NEH Institute: The Cold War, Primary Sources

Spanning the era from the Gilded Age to the Obama years, this unique reader collects more than two hundred documents--everything from presidential addresses and diplomatic cables to political cartoons and song lyrics. It encompasses various phases of American diplomatic history that are typically treated separately, such as the First World War, the Cold War, and 9/11. The book presents the perspectives of elite policymakers--presidents, secretaries of state, generals, and diplomats--alongside those of other kinds of Americans, such as newspaper columnists, clergymen, songwriters, poets, and novelists. It also features numerous documents from other countries, illustrating how foreigners viewed America's role in the world.

Prepared for a conference on United States Intelligence and the End of the Cold War. Contains declassified CIA documents of intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe covering the years 1989-1991.

The Cold War section of Yale Law School's Avalon Project contains primary sources documents in such areas as Soviet-American Diplomacy, the Warsaw Pact, the 1960 U2 Incident, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The first book to document, analyze, and interpret the history of the Warsaw Pact based on the archives of the alliance itself. As suggested by the title, the Soviet bloc military machine that held the West in awe for most of the Cold War does not appear from the inside as formidable as outsiders often believed, nor were its strengths and weaknesses the same at different times in its surprisingly long history, extending for almost half a century. The lengthy introductory study is followed by 193 documents, most of them top secret when created and have only recently been obtained from Eastern European archives by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, an international consortium of scholars. The majority of the texts have never appeared in English before, and each of them is accompanied by explanatory remarks.

Allan M. Winkler excerpts speeches by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to demonstrate the growing abyss between the two political systems. President Harry S. Truman's announcement of the existence of a Soviet atomic bomb and his speech to Congress launching the Truman Doctrine testify to the gravity of the situation. The cold war was not always "cold"--armed conflicts were narrowly avoided in the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs, and war did erupt in Korea and Vietnam. The complex politics of the Vietnam War are represented by voices as divergent as Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh, President Lyndon B. Johnson, antiwar protesters, and a participant in the My Lai massacre. Cold war paranoia permeated American society. The investigations of writer Ring Lardner, Jr., and government official Alger Hiss by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, along with speeches by Senator Joe McCarthy, lay bare the political repression at home generated by the perceived communist threat.

Stretching from the end of World War II to 1989, the Cold War between the Western powers and the Communist bloc shaped national alliances around the world. In 18 chapters, the "Almanac "treats the historic causes of the tension; the mutual suspicions that fueled the conflict for more than 40 years; the ideological clash between communism and democracy; and the policies that marked the long standoff -- the Marshall Plan, Truman's Point Four program, the nuclear arms race, economic aid, the Berlin Wall, detente; and much more. Also covered are the times when the Cold War burst into armed conflict in such areas as Korea, Cuba and Southeast Asia. "Biographies" presents approximately 25 intriguing stories of the lives and actions of Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and many others, both famous and less well-known.Giving first-hand views of various aspects of the Cold War, "Primary Sources" provides fully annotated, complete and excerpted documents and other sources, including the many and often shifting alliances that marked the period.

An extensive revision of the valued but unobtainable 1960 edition. Nearly 300 key documents are now readily available in translation.

This volume presents the complete correspondence between President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev. The correspondence between these two leaders was unique in a number of ways. It gave rise to the first informal written exchange between Cold War leaders. Its existence as a reliable, direct, and quick channel of communications was instrumental in avoiding international catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a key early contributor to the learning process that over several decades allowed leaders of the two nations to communicate with each other with growing mutual understanding and eventually trust. In the field of arms control, the exchange allowed President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev to haggle over the details of an arms control agreement; in later years that function was assumed by growing arms control bureaucracies and standing delegations.

The transcripts of some of Kissinger's highest level, most secret conversations with world leaders.

This book explores Soviet prosecution records to tell the hidden story of ordinary citizens who were arrested for expressing discontent during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years.

Based on secret transcripts of top-level diplomacy undertaken by the number-two Soviet leader, Anastas Mikoyan, to settle the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, this book rewrites conventional history. The "missiles of October" and "13 days" were only half the story: the nuclear crisis actually stretched well into November 1962 as the Soviets secretly planned to leave behind in Cuba over 100 tactical nuclear weapons, then reversed themselves because of obstreperous behavior by Fidel Castro. The highly-charged negotiations with the Cuban leadership, who bitterly felt sold out by Soviet concessions to the United States, were led by Mikoyan.

In this monumental work, Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky offer a panoramic history of Soviet theater from the Bolshevik Revolution to the eventual collapse of the USSR. Making use of more than eighty years’ worth of archival documentation, the authors celebrate in words and pictures a vital, living art form that remained innovative and exciting, growing, adapting, and flourishing despite harsh, often illogical pressures inflicted upon its creators by a totalitarian government. It is the first comprehensive analysis of the subject ever to be published in the English language.

Drawing on documents newly available from Russian archives, this important book conclusively demonstrates the continuous and intimate ties between the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Moscow. Digging even deeper than the authors' earlier volume, The Secret World of American Communism, it conclusively demonstrates that the CPUSA was little more than a pawn of the Soviet regime.

This unique book contains 157 documents-- mostly letters to authorities from Soviet citizens, but also reports compiled by the secret police & Communist Party functionaries, internal government & party memoranda, & correspondence among party officials-- that show firsthand the events of the middle-Stalinist period. Annals of Communism series.

Edited by eminent historian Ronald Grigor Suny, this unique collection of primary documents and important scholarly articles frames both the revolutionary changes and broad continuities in Soviet history. Organized chronologically and covering political, social, and cultural history from a variety of viewpoints, selections include official pronouncements and dissident manifestos, public speeches, private letters, and previously un-translated documents. An introductory essay provides the broad outlines of Soviet history, while chapter introductions summarize the main features and historical debates of each period.

In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian, wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's widely debated idea of containing rather than militarily confronting the Soviet Union. A month later, to Lukacs's surprise, he received a personal reply from Kennan. So began an exchange of letters that would continue for more than fifty years.

The Venona secret US army project of the 1940's was a monumental achievement in this history of American code breaking and one of the America's most closely guarded secrets. This book exposes the greatest domestic counter-espionage operation that has ever been launched against the Soviet Union.

In July 1995, in a ceremony at CIA Headquarters, Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch released the first group of NSA's Venona translations to the public. The DCI announced that a public conference on the Venona story would be held in 1996 as soon as the declassification of the translations had been completed. This conference is now at hand and follows the release of the last set of Venona translations. Some 2,900 Soviet intelligence messages are now on the Internet and in hard copy at major archives around the country.