Abstract
On his first day in office, President Richard Nixon ordered a CIA analysis of world youth unrest.1 Nixon’s action emphasizes the clear connection between the 1968 youth movements and great power policy decisions. Since then, however, the vigorous fields of movement history and Cold War history have taken quite separate historiographical paths. Combined analyses of their interdependence have only recently taken off.2
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Notes
An earlier abridged version of this essay was published in K. Dubinsky et al., ed., New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009), 56–67, 440–443.
For a monograph-size argument, K. Rentola, Vallankumouksen aave: Vasemmisto, Beljakov ja Kekkonen 1970 (Helsinki: Otava, 2005).
Regarding Nixon, see Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 554.
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 216, 261, quoted later.
Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Cf. the subtitles of two seminal books: Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967–1977 (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001).
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Heinemann, 2005), 411. Pompidou, Mendès-France, and Mitterrand are mentioned.
Martin Wiklund, “Leninismens renässans i 1960-talets Sverige,” Den jyske Historiker 101 (July 2003).
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 383–384.
Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2002).
Carlo Feltrinelli, Senior Service (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001), 401. “Ghepeu” stands for GPU, the secret police.
Cf. the country articles in M. Klimke and J. Scharloth, eds, 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 294–295.
J. von Bonsdorff, Kun Vanha vallattiin (Helsinki: Tammi, 1988), 277–278.
Tore Forsberg, Spioner som spionerar pâ spioner (Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg 2003), 315.
Tariq Ali noted this in retrospect, looking at the cover of the first number (1968) of the Black Dwarf. T. Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 8–9.
Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 58.
Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009).
Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 208–209.
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 357–382.
Maud Bracke, Which Socialism, Whose Détente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis, 1968 (Budapest: Central European UP, 2007), 243, 250.
Boris Leibzon, “Communists in the Present World,” published in the CPSU CC Intl Dept Finnish-language bulletin, Sosialismin teoria ja käytäntö (hereafter STK), December 27, 1968. The Soviets began this publication after the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Finnish being as it is, the article titles are given in English. All STK articles were initially published in the Soviet press—except, possibly, Kositsyn’s, mentioned later—but for the sake of the argument it needs to be shown that the CPSU ideologists considered them fit for publication in Finnish.
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 202–206.
Anatoli Chernyaev, “Some Problems of the Labor Movement in Capitalist Countries,” STK, April 3, 1969. Much later, this author would show up as Gorbachev’s key advisor. His diary, now published, begins only in 1972.
M. A. Suslov, “Leninizm i revolyutsionnoe pereobrazovanie mira,” Kommunist no. 15, October 1969.
John Lee Anderson, Che: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 581.
B. N. Ponomarev, “V.I. Lenin—velikii vozhd revolyutsonnoi epokhi,” Kommunist, no. 18, December 1969.
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 290.
Csaba Békés, “The Warsaw Pact, the German Question and the Birth of the CSCE Process, 1961–1970,” in O. Bange and G. Niedhart, eds, Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 121–124.
M. E. Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente and Ostpolitik, 1969–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 19–21, 41.
J. Suomi, Taistelu puolueettomuudesta: Urho Kekkonen 1968–1972 (Helsinki: Otava, 1996), 466–468.
G. Niedhart, “Der alte Freund und der neue Partner: Die Bundesrepublik und Supermächte,” in D. Junker, ed., Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges 1945–1990, vol. II (Stuttgart: DVA, 2001), 48–50.
Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington D.C.: Brookings, 1985), 75–81, 175, 196.
Carl-Gustaf Scott, “Swedish Vietnam Criticism: Social Democratic Vietnam Policy a Manifestation of Swedish Ostpolitik?” Cold War History 9 (2009): 2.
See also Rhiannon Vickers, “Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party, and the War in Vietnam,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10 (2008): 2.
Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 216–217, quoting a political letter from the Soviet embassy in Hanoi, June 25, 1970.
Yuri Krasin, Sociology of Revolution: A Marxist View, trans. Jim Riordan (Moscow: Progress 1972), 201, 173.
The quote from Ponomarev in 1976, Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2011), 296.
For details and analysis, see David Kirby, A Concise History of Finland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
A. P. Kositsyn, “On the Ways to Build up the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” STK, January 22, 1970. In the same issue, Ponomarev’s article on revolutionary theory was published.
A. Belyakov and F. Burlatski, “Leninskaya teoriya sotsialisticheskoi revolyutsii i sovremennost,” Kommunist, no. 15, September 1960, 10–17. Here was the idea of peaceful advance to a socialist revolution on the basis of existing institutions and without distinct break; the best chances were in smaller nonmilitarized developed countries with neutralist tendencies and cooperation with socialist countries. A. S. Belyakov (b. 1917) held jobs in Zhdanov’s secretariat and then in the Central Committee apparatus. In 1957, he was picked by the Finnish-born politburo member O. V. Kuusinen for a seminal role in Khrushchevite ideological reconstruction, where he was a leading liberal (CPSU program committee minutes for the autumn of 1959, RGASPI, f. 586, op. 1, d. 66). In 1963, he was appointed deputy head and in 1965 the first deputy head of the International Department.
Kekkonen’s diary, May 11, 1970, Urho Kekkosen päiväkirjat, ed. J. Suomi, vol. 3 (Helsinki: Otava, 2003).
Melvyn P. Leffler, “Bringing it Together: The Parts and the Whole,” in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 44.
On the U.S. crisis, Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 549–555.
Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 513.
Yu. A. Krasin, Revolyutsiei ustrashennye (Moskva: Izd. pol. literatury, 1975), 133134, 157–158, 177 ff.
Kuisong Yang and Yafeng Xia, “Vacillating between Revolution and Détente: Mao’s Changing Psyche and Policy toward the United States, 1969–1976,” Diplomatic History 34 (2010), 401.
On the hot autumn, Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990), 207–41.
In his memoirs, a KGB political line officer claimed that the ambassador “downright showed off with this idea.” Albert Akulov, Vuodet Tehtaankadulla (Keuruu: Otava, 1996), 148.
And two KGB memoirs, Akulov (Vuodet Tehtaankadulla) and Viktor Vladimirov, Näin se oli … (Otava, 1993).
A. M. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva (Moskva: Mezhd. otnosheniya, 1994), 161–164.
Partially published in Aarne Saarinen, Kivimies (Helsinki: Otava, 1995), 199–201.
Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 154–157.
Keith H. Nelson, The Making of the Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 91.
Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London: Verso, 2001), 234.
For a fine analysis of the significance and consequences of the 1970s détente for the Soviets, see V. Zubok, “The Soviet Union and détente of the 1970s,” Cold War History 8 (2008): 4.
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© 2012 Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth, and Laura Wong
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Rentola, K. (2012). The Year 1968 and the Soviet Communist Party. In: Fahlenbrach, K., Klimke, M., Scharloth, J., Wong, L. (eds) The Establishment Responds. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119833_10
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