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During the Cold War, numerous [[anti-war]] movements were formed in [[democracy|democratic]] countries in the West. It has been claimed that some of these movements were used by the [[Soviet Union]] as a vehicle for Soviet propaganda, with the specific intention of reducing Western armaments and weakening Western states, and that some of them were funded by the Soviet Union.
During the [[Cold War]], the [[Soviet Union]] and [[USA]] competed for world hegemony by the [[arms race]]. Several times, when the Soviet military-industrial complex found itself unable to compete against new developments, [[KGB]] responded by propping up fake "[[peace movements]]" in Western countries, creating [[astroturfing]] campaigns against these developments. In other cases, the Soviets exploited existing Western peace movements as well as [[anti-war]] and [[pacifist]] sentiments, in order to influence Western [[public opinion]] and [[democracy|democratic]] governments to reduce the build-up of arms in the West.


==Russian Revolution and the Polish-Soviet War==
==Russian Revolution and the Polish-Soviet War==

Revision as of 22:23, 16 July 2009

During the Cold War, numerous anti-war movements were formed in democratic countries in the West. It has been claimed that some of these movements were used by the Soviet Union as a vehicle for Soviet propaganda, with the specific intention of reducing Western armaments and weakening Western states, and that some of them were funded by the Soviet Union.

Russian Revolution and the Polish-Soviet War

The Bolsheviks aimed at spreading their revolution by the use of force, linking the revolution in Russia with an expected revolution in Germany and assisting other Communist movements in Western Europe. Poland, in particular, was the geographical bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to do so and thus Soviets had been preparing their own strike against Poland even before the Polish Kiev Offensive; they planned to take over Galica, and use the conquered ethnic Polish territories as a springboard for the invasion of Germany and other European countries.[1][2][3][4]

Soviet leadership's confidence soared after their victories in the Polish-Soviet War in the summer of 1920. At a closed meeting of the 9th Conference of the Russian Communist Party on September 22, 1920, Lenin said:

...the defensive war against imperialism was over, we won it... We could and should take advantage of the military situation to begin an offensive war... we should poke about with bayonets to see whether the socialist revolution of the proletariat had not ripened in Poland... somewhere near Warsaw lies not [only] the center of the Polish bourgeois government and the republic of capital, but the center of the whole contemporary system of international imperialism, and that circumstances enabled us to shake that system, and to conduct politics not in Poland but in Germany and England.[5]

Soviet communist theorist Nikolay Bukharin, writer for the newspaper Pravda, wished for the resources to carry the campaign beyond Warsaw "right up to London and Paris".[6] General Tukhachevsky's order of the day, 2 July, 1920 read: "To the West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration. March on Vilno, Minsk, Warsaw!"[7] and "onward to Berlin over the corpse of Poland!"[2]

However, the Soviet propaganda, aimed at the international scene, would deny any visions of conquest:

But our enemies and yours deceive you when they say that the Russian Soviet Government wishes to plant communism in Polish soil with the bayonets of Russian Red Army men. A communist order is possible only where the vast majority of the working people are penetrated with the idea of creating it by their own strength. Only then can it be solid; for only then can communist policy strike deep roots in a country. The communists of Russia are at present striving only to defend their own soil, their own constructive work; they are not striving, and cannot strive, to plant communism by force in other countries.”[8]

This propaganda, accepted at faith by the communist sympathizers throughout Europe, would serve to alienate Poland on the international scene. In July 1920, British government announced it would send huge quantities of World War I surplus military supplies to Poland, but a threatened general strike by the Trades Union Congress, who objected to British support of "White Poland", ensured that none of the weapons destined for Poland left British ports. On August 6, 1920, the British Labour Party published a pamphlet stating that British workers would never take part in the war as Poland's allies, and labour unions blocked supplies to the British expeditionary force assisting Russian Whites in Arkhangelsk. French Socialists, in their newspaper L'Humanité, declared: "Not a man, not a sou, not a shell for reactionary and capitalist Poland. Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live the Workmen's International!"[citation needed] Poland also suffered setbacks due to sabotage and delays in deliveries of war supplies, when workers in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany refused to transit such materials to Poland.[failed verification][2]

Eventually, the Soviets were defeated at the battle of Warsaw and the resulting Treaty of Riga was favorable to Poland. According to the British historian A.J.P. Taylor, the Polish-Soviet War "largely determined the course of European history for the next twenty years or more. […] Unavowedly and almost unconsciously, Soviet leaders abandoned the cause of international revolution." It would be twenty years before the Bolsheviks would send their armies abroad to 'make revolution'.[4][9] According to American sociologist Alexander Gella "the Polish victory had gained twenty years of independence not only for Poland, but at least for an entire central part of Europe.[10]

Support for the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

London's Daily Worker, with an anti-war editorial policy supporting the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1940, accused Sir Walter Citrine, the General Secretary of Britain's Trades Union Congress, of "plotting with the French Citrines to bring millions of Anglo-French Trade Unionists behind the Anglo-French imperialist war machine". Citrine sued and the case turned into a display of the Daily Worker's editorial position as being directed from the Soviet Union.[11]

Cold War

Funding peace movements

It has been claimed that non-communist peace movements without overt ties to the USSR were in fact were "virtually controlled" by it[12] and that most of their supporters - so-called "useful idiots" - were unwitting instruments of Soviet propaganda.[12][13][14] A witness at a US congressional hearing on Soviet covert activity said the goals of such organizations were to "spread Soviet propaganda themes and create false impression of public support for the foreign policies of Soviet Union."[13]

Soviet peace propaganda was led by the World Peace Council.[12][13] Organizations said to be "closely connected" with it include the World Federation of Trade Unions, World Federation of Democratic Youth, International Union of Students,[13] Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization, Christian Peace Conference, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, International Federation of Resistance Movements, International Institute for Peace, International Organization of Journalists, Women's International Democratic Federation and World Federation of Scientific Workers.[15] It has been claimed that the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs[14][16] and the Dartmouth Conferences[17] were used by Soviet delegates to promote Soviet propaganda.

According to Russian GRU defector Stanislav Lunev, during the Vietnam War the USSR gave $1 billion to American anti-war movements, more than it gave to the VietCong.[18] Lunev described this as a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost".[18]

Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general convicted in absentia of spying for the West in Moscow in 2002, said that "the Soviet intelligence was really unparalleled. ... The KGB programs - which would run all sorts of congresses, peace congresses, youth congresses, festivals, women's movements, trade union movements, campaigns against U.S. missiles in Europe, campaigns against neutron weapons, allegations that AIDS ... was invented by the CIA ... all sorts of forgeries and faked material - [were] targeted at politicians, the academic community, at the public at large."[19]

Opposition to US nuclear weapons in Europe: funding anti-nuclear movements

Russian former intelligence officer and SVR defector Sergei Tretyakov claimed that the KGB "created the myth of nuclear winter"[20], specifically to boost the anti-war movement at the West.[citation needed] Sergei, a former Colonel in the Russian KGB/SVR that defected to the United States in 2000, says during the 1970s the KGB wanted to prevent the United States from deploying Pershing II cruise missiles in Western Europe. The plan, under KGB Director Yuri Andropov, aimed at fostering popular opposition to the deployment included a massive disinformation campaign requiring false scientific reports from the Soviet Academy of Sciences[20] and funding to European anti-nuclear and peace groups opposed to arms proliferation.[citation needed] The Soviet Peace Committee, a government organization, spearheaded the effort by funding and organizing demonstrations in Europe against the US bases.[20] The KGB propagandists then went to work creating two different scientific studies to be released from the Main Geophysical Observatory and the Institute of Terrestrial Physics but never submitted for peer review. The second study, using the findings from the first, concluded that temperatures across Europe would plunge after the use of nuclear weapons in Germany from dirt launched into the atmosphere blocking the sun's rays. The Soviet propaganda was then distributed to sources within environmental, peace, anti-nuclear, and disarmament groups including the publication Ambio.[20] The concept hit mainstream from there and propelled into popular culture with the help of Carl Sagan.[21][failed verification]

It has also been claimed that the Nobel Prize winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War was "closely connected" with the World Peace Council and was used as a platform for Soviet propaganda by its Soviet members.[16][17][17]

See also

References

  1. ^ Davies, Norman, White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20, Pimlico, 2003, ISBN 0-7126-0694-7. (First edition: New York, St. Martin's Press, inc., 1972.) Page 29
  2. ^ a b c THE REBIRTH OF POLAND. University of Kansas, lecture notes by professor Anna M. Cienciala, 2004. Retrieved 2 June 2006.
  3. ^ Richard Pipes, David Brandenberger, Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, The unknown Lenin: from the secret archive, Yale University Press, 1999, ISBN 0300076622, Google Print, p.6-7
  4. ^ a b Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508105-6, Google Print, p.106
  5. ^ English translation quoted from Richard Pipes, RUSSIA UNDER THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME, New York, 1993, pp.181–182, with some stylistic modification in par 3, line 3, by A. M. Cienciala. This document was first published in a Russian historical periodical, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, vol. I, no. 1., Moscow,1992 and is cited through THE REBIRTH OF POLAND. University of Kansas, lecture notes by professor Anna M. Cienciala, 2004. Retrieved 2 June 2006.
  6. ^ Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, Oxford University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-19-502697-7, Google Print, p. 101
  7. ^ Battle Of Warsaw 1920 by Witold Lawrynowicz; A detailed write-up, with bibliography. Polish Militaria Collectors Association. Retrieved 5 November 2006.
  8. ^ EH Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, volume 3, p.165, London
  9. ^ Davies, Norman, White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20, Pimlico, 2003, ISBN 0-7126-0694-7. (First edition: New York, St. Martin's Press, inc., 1972.)Page ix.
  10. ^ Aleksander Gella, Development of Class Structure in Eastern Europe: Poland and Her Southern Neighbors, SUNY Press, 1988, ISBN 0-88706-833-2, Google Print, p. 23
  11. ^ "Reds, Labor and the War". Time (magazine). 13 May 1940.
  12. ^ a b c Richard Felix Staar, Foreign policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0817991026, p.79
  13. ^ a b c d Richard Felix Staar, Foreign policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0817991026, p.84
  14. ^ a b Richard Felix Staar, Foreign policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0817991026, p.86
  15. ^ Richard Felix Staar, Foreign policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0817991026, p.80-81
  16. ^ a b Richard Felix Staar, Foreign policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0817991026, p.82-83
  17. ^ a b c Richard Felix Staar, Foreign policies of the Soviet Union, Hoover Press, 1991, ISBN 0817991026, p.87
  18. ^ a b Stanislav Lunev. Through the Eyes of the Enemy: The Autobiography of Stanislav Lunev, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998. ISBN 0-89526-390-4
  19. ^ An interview with retired KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, CNN
  20. ^ a b c d Pete Earley, "Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War", Penguin Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-399-15439-3, pages 169-177
  21. ^ Time (1985) briefly noted the disappearance in Madrid of Vladimir Alexandrov, the man who created the mathematical model for the Nuclear Winter theory released in the study from the Institute of Terrestrial Physics, in 1985. ("Another Return from the Cold"–Oct. 07, 1985.)
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