Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Edward Geist on a topic that generated fierce controversy during the Cold War: the extensive Soviet civil defense program designed to withstand the effects of nuclear war. For many years, Western analysts and government officials were sharply divided in their assessments of Soviet civil defense, and the paucity of evidence hindered attempts to look into the true nature of the program. Geist’s article, focusing on the period from Iosif Stalin’s death in 1953 to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, is the first attempt in the post–Cold War era to go back and reevaluate Soviet civil defense on the basis of archival evidence and other information that has become available since 1991. He argues that the Soviet program was more complex than often portrayed by the contending sides in the debate. Geist shows that the construction of civil defense shelters in the USSR in the 1950s absorbed huge amounts of scarce resources, but he maintains that Soviet leaders viewed the shelter program not as a contributor to victory in a nuclear war or as a means of intimidating Western leaders but as a last-ditch measure to cope with a disaster. Hence, Geist believes U.S. fears of a perilous “gap” in civil defense during this period were overblown.

The next article, by László Borhi, looks at U.S. and British policy toward Hungary during World War II. He argues that U.S. and British leaders were so preoccupied with opening a second front on the western flank of Europe that they did not seriously respond to overtures in 1943 from Hungarian (and Romanian) officials who were seeking to extricate their countries from Germany’s embrace and to realign their policies with the Allies. According to Borhi, the U.S. and British governments were eager to spread German forces thin to bolster the likelihood of a successful Allied landing on France’s Atlantic coast, and hence they paid little heed to Hungary’s peace overtures. Borhi claims that U.S. and British officials thus actually welcomed Germany’s invasion of Hungary in 1944 because it diverted German forces. The invasion led to the destruction of Hungary’s large Jewish community, an outcome that, in Borhi’s view, Allied leaders were willing to risk, if only with grave misgivings. Not only did the events result in tragic consequences for Hungarian (and Romanian) Jews; they also helped to shape the postwar political fate of Hungary.

The third article, by Aryo Makko, is a reassessment of Sweden’s adherence to a neutral foreign policy during the Cold War. Looking at Sweden’s approach to the European Communities (EC) and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in the 1970s, he finds that neutrality did not prevent Sweden from embracing an active (some would say sanctimonious) foreign policy in various parts of the Third World but did inhibit it from becoming involved in “European” affairs, including both the CSCE and the EC. Although Sweden took part in the CSCE, it sought a low-key role, and it declined to pursue membership in the EC. Makko shows that even as Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme loudly proclaimed support for justice and human rights in distant parts of the Third World, his government kept silent about egregious human rights abuses much closer to home, in the Soviet bloc. Palme vocally condemned U.S. actions in Vietnam, but he could not bring himself to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sweden’s reluctance to adopt an active stance in Europe throughout the Cold War raises disturbing questions about the moral basis of Swedish neutrality.

The fourth article, by Simo Mikkonen, discusses the U.S. government’s efforts in the early 1950s to enlist Soviet émigrés, especially those in the United States and West Germany, in waging a broad political offensive against Soviet rule. Mikkonen’s analysis complements the article by Ieva Zake in the Summer 2010 issue of the JCWS, which discussed how the Soviet authorities tried to exploit Latvian émigré groups in the United States for Moscow’s own purposes. In the early years...