1. What was the impact of the Cold War on the economy of the USSR?

Soviet nuclear missiles being paraded through Red Square at the height of the Cold War.

Starter:

1. Examine this cartoon. What is the message of this cartoon?

2. Also look at the propaganda poster at the top of the page which was entitled 'Same Year, Different Weather'.

The black thermometer is labeled "American Industry Rate."

What is the message of this poster regarding the Soviet economy?

The structure of the USSR's economy had been established before the war; the state remained in control and policy was projected in terms of successive Five-year plans. The central planning agencies continued to identity for the different branches of the economy output targets and resources.

Within this structure, the highest priority was given to the defence sector. The military had gained huge prestige from his victory in the war and Stalin was determined to ensure that the USSR was never again unprepared for war as it had been in 1941. With the escalation of Cold War tensions and a nuclear arms race, defence spending became even more more significant and impacted the whole economy. The proportion of GDP devoted to defence grew each year and remained steadily far above that of other countries, such as the US; the channeling of resources into military strength and development meant that spending on other areas such as consumer goods was limited. The USSR's economy remained focused on investment rather than consumption and on heavy industry rather than light industry and agriculture.

Industrial growth continued until the 1970s, but at this point the inbuilt limitations of the Stalinist economic model became more obvious, and the impact of the spending on defence and development of nuclear weapons became crippling given these limitations. Under Brezhnev, the economy stagnated and the costs of competing with Reagan's aggressive military build up in the early 1980s put further strains on the economy. Some estimates put the defence budget, by the time of Brezhnev's death at 30% of GNP - hence Gorbachev's attempts to save the economy by reducing the competition for nuclear weapons.

There are some interesting graphs on military spending compared to US spending here.

The space race was an integral part of the arms race and also the overall competition between communism and  capitalism The Soviet Union poured funding and its best scientists into this race, and their victories in launching the first satellite in 1957 and launching the first man (and first woman) into space, seemed to prove the superiority of Communism.

Task One

ATL: Thinking skills

As with the US, the Soviet Union also used economic measures to expand its influence. Whereas, in Europe, the USA used economic assistance to gain consent for capitalism, the USSR used economic measures via COMECON as a form of control to gain a tighter hold over eastern Europe.

The USSR's economy was further impacted by its use of financial assistance as a way of winning influence in newly decolonised countries. Soviet economic aid, often with military supplies, was given to countries such as Egypt, Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia in Africa and Cuba in Central America. Military support was also sent to North Vietnam and in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan which was to entrench it in a Vietnam style war. All of these commitments impacted on the economy of the USSR.

This cost of both overseas' commitments and spending on weapons by the time of Brezhnev's death meant that there was minimal investment in the economy as a whole and that the USSR fell behind in new industries such as information technology. In 1982, the Soviet Union possessed only one per cent of the amount of computers that existed in the USA.

Task Two

ATL: Thinking skills

Task Three

ATL: Thinking skills

2. How did the Cold War affect Soviet society?

The caption here reads: 'Space will be ours. Long live the first woman cosmonaut!'

Heroic women appeared in Cold War propaganda; this had the aim of showing that the Soviet union had achieved sexual equality.  In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space further highlighting the superiority of the Soviet system. However, particularly under Brezhnev, women were expected to play more traditional roles, and the tone of propaganda became much more conservative.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/nottingham/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8517000/8517622.stm

Starter:

What is the message of this Soviet poster?

As you have seen, in the US the fear of Communism, which intensified with the development of the Cold War, was all-pervasive; this fear, backed up and intensified by government laws, the actions of the FBI and the MacCarthy witch- hunts permeated US society after 1945 affecting the lives of thousands of Americans.

The social impact of the Cold War was not such a watershed for the Soviet population. Fear of outside ideologies and of eternal threats in general had been used since the 1920s as a reason for state sponsored terror and repression. The development of the Cold War was thus another chapter in this well-established trend. It was used - as the growth of Nazism in the 1930s had been used - as evidence of a continued foreign threat against which the Soviet population needed to be vigilant. Criticisms of the Soviet system or signs of western influence were to be condemned and severely dealt with; thus the terror continued after 1945. Under Khrushchev, the terror ended, but the consequences of being associated with any kind of western influence were still severe.

As Hanhimäki and Westad write, 'Even during the worst anti-Communist hysteria in the United states when leftists were hounded out of their professions and sometimes out of their country, their punishment for speaking out was in no way commensurate with the years in prison, labour camp or psychiatric hospital which awaited those Soviets, Czechs, or Hungarians who spoke out against their regimes'. (The Cold War, A history in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, OUP, 2003)

There was however a change in those who were specifically targeted. The intensified paranoia against the West led to a campaign against 'cosmopolitanism'. This was associated with Zhadanov (see below under culture) but also developed due to Stalin's own paranoia. 'Cosmopolitanism' led to an increase in anti-Semitism. Many Soviet Jews lost their posts in the Party or the bureaucracy. The 'Doctor's Plot' was one aspect of this wider suspicion of supposed evil Jewish influence. Cosmopolitanism also involved eliminating virtually any contact with the outside world. Prisoners of War who had been in the West and who returned home after the end of the war found themselves taken straight to camps for interrogation, or even killed for having supposedly colluded or been influenced by the West. After the war, only high ranking officials were allowed to travel to the West, marriage with foreigners was forbidden and foreign films, books and arts were denounced (see below).

Soviet people were bombarded with propaganda which showed the evils of capitalism and the superiority of the Communist system. This was done through posters and the media (see below) but also through state controlled education which portrayed the United States as "the last and most decadent stage of capitalism" and a crime-ridden society full of drugs and racism. History was also rewritten to highlight the Soviet Union's role in the Second World War (ignoring the pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939) and downplay the role of the West. In fact the Cold War saw a resurgence of Russian nationalism; the official line was that anything Russian was superior to that in the West. (see the impact of this on culture below).

Task One

ATL: Thinking skills

Tass was the Soviet government's news agency. All media was under the control of the Government and it was able to use the media to wage a propaganda war against the West. Tass, for example, claimed that the chemical explosion at Bhopal in India, which killed over 2000 people in 1948, was a US experiment to collect data on gas poisoning. It also claimed that the Americans had released the AIDS virus in order to kill the black population of Africa.

Task Two

ATL: Thinking skills

3. What was the impact of the Cold War on Soviet culture?

'Our literature, reflecting a system many times superior to any bourgeois democratic order, a culture many times higher than any bourgeois culture, has the right to teach other people a new, universal, human morality.'

Zhdanov, 1946

In the same way as anti-communist propaganda had fed into US culture, so the anti-Western propaganda in the Soviet Union impacted on all aspects of Soviet culture - though this was state-led in a way that, for the most part, did not happen in the US.

Task One

ATL: thinking skills

Since the 1930s, the Soviet government had censored the arts and promoted Socialist realism. However with the Cold War there was now a greater focus on ridding the arts of western influence and highlighting the superiority of the Soviet system over that of the West.  Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo, laid down strict guidelines for Soviet literature and other arts in an attempt to purify them of western 'bourgeois' influences. This was known as the 'Zhadanovshchina'.

Literature, music and art

The Zhadanovshchina' was started by a resolution in 1946 of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and initially directed against two literary magazines Zveda and Leningrade which were accused of having published apolitical, bourgeois works of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova who were expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. There was, according to Zhdanhov no place in Soviet literature for political neutrality. However the resolution went further than just attacking these two writers; it aimed to free Soviet culture from 'servility before the West'.

Repressive measures were  thus taken against any 'anti-Soviet elements' in all the arts. All foreign influences on Soviet literature were rejected and critics and literary historians were denounced for suggesting that Russian classics had been influenced by western writers such as Dickens or Rousseau for example. The State Museum of Modern Western Art was closed down and several composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev who were accused of having 'decadent Western influences' in their music were blacklisted. Leading composers were called in to meet Zhadanov who personally demonstrated 'acceptable' tunes on a piano!

In 1947, the Politburo issued a decree against a History of European Philosophy by G. F Aleksandrov who was the head of the Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda. According to the Politburo it did not include enough on Russia's contribution to the western philosophical tradition.

Science

Science was also attacked. In 1947 the Politburo launched a campaign against the scientists Nina Kliueva and her husband Grigorii Roskin who were accused of 'obeisances and servility before foreign and reactionary bourgeois Western culture unworthy of our people.' They had been on a tour of the USA in 1946 and were accused of having given information about their cancer research to the Americans. Nikolai Krementsov in his book 'Stalinist Science' writes: 'Having earlier encouraged Soviet scientists to cultivate international contacts, they now attacked those contacts in order to fuel the isolationist campaign; scientific internationalism was again damned and replaced with militant Soviet nationalism. This shift in foreign and domestic policy profoundly reshaped the cultural landscape of the Stalinist science system, dramatically changing the system's language and reinstalling ideologists as authorities over science'. (pg 131)

Cinema

Cinema was also used as a Cold War weapon with the villains of films being played by British or Americans. Movies in the 1940s were used to show that American propaganda was false. So the 'Meeting on the Elbe' claimed to show the real events of the liberation of Berlin and was used as a vehicle to dispute the US claims that Soviet soldiers had raped German women and pillaged German treasures. Films released throughout the late 1950s and 1960s focused on spreading a positive image of Soviet life, intent to prove that Soviet life was indeed better than American life.

Another tactic was to show Western movies which seemed to confirm the evils of the West and capitalism. You will have seen in the video above how the British film of the musical 'Oliver,' which was set in 19th century Britain, was used to show the current poverty of Western society! Similarly The Grapes of Wrath which showed US poverty in the 1930s during the Great Depression was used to give a very negative portrayal of the living standards of the West and the failures of capitalism.

4. What were the similarities and differences in the way the USA and the USSR were impacted by the Cold War?

Task One

ATL: Self-management skills