This issue begins with an article by Konstantin Tertitski and Fyodor Tertitskiy, who seek to explain the peculiar nature of North Korea's tyrannical dictatorship by looking at a formative experience of the founder of North Korean Communism, Kim Il-sung. Kim's official biography always presented him as a courageous leader of the Korean resistance to Imperial Japan in the late 1930s and 1940s, but the article shows that in fact Kim spent most of the war in the Soviet Red Army and imbibed the culture and practices he found there. His service in the Soviet armed forces had a crucial impact on the way he later set up North Korea's own military establishment, which came to be a central pillar of his regime, and on the economic and political structures he helped build from the mid-1940s on. Kim's years in the Red Army have received little attention from scholars (in part because scant documentation was available earlier), but the authors demonstrate, on the basis of a wide range of Russian, Korean, and Chinese archival and published sources, that an analysis of Kim's military service in the USSR sheds valuable light on the genesis and evolution of the North Korean polity as well as Kim's assertive role in the Cold War.
The next article, by James R. Stocker, discusses U.S. policy toward the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the USSR and the destructive war that resulted between newly independent Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1992–1994. The conflict emerged in early 1988, when an Armenian protest movement began urging the Soviet government to transfer control of Nagorno-Karabakh from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The conflict continued through the final few years of the Soviet Union and precipitated all-out war shortly after the USSR broke apart. Most accounts of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late 1980s and early 1990s have suggested that the administration of George H. W. Bush sought to avoid getting involved in the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute, but Stocker shows that in fact the U.S. government took an active role in trying to mediate the conflict and to prevent a large-scale war. U.S. officials were especially concerned that the conflict would endanger the position of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (and later the position of Russian President Boris Yeltsin). Even though the Armenian-Azerbaijani war was still under way when Bush left office in January 1993, the steps taken by his administration to try to curb the bloodshed underscored the U.S. government's interest in maintaining peace and stability in the southern Caucasus.
The next article, by Henry Prown, highlights the willingness of prominent leftwing intellectuals in the United States to offer lavish praise for the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and 1940s despite the violent terror and other mass repressions perpetrated by Joseph Stalin. Prown draws on files in former Soviet archives, especially those compiled by the Soviet-dominated Communist International (Comintern), to show how senior officials in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) aided the Soviet Union in recruiting American leftists (mostly non-Communists) to produce highly favorable assessments of the USSR. Some of the leftists and CPUSA members (including those at high levels of the U.S. government) were willing to go further and become spies for Soviet intelligence agencies, but Prown's chief focus is on the way leftwing U.S. artists, scientists, writers, and performers helped Stalin and the Comintern in their propaganda campaigns.
The next article, by Steven T. Usdin, recounts the espionage career of Vladimir Pravdin, the name used by Roland Abbiate after he became one of the most important Soviet intelligence officers in the United States during the Stalin era. Born in London in 1905, Abbiate/Pravdin rose through the ranks of the Soviet foreign intelligence service and engaged in numerous high-profile operations, including assassinations, warfare in Spain, surveillance of Leon Trotsky, and the stealing of extremely sensitive U.S. government secrets. Pravdin oversaw important rings of spies, including senior U.S. government officials such as Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Judith Coplon. His ostensible job as an editor and then director of U.S. operations for the Soviet TASS news agency facilitated contacts with influential U.S. journalists such as Walter Lippmann, the renowned commentator for The New York Herald Tribune, and I. F. Stone, the leftwing journalist who was willing to assist Pravdin's mission. Although Pravdin posed as a journalist, his main role was as a spy, and he proved a valuable asset for the Soviet Union in penetrating all spheres of life in the United States, easily overcoming the feeble counterintelligence efforts of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) before and during the Second World War. Not until the defections of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley at the end of the war was the FBI finally able to begin dismantling Soviet spy networks in the United States. The crackdowns on Soviet spies prompted the recall of Pravdin to the USSR in 1946. Even then, however, he continued to work for the Soviet foreign intelligence service, carrying out assignments in Europe. Usdin's article highlights the aggressive nature of Stalin's espionage operations in the United States before, during, and after World War II.
The next article, by He Yanqing, Cheong Kee Cheok, and Li Ran, discusses how the Communist regime in the People's Republic of China (PRC) led by Mao Zedong affected political developments in Southeast Asia in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War and decolonization. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had been waging a guerrilla war against the government in Malaya since 1948, but in 1955 Mao and Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai urged the MCP to hold peace talks with the Malayan authorities, which eventually took place in Baling at the end of December 1955. Mao and Zhou had expected that the Malayan government would readily comply with the PRC's wishes, but the Chinese leaders soon found that the Malayans, who were looking forward to full independence from Great Britain, had no desire to be subservient to China. Mao subsequently urged the MCP to resume its armed campaign, but the party made far less headway than it had in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The MCP continued to exist until the late 1980s, but it was unable to bring Malaysia under Communist rule.
The next article, by Simo Mikkonen and Antti Okko, discusses efforts in Finland to mitigate Cold War divides in the cultural sphere. In 1956, a regional Finnish town, Jyväskylä, had launched a summer music festival that brought in performers and instructors from various European countries. Starting in the mid-1960s, the festival organizers sought to involve well-known Soviet musicians. That effort posed numerous logistical, political, and economic challenges, but over a period of several years the Jyväskylä festival became an important venue for Western musicians and artists to interact with their Soviet counterparts against the backdrop of the Cold War. Mikkonen and Okko highlight the daunting obstacles that arose at various points on the Soviet side and the ways the Finnish organizers tried to overcome them, albeit with mixed success. The Finns who established close links with the USSR sought to maintain and expand Soviet participation in the Jyväskylä festival, but hopes of enlarging the effort were eventually dashed.
The final article, by David I. Goldman, discusses the East-West tensions over Berlin that lasted more than a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Some scholars, notably Marc Trachtenberg, have argued that the combination of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 engendered a lasting relaxation of the Cold War, putting an end to disputes that had earlier posed risks of war. Goldman shows that in fact disputes with the Soviet Union over U.S., British, and French access to West Berlin—the so-called Autobahn crises—continued to spawn serious tensions until late 1963, when the last of the showdowns were defused. The episode not only underscores the sensitivity of Berlin in the Cold War but also indicates how the murkiness of ad-hoc procedures can be dangerous during times of crisis.