A Cold War In The Soviet Bloc: Polish-east German Relations, 1945-1962 [Paperback]

In A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc, Sheldon Anderson uses recently declassified documents from Polish and East German communist party and foreign ministry archives to examine the interplay of national interests with the exigencies of communist party relations within the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Anderson explores how Polish-East German relations were strained over the permanence of the Oder-Neisse border, the correct road to socialism, German repatriation from Poland, and trade policy; he provides an inside account of the heated debates that seriously divided the Polish and East German communists.Anderson delves into how and why the rift culminated in the return of the anti-Stalinist Wladyslaw Gomulka in October 1956, and he delineates how the Polish-East German conflict undermined the unity of the Soviet bloc on its most strategic flank. In doing so, he reveals the persistence of nationalism and ethnic prejudice in the former communist countries. In this timely text, Anderson pinpoints how nationalism has reemerged as a powerful political force following the end of the Cold War. With A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc, Anderson markedly fills the gap in the existing scholarship on postwar relations between the countries of East Europe.This book explores the Polish and East German communist parties' pursuit of conflicting national interests--rather than common socialist goals--during the height of the Cold War, and how this weakened the unity of the Soviet bloc.Introduction , There Are No Good Germans: The Myth of Proletarian Internationalism, 19451949 , The Controversy over the Oder-Neisse Border, 19461949 , The Myth of the Stalinist Brotherhood, 19491954 , The Problems of German Repatriation, Reparations, and Trade, 19451953 , German Remilitarization and the Polish Thaw, 19541955 , Khrushchev's De-Stalinization Speech and Gomu?ka's Return to Power, JanuaryOctober, 1956 , The Cold Winter of PolishEast German Relations, 19561957 , Gomu?ka's Trade Policies anlc+