Professor James G. Hershberg Office Hours: Tues. 1:30-3:30 p.m.
Department of History (Phillips 326) Office Telephone: (202) 994-6476
George Washington University E-mail: jhershb@gwu.edu
HISTORY 297.12:
SPECIAL TOPICS:
RETHINKING COLD WAR HISTORY
Spring 2004 Semester:
Wed. 4:10-6 p.m.
Rome 771
CRN #25781
SUMMARY: This graduate-level seminar explores the history of the Cold War, the superpower rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union that dominated international relations for nearly half a century, from the close of World War II until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The course will focus on major events and interpretations with a special emphasis on newly-available materials documents from both Eastern and Western archives and their impact on previous historiography. It will be based on a series of lectures, discussions, and readings of both primary and secondary sources, with the principal requirement a research paper of approximately 30 pages due at the end of the semester. The paper will require an exploration of a theme, episode, or aspect of Cold War history, utilizing primary sources to reassess existing historiography, memoirs, and other available public accounts on the topic.
Particularly encouraged will be research that takes advantage of the local availability of materials of the U.S. National Archives II, in College Park, MD; of the National Security Archive, a repository of declassified government documents on contemporary U.S. foreign policy located on the 7th-floor of Gelman Library; and the publications and resources of the Cold War International History Project (located at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.), which collects, publishes, analyzes, and disseminates materials from formerly closed archives of the former communist bloc. Many of the assigned readings and potential resources for your papers are available at the websites of these two organizations: www.cwihp.si.edu and www.nsarchive.org (note that some programs no longer require the initial “www.”). Topics should also be designed to enable use of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series of compilations of declassified U.S. government documents published by the State Department and, for the most part, available in Gelman Library, the History Department conference room, and/or the GWU Law School Library, and covering events through the late 1960s (declassified documentation for some later events is available at the National Security Archive). Recent FRUS volumes as well as selected official declassified documents (such as the recent releases on Chile) can also be searched on and downloaded from the State Department’s website (www.state.gov—follow the prompts for History Office and/or Freedom of Information Act). Being in Washington, DC, also provides excellent opportunities, in many cases, for oral history interviews to supplement documentary research.
This combination of sources—particularly on events such as the Berlin or Cuban Missile Crises, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, the Sino-Soviet split, etc., for which substantial fresh documentation on the policies of the "other (communist) side" is available—should enable the papers to assess comparatively the motives, perceptions, and actions of U.S. and Soviet/communist foreign policy makers. Ideally, the term paper could constitute the first draft of an article of a quality, originality, and significance to merit submission to an academic journal. (A good test of whether your topic is historically significant is whether the paper will enable you to correct, contradict, modify, or elaborate on the account or interpretation given in such standard survey texts as LaFeber's America, Russia, and the Cold War or Warren I. Cohen’s America in the Age of Soviet Power; memoirs of key participants; and/or contemporary press/media coverage.) Before embarking on the paper, students should read E.H. Carr's What Is History? if they have not already done so.
As indicated below, during the semester there will be several occasions to review progress on the term paper. A written paper proposal of 2-3 pp., giving the principal questions to be addressed, topics to be explored, and sources to be used, is due in class on Feb. 11; the final paper is due in the History Department office by the end of business on Monday, May 10. In between, students are welcomed to stop by during office hours to review progress on the paper, and/or to e-mail inquiries. Late papers are subject to penalty, as are papers that have not been proofread and contain obvious writing errors. IMPORTANT NOTE: Citations to sources should be complete, including both full descriptions of the original documents (author, date, title, addressee, etc.) as well as the details of their locations in an archive, a publication such as FRUS, or quotation in a secondary source.
GRADING: Grades will be determined roughly on the following basis: class participation, discussion, and presentation--25%; final paper--75%
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague
Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War behind the Iron Curtain
Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War
Alexander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb
Kenneth M. Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan and Roberts “Long Telegrams” of 1946
Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men
Ralph B. Levering, ed., Debating the Origins of the Cold War: Russian and American Perspectives
Mary Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969-1973
Vladislav M. Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
Plus readings from the Cold War International History Project's Bulletin and Working Papers on reserve in the History Department (Phillips Hall, 3rd floor) and available free on the World Wide Web at cwihp.si.edu, and from the National Security Archive’s website at www.nsarchive.org
OFFICE HOURS: I will be available in my office in Phillips 326 on Tuesday afternoons from 1:30-3:30 p.m. Students are welcome to show up without an appointment. I can be reached by telephone at (202) 994-6476 and by e-mail at jhershb@gwu.edu. Technical questions regarding deadlines for pass/fail, add/drop, registration, forms, credit, etc., should be directed to the History Department secretary's office in Phillips 335 at 994-6230.
CLASS SCHEDULE:
Wed., Jan. 14: Introduction/Overview: The “New” Cold War History
Wed., Jan. 21: Cold War Origins, I
Recommended Reading (on new sources): Mark Kramer, "Archival Research in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls," CWIHP Bulletin 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 1, 18-39
Wed., Jan. 28: Cold War Origins, II: The Division of Germany and Europe and the Creation of the Alliance System
Assigned Reading: Gaddis, We Now Know, chaps. 2, 5; Melvyn P. Leffler, "The Cold War: What Do 'We Now Know'?" American Historical Review 104:2 (April 1999), pp. 501-524 (on reserve); CWIHP Working Paper no. 14 (Ruud van Dijk)
Wed., Feb. 4: The Atomic Bomb in the Early Cold War
Assigned Reading: Gaddis, We Now Know, chap. 4; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (entire, but can skim sections on scientists and can focus on sections dealing with Stalin and Soviet strategy); CWIHP Bulletin #4 (section on Soviet atomic espionage) (on reserve).
Wed., Feb. 11: The Rise of the Cold War in Asia
Assigned Reading: Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, intro., chaps. 1-2;
Gaddis, We Now Know, chap. 3; CWIHP Bulletin #5 (Weathersby, "To Attack or Not to Attack?"), CWIHP Bulletin #6/7 (“Stalin’s Conversations with Chinese Leaders,” documents and commentaries by Westad, Zubok, Mastny, Chen Jian);
* 2-3 pp. proposal for paper due
Wed., Feb. 18: The Cold War Turns Hot: The Korean War
Assigned Reading: Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, chap. 4; CWIHP Bulletin #6/7 (Mansourov article and accompanying documents)
Recommended: CWIHP Bulletin #6/7 (Weathersby article & documents (skim); Bajanov article), #8/9 (articles by Shen Zhihua and Dieter Heinzig, pp. 237-42), and #11 (documents on biological warfare, commentary by Weathersby and Leitenberg)
Wed., Feb. 25: The Post-Stalin Succession Struggle, the Communist World in Crisis, and the Rise of Nikita Khrushchev
Assigned Reading: Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, chaps. 5-7; Gaddis, We Now Know, chap. 7; CWIHP Bulletin #8/9 (feature on Kremlin decision-making and 1956 Hungary/Poland Crises, pp. 355-410) and CWIHP Bulletin 10 (feature on CPSU CC Plenums, 1953-57), pp. 7-60; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, chap. 6
Wed., March 3: Inside the Covert Cold War
Assigned Reading: Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men (entire); Grose, Operation Rollback (entire); article on Stalin’s Plan to Assassinate Tito in CWIHP Bulletin 10
Wed., March 10: The Sino-Soviet Split
Assigned Reading: Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, chap. 3; David Wolff, CWIHP Working Paper #30; article by Hal Ford from Studies in Intelligence on the CIA’s analysis of the split (handout); article and documents on 1958 & 1959 Mao-Khrushchev conversations in CWIHP Bulletin 12/13
Wed., March 17: NO CLASS—SPRING BREAK
Wed., March 24: Germany and Berlin, from Crisis to Detente
Assigned Reading: Hope M. Harrison, “Ulbricht and the Concrete ‘Rose’” (CWIHP Working Paper no. 5, available at cwihp website); Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil
(entire)
Wed., March 31: On the Brink: The Cuban Missile Crisis
Assigned Reading: Naftali and Fursenko, "One Hell of a Gamble" (entire); Gaddis, We Now Know, chap. 9;
Recommended: articles and documents on Cuban Missile Crisis in CWIHP Bulletins #5 and #8/9, and electronic briefing books on Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis on National Security Archive website (www.nsarchive.org)
Wed., April 7: The Crisis of Containment: Vietnam
Assigned Reading: Cold War International History Project Bulletin #6/7 (articles by Gaiduk and Zhai Qiang on Soviet and Chinese roles in the Vietnam War) (on reserve); Cold War International History Project Working Papers #7 (Bradley/Brigham), #18 (Zhai Qiang), and #22 (“77 Conversations…”); Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, chaps. 5, 8
Recommended: Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1996); Zhai Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam (UNC Press, 2001)
Wed., April 14: Triangular Diplomacy and the Rise and Fall of Detente
Assigned Reading: Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, chap. 9; National Security Archive electronic briefing books on Sino-American Opening, 1969-1972; Cold War International History Project Bulletin #8/9 (section on The Cold War in the Third World and the Collapse of Detente in the 1970s; read articles on Angola, documents and commentaries on materials on U.S.-Cuban relations and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, skim materials on Horn of Africa crisis)
Recommended: CWIHP Working Paper no. 40 by Mitrokhin
Wed., April 21: An Empire Crumbles: Gorbachev, the Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the End of the Cold War
Assigned Reading: Articles on 1968 Czechoslovakia Crisis in CWIHP Bulletins #3, 4, & 10 (all by Mark Kramer) and documents and articles on the 1980-81 Polish Crisis in CWIHP Bulletin #11; Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (entire)
Monday, May 10: Final Draft of Research Papers Due in History Department Office by close of business (5 p.m.)