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Negotiating Cold War Culture at the Crossroads of East and West: Uplifting the Working People, Entertaining the Masses, Cultivating the Nation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2011

Sabina Mihelj
Sabina Mihelj*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
*
S.Mihelj@lboro.ac.uk
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Extract

Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, our understanding of Cold War history has changed considerably. The wave of new research spurred by the opening of archives and opportunities for novel East-West comparisons threw into sharper relief aspects of the Cold War contest that had received little attention previously. It has become increasingly clear that the Cold War was not only a military, political, and economic conflict, but also one profoundly implicated in, and shaped by, key transformations in twentieth-century culture. Capitalizing on the increased accessibility of primary sources from former socialist states, recent research has provided valuable insights into the politics of everyday culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and we have seen as well the publication of several transnational accounts of the cultural Cold War spanning the West and the East.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 509 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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