The representation of the Cold War: the Peace and the War camps in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1960

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the socialist representation of East and West Camps in Czechoslovakia, during the founding period of the 1950s. After investigating the origins of the Peace Movement, I analyse how the Peace and the War Camps were represented, and how the representation of ‘the other’ (in this case, the West) also revealed the (both idealised and actual) self-images and intents of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

Keywords:

• symbols
• Czechoslovakia
• representation
• Cold War
• East-West dichotomy

Notes

1. For an extended analysis of the May Day ritual, see Roman Krakovsky, Rituel du 1 ^er mai en Tchécoslovaquie 1948–1989 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004).

2. The German question, the Iran dispute over continued Soviet occupation of the Azerbaijan region of northern Iran, etc.

3. Benjamin Frankel (ed.), The Cold War 1945–1991. Vol. 3. Resources (Detroit, MI/Washington, DC/London: Gare Research Inc., 1992), 56–57.

4. Walter La Feber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945–1975 (New York: Wiley, 1976), 39. On the origins of the Cold War in the USA, see Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain. Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For Stalin's response to Churchill's speech, see his interview with Pravda correspondent (14 May 1946), http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/02/1st.draft/pravda.html.

5. Pravda, 23 March 1946. Quoted in Marshall D. Shulman, Stalin's Foreign Policy Reappraised (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 83.

6. Pravda, 29 October 1948.

7. Martin A. Schain (ed.), The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 132.

8. The Cominform, created in place of the Comintern, was dissolved in 1956.

9. For Zdhanov's speech at the founding meeting of the Cominform, see: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/04/documents/cominform.html.

10. The first among them, the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, was organised by Polish communists in August 1948, at Wroclaw. The congress was successful in attracting a number of prominent non-communists, including a British biologist Julian Huxley, an American Prosecutor on Nazi Sedition Trials, O. John Rogge, and the ‘red priest’ Abbé Boulier from France. Alexander Fadeyev, head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, provided the climax to the congress with a violently anti-American speech. Several International Peace Congresses followed, organized on the same basis, in Paris and New York (1949), in Wroclaw and Berlin (1950), in Vienna (1952), etc.

11. The poster for the Conference was designed by Pablo Picasso. He used his lithograph with the dove, which already was one of the most recognised symbols of peace.

12. Soviet Union, China, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, ‘free Greece’ and ‘democratic Spain’, Mongolia, Korea, Indonesia and the World Student Union.

13. In French: ‘Le Congrès Mondial des Partisans de la Paix proclamme hautement que la défense de la Paix est désormais l'affaire de tous les peuples’. See ‘Manifesto’, L'Humanité, 27 April 1949.

14. ‘Z Paříže a Prahy zní mohutný hlas národů světa za mír’ [From Paris and Prague rings out the huge voice of nations for peace], Rudé právo, 21 April 1949.

15. François Hartog, Le Miroir d'Hérodote. Essai sur la représentation de l'autre (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Bibliothèque des Histoires, 1991), 326.

16. Carl Schmitt, La Notion de politique suivi de La Théorie du partisan (Paris: Flammarion, collection Champs, 1992, first edn 1932), 64–65.

17. In answer to the Nobel Peace Prize, the Soviet Union created on 21 December 1949 the International Stalin Peace Prize. It was awarded to notable individuals who had ‘strengthened peace among peoples’. Following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress held in 1956, the prize was renamed the International Lenin Peace Prize.

18. General Hans Speidel (1897–1987) was, during the Second World War, the head of general staff of Rommel. He took part in the attempted assassination of Hitler in 1943 at Poltava (Ukraina). From April 1957 to September 1963, he was commander-in-chief of NATO forces in Europe.

19. The Pioneers were members of the Communist children organization Pionýr, comprising children from the age of nine, before joining the youth organization Československý svaz mládeže (ČSM).

20. ‘Jdou jednotné šíky, jdou’ [The columns march united], Rudé právo, 2 May 1957.

21. In Eastern Europe, spreading or propagating war was condemned and prosecuted under the law. For Czechoslovakia, see Zákon na ochradu míru 165/1950.

22. Mondher Kilani, ‘Découverte et invention de l'autre dans le discours anthropologique. De Christophe Colomb à Claude Lévi-Strauss’, in L'Invention de l'autre. Essais sur le discours anthropologique, ed. Mondher Kilani (Lausanne: Payot, Coll. Sciences humaines, 1994), 68.

23. British Prime Minister from October 1951 to April 1955.

24. Archives of the Press Agency ČTK, picture FO01226557 (František Nesvadba).

25. Archives of the Press Agency ČTK, picture FO01226558 (František Nesvadba).

26. From 1953 to 1959, De Gaulle leads a quiet life in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises and does not play any role in French politics.

27. Howard F. Stein, ‘Psychological Complementarity in Soviet-American Relations’, Political Psychology 2 (1985), 257.

28. In Czech, the slogan ‘Brigades and tractors will destroy these monsters’ uses also the melody of the phrase: ‘Úderky a traktory zničí tyhle potvory!’. See ‘Se sovětským svazem za mír, za vlast, za socialismus’, Mladá fronta, 3 May 1950.

29. ‘Slavný 1. máj v Ostravě’, Mladá fronta, 3 May 1950.

30. In Czech, the slogan plays on the comic character of the phrase: ‘Budte zticha, atomčíci, atom vám dá na palici!’. See ‘Míru patří naše srdce – násilníkům pěst’, Mladá Fronta, 2 May 1951.

31. ‘Slavný 1. máj v Ostravě’, Mladá fronta, 3 May 1950.

32. Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris : Gallimard, 1991).

33. Sigmund Freud, L'Inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 251 et seq.

34. Vamik D. Volkan, ‘The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: A Developmental Approach’, Political Psychology 2 (1985), 219–247.

35. Ofer Zur, ‘The Love of Hating. The Psychology of Enemy’, History of European Ideas 4 (1991): 345–369.

36. Czech National Archives, Centrální katalog FFKD, 1952, picture 40391/52.

37. The first Soviet atomic test was on 29 August 1949. It was a replica of the American Fat Man bomb whose design the Soviets knew from espionage.

38. The first Soviet test of a hydrogen bomb was on 12 August 1953. However, it was more a ‘boosted’ fission bomb than a staged thermonuclear device.

39. Vilho Harle, ‘European Roots of Dualism and Its Alternatives in International Relations’, in European Values in International Relations, ed. Vilho Harle (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990), 10.

40. Czech National Archives, Centrální katalog FFKD, 1951, picture 38224/52.

41. Archives of the Czech Press Agency ČTK, 1957, pictures FO01087357, FO01087359 and FO01226564. The funeral of NATO is not a coincidence. The NATO was originally founded to defend Peace. After the creation of the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, it was not possible to admit that ‘the other’ shared the same objective. It would have meant that the two camps were, fundamentally, the same.

42. ‘Pohřeb v průvodu’, Rudé právo, 2 May 1957.

43. ‘Strhující proud radosti a odhodlání’, Rudé právo, 2 May 1958.

44. The bipolar conception of the world in the Russian inter-war culture was analysed by Katherine Clark in The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) and Victoria E. Bonnel, Iconography of Power. Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).