student to Germany (1957). Now retired after 40 years of service with the U.S. Department of Defense, he writes from his home in Washington, DC. During the twentieth century it became common practice for …

Uprising! One Nation’s Nightmare: Hungary 1956, by David Irving. London, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981. 628pp, $13.50, ISBN 0-340-18313-6 No less a figure than A. J. P. Taylor has described British historian David Irving as “a patient researcher of unrivalled industry and success.” Since the publication of his …

Pal Joey Joseph Sobran is a nationally-syndicated columnist, lecturer, author (most recently of Alias Shakespeare), and editor of the monthly newsletter Sobran's (PO Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183). "Pal Joey" is reprinted from the August 1995 issue of Sobran's, and "The Hiss Case" from the January 1997 issue. Thanks to …

Mikhail Gorbachev Gorbachev: On My Country and the World, by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Translated from Russian by George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Hardcover. 300 pages. $29.95. Basil Dmytryshyn, Professor Emeritus of History, was born in Poland. He holds a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (1955). For …

‘Why, of course, the people don’t want war… Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece… But after all, it is the leaders …

The ongoing legal proceedings in the Hague against Serb and Croat war crimes suspects, including the Serbian ex-president Slobodan Milosevic, must be put into wider perspective. The unfortunate and often irrational hatred between Serbs and Croats had for decades been stirred up and kept alive by the Communist Yugoslav secret …

Yuri N. Maltsev, a native of Russia, escaped from the Soviet Union a few years before its downfall. He is associate professor of economics at Carthage College (Kenosha, Wise.), and a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Auburn, Ala. 36849-5301). This essay is reprinted from the Nov. 1994 …

At a meeting between Joseph Stalin and leaders of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands: SED) in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, held on January 31, 1947, Stalin asked what percentage of Germans (in all the occupation zones) were “fascist elements,” and “what influence did they retain in …

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, …

Ever-vigilant American television, newspapers and magazines take care to play up outbursts of "hate," especially incidents against Jews. No where is the danger of anti-Semitism more alarming than in Germany, we are constantly told. As part of the ceaseless Holocaust campaign, the media treats anti-Jewish incidents in Germany as especially …

Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era, by Justus D. Doenecke, Bucknell University Press, Hardback, $17.50, ISBN 0-8387-1940-6. Justus D. Doenecke's book is a veritable gold-mine of information for the serious scholar of Revisionist historiography. Although lacking the minute detail of a similar work, James …

On August 4, 1964, network television was interrupted at 11:36 p.m. EDT so President Lyndon B. Johnson could tell the nation that the U.S. warships USS Maddox and its sister ship USS C. Turner Joy had been attacked in a place called the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese PT …

In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it. The vast clandestine apparatus we built up to prove our enemies' resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that practice of deceiving others for the good of …

Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left, by Paul Buhle. London: Verso (Haymarket Series), 1987, paperback, 299 pages, $12.95, ISBN 0-86091-848-3. The most enjoyable treasure is that which is found in the most unlikely place. Who would have thought of looking in a history of …

The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, Harvill Secker, London 2014 Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago was published in 1957, my last year at secondary school, and led to the award for its author of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, my first year at university. David …