Socialist anti-Communism in the Nordic region

Ph.D. Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2012

This thesis investigates the anti-communist cooperation between the social democratic parties of Norden in the early Cold War (1945-62). The animosity between social democrats and communists dates back to the 1920s but recieved new actuality with the relative rise in communist popularity after WWII. As the Cold War froze over, the social democratic party secretaries started meeting once or twice a year to echange information about communism and plan how to counter it. The party secretary meetings went on for a decade and died out in the late 1950s/early1960s as communism ceased to be a threat and the Cold War settled. The party secretary meetings were marked the the securitisation of the communist problem, which caused social democratic parties, mainly in Scandinavia, to cooperate with state security services on containing and fighting communism. The meetings were marked by this cooperation as they not only discussed communism in the labour movement but also in terms of national security. The Nordic labour movements have cooperated since their establishment in the late 1800s and early 1900s; hence it was only natural that they cooperated on this common problem as well. During the early Cold War the social democratic parties of Scandinavia were politically dominant. They built welfare states which they identified themselves with to such an extent that seperating party and state became increasingly difficult. They were social democratic states. This identification was a contributing part in the social democratic view of national security as a party problem. Since the end of the Cold War, new research have increasingly shown the Scandinavian countries to have cooperated militarily and in intelligence. Hence, the failure to establish a Scandinavian defence union in 1949 did not mean a division of Scandinavia, to the extent that traditional research has looked at it. A new picture of Nordic security is emerging, to which this thesis is a contribution: the picture of a region that was bound together not only by culture, values and language, but also by security issues. The governing parties were a part of this cooperation as well, as I show. They were, in all practicality, brothers in arms. Hence, I propose that research in Nordic security re-evaluates the picture of a divided Norden.

Scandinavian Studies, 2012

American Communist History, 2005

From the early 1920s until 1939, communications between the American Communist party and Communist International (Comintern) leaders in Moscow had been frequent and ample. Tens of thousands of pages of texts (letters, memoranda, cables, magazines, and newspapers) passed to and from Moscow and the CPUSA. The Comintern also dispatched plenipotentiary representatives who supervised the leadership of the American party as well as specialized agents who dealt with specific ethnic groups or specific organizational tasks or technical requirements. 1 For its part, the American party sent a stream of American Communists to Moscow: official party ''representatives'' to the Comintern, ''referents'' who served apprenticeships with sections of the Comintern and as in-house sources of information on America, cadre attending long-term educational and shortterm training sessions at the elite International Lenin School and the lessprestigious Communist University of Toilers of the East, and delegations of party activists attending Comintern-related conferences. 2 In the 1930s numerous high-level CPUSA officials also personally traveled to Moscow to deliver lengthy written reports, testify, and be subjected to detailed examination by the Comintern's Anglo-American Secretariat. 3

Studia Maritima,, 2013

The article aims at presenting – very fragile and scanty – foreign relations existing between the Unites States of America and Sweden during the initial Cold War period. The author discusses the Swedish reluctance to give up its neutrality as contrary to the expectations which America had with reference to Sweden. In order to receive American aid, particularly in the form of military equipment, the American government required significant contributions to be made on the part of Sweden and her people in the process of non-alignment with the Communist Block. The article both presents the American public diplomacy efforts to have been exercised mostly via cultural and educational exchange programs and demonstrates the activities of the United States Information Agency undertook so as to convince the Swedish society to American culture, American people and American foreign policy aims and tools. Although Sweden remained determined to continue its policy of non-alliance and neutrality, she nevertheless contributed to the improvement of East-West relations.

1998

The Review of Politics, 1996

2016

This paper presents an analysis of the so-called Latvian national communists, which controlled Soviet Latvia in the 1950s. The traditional interpretation of national communism has profiled the group based on criteria such as youth, prior association, Latvian ethnicity, language and residency in Latvia before 1940. This composite of a Latvian national communist is often accurate: many fought together in the war, had lived in bourgeois Latvia and were in their late thirties during the group’s brief dominance of Latvian politics. There were, however, numerous exceptions in all of these areas. In this paper, I refute the traditional claim that these characteristics constituted Latvian national communism. Instead, this paper argues that the common denominator was their shared vision for Latvian culture and traditions, which allowed these like-minded individuals to coalesce into a unified faction of reformers keen to advance local interests and redraw centre-periphery relations through the repeal of Stalinism. Historiography about the Latvian national communists treats them as a loose group of like-minded individuals who voted together in the Latvian bureau and did not have specific aims or agenda. In this paper, I argue that the Latvian national communists operated as a cohesive faction to the extent that was possible within the rigid one-Party Soviet structure. Based on archival evidence this paper examines the operations of the national communists within this context. Finally, this paper examines the structure of the national communists to further demonstrate that they constituted a distinct faction within the leadership. Positions of seniority within the group did not necessarily conform to their rank within the Party or state apparatus. Between 1956 and 1959 the national communists strategised to increase their representation within the organs of power, taking control by appointing members to key positions, usually chairman or deputy of a department and packing the bureau (the highest decision-making body) with members. Furthermore, many decisions were decided informally by senior national communists outside the bureau to circumvent opposition to their goals.