The tragic fate of the courageous Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg after he was seized by Soviet forces at the end of World War II has never been adequately explained. For more than four decades afterward, Soviet officials refused to explain why Wallenberg was detained or what happened to him afterward. Even after the Soviet Union broke apart, officials in Moscow were averse to divulging much information about Wallenberg. The book Auf den Spuren Wallenbergs , edited by Stefan Karner, brings together contributors from several countries who draw on the latest releases from Moscow archives and produce up-to-date essays about what is known at this stage about Wallenberg's mysterious disappearance.

This review essay provides a critical assessment of a book published in 2012 by Igor Lukes, On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague . Lukes's aim in the book is to explain why the United States failed to prevent Czechoslovakia from being absorbed into the Soviet bloc after the Second World War. Although the book is highly readable and contains useful information, it is professionally unbalanced. Lukes's generally acceptable conclusions are undermined by numerous factual and methodological mistakes. These flaws stem from Lukes's frequently insufficient historical critique of his sources, his neglect of other important documentation, and his tendency to ignore much of the relevant historical literature.

This article reviews the scholarship on Cold War sexuality issues prior to the 1969 Stonewall riots, paying particular attention to recent books by Robert J. Corber, Michael S. Sherry, and Jennifer V. Evans. The Cold War in the West affected both the lived and the discursive realities of sexual minorities in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, anxieties about the superpower rivalry facilitated regulatory frameworks and social demarcation lines that profoundly circumscribed the agency of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender groups and individuals. On the other hand, these borders and regulatory systems often backfired, subverted their intended function, or simply produced unintended consequences. Although repression of non-normative sexual and gender identities remained a fact of life during the first two-and-a half decades of the Cold War, it does not reveal the totality of the Cold War experience. The current research on Cold War sexualities demonstrates that Cold War culture can thus be best understood as a complex system in which fissures and breaks were as salient as the demand for uniformity and control.

This review essay examines the myth of Lech Wałęsa in Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Hope and the events before and during the Solidarity era in Poland. Man of Hope completes Wajda’s ambitious historical trilogy, consisting earlier of Man of Marble and Man of Iron . The film, in its attempt to restore myth, significantly departs from Wajda’s earlier post-ideological documentary style, which was characteristic of the cinema of moral anxiety. Wajda’s interpretation of the myth of Wałęsa as well as of Wajda’s (and Wałęsa’s) more ideological critics, notably Sławomir Cenckiewicz in Człowiek z teczki (Man with a Police File), does not always square well with the historical facts. Other recent perspectives on Wałęsa, including Danuta Wałęsa’s memoir, are crucial for a more rounded picture. Oriana Fallaci’s assessment of postmodern leaders, including Wałęsa, as much diminished in stature but more believable as real historical figures, seems the most appropriate judgment.

This review essay evaluates a lengthy new biography of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and his impact on Sino-Soviet relations. The lead author of the book, Aleksandr Pantsov, is one of the foremost Russian experts on China and Soviet policy toward East Asia, and his coauthor, Steven I. Levine, is a distinguished scholar of the history of Communist China. The authors have amassed a wealth of primary evidence, especially from the former Soviet archives, and have produced a first-rate book.

This review essay looks at Stephen Kotkin's acclaimed but controversial book, Uncivil Society . Although some aspects of Kotkin's analysis may be dubious, his approach overall is insightful and convincing. Kotkin gives due weight to mass mobilization, but he rightly focuses on the collapse of will within the Communist establishment.

Until recently, scholars of the Cold War had devoted little attention to the role of religion in the East-West standoff—its impact on events, institutions, and strategies. In recent years, however, this lacuna has begun to be filled by a burgeoning literature on different aspects of religion and the Cold War. The outpouring of scholarship has given a much more nuanced picture of how religion influenced U.S. foreign policy after 1945 both domestically and internationally. This article evaluates four recent books about the topic, distilling from them some of the key questions to be answered about the religious dimension of the Cold War.

The contribution of the U.S. intelligence community (IC) to counterinsurgency operations past and present has gone largely underappreciated, in part because of the pervasive secrecy surrounding most of the IC's activities. A review of two recently declassified histories of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s provides insight into the historical contributions of these agencies to counterinsurgency efforts. This analysis provides a context for understanding available evidence relating to the two agencies' contributions to current counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The review concludes with intelligence policy recommendations.

The Polish historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz, formerly of the Institute of National Memory, has produced a book discussing the life and impact of Anna Walentynowicz, whose dismissal from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in early August 1980, five months before she was scheduled to retire, became the catalyst for the formation of Solidarity. The appendices to Cenckiewicz's book consist of more than 300 densely printed pages of crucial documents from the former state security archives, and these make the volume worthwhile. As a biography, the book has notable shortcomings, in part because it contains a good deal of extraneous material and fails to discuss numerous parts of Walentynowicz's life. Even so, Cenckiewicz does successfully capture some aspects of Walentynowicz's character and activities. In time, better books about Walentynowicz will appear, but Cenckiewicz's volume will be an important source for future biographers.

Solidarity, the free Polish trade union that emerged in 1980, acted in close alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. The union's struggle for human dignity and freedom became a question of national redemption and often used religious symbols and rituals. Although one can argue whether Pope John Paul II was personally the fulcrum of revolt, Solidarity and the demise of Polish Communism are hard to imagine without him. Not surprisingly, the Polish security forces made vigorous efforts to penetrate the Polish Catholic Church, eventually enlisting as informants some 15 percent of the clergy. Recent revelations of extensive collaboration by priests, notably in Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski's acclaimed book, provide a valuable correction to the historical record but do not greatly detract from the overall image of the Church as having resisted Communism. The Church, among other things, served as a refuge for many in the darkest moments of the Communist era and helped to force change by throwing its support behind Solidarity.

This article reviews two recent collections of essays that focus on the role of popular culture in the Cold War. The article sets the phenomenon into a wide international context and shows how American popular culture affected Europe and vice versa. The essays in these two collections, though divergent in many key respects, show that culture is dynamic and that the past as interpreted from the perspective of the present is often reworked with new meanings. Understanding popular culture in its Cold War context is crucial, but seeing how the culture has evolved in the post-Cold War era can illuminate our view of its Cold War roots.

In critiquing a recent book by Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism , this article addresses fundamental questions about collective memories of Communism and the Soviet bloc: Why and how is “the past” remembered selectively? What happens when forgotten events are brought back to the fore of collective consciousness? What are the actual mechanisms of remembering? Who are the often invisible gatekeepers that direct the paths of our memories? Who are the influential rulers of memory attempting to shape our mnemonic repertoire? Scribner's book indirectly touches on these issues, though not in a fully satisfactory way, especially with regard to working-class life under Communism. Although the book does have some strong points, it too often fails to take account of how people in the region (as opposed to leftist intellectuals in the West who “knew” Communism vicariously) experienced manual labor during the Communist era and how they remember it now.

This article provides a critical review of Oczami Bezpieki (Through the Eyes of the Security Service), an overview of post-1945 Poland based on secret police files by Slawomir Cenckiewicz. The essay sheds light on the ongoing controversies surrounding the secret police files that still can cause turmoil in Polish politics. The article discusses the aggressive strategies of the Communist-era security apparatus in three areas considered in the volume: penetration of émigré communities in the United States; attempts to neutralize opposition to the Communist regime from 1968 through the 1980s; and the manipulation of the Roman Catholic Church. The documents demonstrate how obsessively the security forces kept track of opposition activities.

John L. Gaddis's classic 1982 book Strategies of Containment , now out in a revised and expanded edition, characterizes the Cold War strategies of successive U.S. administrations as either symmetric or asymmetric. The new edition of the book retains this distinction and applies it to the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Gaddis incorporates a few findings from research that has appeared since 1982, but the original text has undergone fewer revisions than one might have expected. Gaddis's general approach, and many of his specific claims, are bound to provoke objections, but historians and political scientists will find his analysis stimulating and provocative.

On 16 March 1978, the Marxist-Leninist Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro, Italy's paramount political figure of the time. The Italian government steadfastly refused to negotiate with the Red Brigades for Moro's life, and on 9 May the terrorists executed him. Conspiracy theories based on the logic of Cold War politics and involving accusations against subversive elements in the Italian government and the secret services of foreign governments, particularly the United States and Israel, quickly surfaced. These theories gained wide currency among the Italian public despite overwhelming evidence that the Red Brigades bore exclusive responsibility for the crime. This article surveys some of the recent literature on what is still an extremely controversial subject in Italy.

Throughout the Cold War the task of winning “hearts and minds” around the world was of great importance to Soviet and American leaders. Both sides fought a cultural Cold War via radio waves, television transmissions, propa-ganda, and other forms of psychological pressure. A number of recent books that draw on declassified U.S. government records have provided valuable in-sights into the American side of the cultural Cold War. The U.S. government employed military, political, diplomatic, and cultural means to influence for-eign and domestic opinion. The study of this phenomenon requires interdis-ciplinary methodological approaches. Diplomatic historians need to integrate the cultural and propaganda issues into their narratives, and cultural histori-ans need to pay greater heed to the themes raised in diplomatic historical accounts.

This article examines the relationship between politics and culture in Great Britain and the United States during the Cold War, with particular emphasis on the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The article critically examines several recent books on British and American Cold War cultural activities, both domestic and external. The review covers theatrical, cinematic, literary, and broadcast propaganda and analyzes the complex network of links between governments and private groups in commerce, education, labor markets, and the mass entertainment media. It points out the fundamental differences between Western countries and the Soviet bloc and provides a warning to those inclined to view Western culture solely through a Cold War prism.

The path that led to Austrian independence in 1955 has often been ignored in Cold War scholarship. Although Austria was a battleground for East-West conflict in Europe from 1945 to 1955, it often gets short shrift compared to the detailed analysis of Germany's role in the Cold War. This essay seeks to redress that imbalance, taking as a starting point the valuable new book by Günter Bischof, Austria and the First Cold War, 1945–1955 . Bischof's analysis is not uniformly convincing, but he makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of a neglected part of Cold War history. Although the book provides some helpful speculation about why the Soviet Union decided to sign the Austrian State Treaty after years of stalling, far more research on this particular issue is needed.

One of the leading specialists on the Soviet Union, Jerry Hough, has published a lengthy book analyzing events in the late 1980s and early 1990s that brought about the disintegration of the Soviet state. This essay challenges Hough's interpretations. It finds shortcomings both in his general approach and in many of his specific claims.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Western governments turned to radio as the most effective means of countering the Soviet information monopoly. U.S. and West European radio stations attempted to provide listeners with the kind of programs they might expect from their own radio stations if the latter were free of censorship. For most of these listeners in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the broadcasts were their only contact with the outside world. The importance of the foreign radio programs was confirmed not only by audience estimates, but also by the considerable efforts the Communist regimes made to jam the transmissions. Given the importance of foreign broadcasting for the political life of the Soviet bloc, it is remarkable that these broadcasts have received scant scholarly attention in the Western countries that sponsored them. The three books reviewed here help to fill that gap.