Bulgarian military neurosurgery: from Warsaw Pact to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. E15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yavor Enchev ◽  
Tihomir Eftimov

After 45 years as a closest ally of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact, founded mainly against the US and the Western Europe countries, and 15 years of democratic changes, since 2004 Bulgaria has been a full member of NATO and an equal and trusted partner of its former enemies. The unprecedented transformation has affected all aspects of the Bulgarian society. As a function of the Bulgarian Armed Forces, Bulgarian military medicine and in particular Bulgarian military neurosurgery is indivisibly connected with their development. The history of Bulgarian military neurosurgery is the history of the transition from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics military system and military medicine to NATO standards in every aspect. The career of the military neurosurgeon in Bulgaria is in many ways similar to that of the civilian neurosurgeon, but there are also many peculiarities. The purpose of this study was to outline the background and the history of Bulgarian military neurosurgery as well as its future trends in the conditions of world globalization.

1960 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-363 ◽  

According to the press, a one-day meeting of the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow on February 4, 1960, was attended by premiers and foreign ministers of the eight pact members (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania) and by observers from Communist China, Mongolia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. In a 4,000-word declaration issued after the meeting, the pact members expressed the hope that forthcoming East-West summit talks would be “a turning point in the relations” between the two groups of countries and proposed that the summit agenda include such topics as general and controlled disarmament, a German peace treaty, creation of a free city of West Berlin, a ban on nuclear weapons tests, and amelioration of relations between East and West. The committee also repeated the communist proposal for a non-aggression pact between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact countries and called on NATO members to respond to the Soviet Union's armed forces cut of 1, 200, 000 men by reducing their forces as well. It criticized NATO for maintaining “inflated armies” and for arming West Germany with atomic weapons, adding that the West German government was being given a free hand in the production of these weapons.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.


Author(s):  
Stephen G. Rabe

This introductory chapter provides an overview of U.S. policies toward Latin America during Henry Kissinger's career as national security adviser and secretary of state. Henri Kissinger directed inter-American relations between 1969 and 1977. Like his predecessors, Kissinger judged relations with Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and China as strategically more important than relations with Latin America. But Kissinger launched noteworthy initiatives, such as the attempt to normalize relations with Cuba and to transfer the canal to Panama. The Kissinger years were also historically significant for Latin Americans. The 1970s represented the most violent period in the history of post-independence (1825) South America. This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the foreign policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations toward Latin America and Kissinger's central role in formulating and implementing those policies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
THOMAS KÜHNE

Scholarship is not only about gaining new insights or establishing accurate knowledge but also about struggling for political impact and for market shares – shares of public or private funds, of academic jobs, of quotations by peers, and of media performances. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands fights for recentring contemporary European history.1 No longer, his new book implies, should the centre of that history be Germany, which initiated two world wars and engaged with three genocides; even less should the centre be Western Europe, which historians for long have glorified as the trendsetter of modernity; and the Soviet Union, or Russia, does not qualify as ‘centre’ anyway. Introducing ‘to European history its central event’ (p. 380) means to focus on the eastern territories of Europe, the lands between Germany and Russia, which, according to Snyder, suffered more than any other part from systematic, politically motivated, mass murder in the twentieth century. The superior victimhood of the ‘bloodlands’ is a numerical one. Fourteen million people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the territories of what is today most of Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and the Baltic States did not become just casualties of war but victims of deliberate mass murder. Indeed, this is ‘a very large number’ (p. 411), one that stands many comparisons: ten million people perished in Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the Nazi death camps, which were located within the ‘bloodlands’), 165,000 German Jews died during the Holocaust (p. ix), and even the number of war casualties most single countries or territories counted in the Second World War was smaller.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORITZ FÖLLMER ◽  
MARK B. SMITH

How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Spohr Readman

On the basis of recently released archival sources from several member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), this article revisits the making of NATO's landmark 1979 dual-track decision. The article examines the intersecting processes of personal, bureaucratic, national, and alliance high politics in the broader Cold War context of increasingly adversarial East-West relations. The discussion sheds new light on how NATO tried to augment its deterrent capability via the deployment of long-range theater nuclear missiles and why ultimately an arms control proposal to the Soviet Union was included as an equal strand. The 1979 decision owed most to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's political thought and initiative. Intra-alliance decision-making, marked by transatlantic conflict and cooperation, benefitted from the creativity and agency of West German, British, and Norwegian officials. Contrary to popular impressions, the United States did not truly lead the process.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Gusnelly Gusnelly

This paper is the result of research on Indonesian migration that focuses on the diaspora of the exile community in the Netherlands. The purpose to discuss this issue is to tell about the existence of an Indonesian community that has been exiled from the country for decades and became stateless or lost citizenship, because its passport was revoked by the Indonesian government. They are the generation who have been forced to move to several countries and choose to seek asylum in various Western European countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The history of their existence abroad as a result of the event of G30S/1965. They were abroad when the G30S occurred in the country. Their departure abroad was in the leftist (socialist) countries of the mid-1960s not because of political affairs but for various interests, but in fact it was related to the occurrence of the G30S/1965. In 1989 with the fall of communism and the end of the cold war after the collapse of the superpower of the Soviet Union, most of them have registered themselves as asylum seekers to several countries in Western Europe, including to the Netherlands. As a Dutch citizen, their descendants get education and work in the Netherlands. Their descendants feel that the Dutch or Europeans are his identity but the exiles keep their nationalism for Indonesia. We call that with long-distance nationalism.Keywords: Dutch, diaspora, exile community, asylum, citizenshipABSTRAKTulisan ini merupakan hasil penelitian tentang migrasi orang Indonesia yang fokus pada diaspora komunitas eksil di Belanda. Tujuan untuk membahas masalah ini adalah untuk menceritakan tentang keberadaan komunitas Indonesia yang sejak puluhan tahun terbuang dari tanah air dan menjadi stateless atau kehilangan kewarganegaraan, sebab pasportnya dicabut oleh pemerintah Indonesia. Mereka merupakan anak bangsa dari satu generasi yang terpaksa pindah ke beberapa negara dan memilih mencari suaka ke berbagai negara Eropa Barat pascaruntuhnya Uni Soviet. Sejarah keberadaan mereka di luar negeri sebagai akibat dari peristiwa G30S tahun 1965. Mereka sedang berada di luar negeri ketika terjadi peristiwa G30S di dalam negeri. Kepergian mereka ke luar negeri yaitu di negara-negara beraliran kiri (sosialis) di pertengahan tahun 60-an bukan karena hanya karena urusan politik, tetapi untuk berbagai kepentingan, namun pada kenyataannya disangkutpautkan dengan terjadinya peristiwa G30S tahun 1965 tersebut. Pada tahun 1989 dengan kejatuhan komunisme dan berakhirnya perang dingin setelah keruntuhan negara adi kuasa Uni Soviet sebagian besar mereka telah mendaftarkan diri menjadi pencari suaka ke beberapa negara di Eropa Barat, termasuk ke Belanda. Sebagai warga negara Belanda, anak keturunannya mendapatkan pendidikan dan bekerja di Belanda. Anak-anak keturunannya merasa Belanda atau Eropa adalah identitasnya akan tetapi orang eksil tetap menjaga nasionalisme mereka buat tanah airnya yaitu Indonesia. Kami menyebutnya dengan nasionalisme jarak jauh.  Kata Kunci: Belanda, diaspora, komunitas eksil, suaka, kewarganegaraan


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-32
Author(s):  
Anne E. Hasselmann

In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet museum curators began to establish a museal depiction of the war. This article analyzes these early beginnings of Soviet war commemoration and the curtailing of its surprising heterogeneity in late Stalinism. Historical research has largely ignored the impact of Soviet museum workers (muzeishchiki) on the evolution of Russian war memory. Archival material from the Red Army Museum, now renamed the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, in Moscow and the Belarus Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk documents the unfolding of locally specific war exhibitions which stand in stark contrast to the later homogenized official Soviet war narrative. Yet war memory was not created unilaterally by the curators. Visitors also participated in its making, as the museum guestbooks demonstrate. As “sites of commemoration and learning,” early Soviet war exhibitions reveal the agency of the muzeishchiki and the involvement of the visitors in the “small events” of memory creation.


1956 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 220-223

The fifteen countries members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were represented by their defense ministers at a conference held in Paris from October 10 to 12, under the chairmanship of Lord Ismay (Vice Chairman of the North Atlantic Council and Secretary General of NATO). The meeting, which was attended by the Standing Group and the Supreme Commanders, was a preliminary to the full ministerial session, to be held in December; it was the first occasion on which the NATO defense ministers met in Council without the foreign or finance ministers. A communique issued at the close of the meeting stated that the meeting had primarily been for the exchange of information, and that the ministers had heard statements on the strategic situation and on western defensive arrangements from General Sir John Whiteley (United Kingdom), Chairman of the Standing Group, and from his colleagues on the Standing Group, General Joseph Lawton Collins (United States), General Jean Valluy (France), General Alfred M. Gruenther (SACEUR), Admiral Jerauld Wright (SACLANT) and several other officers. Following these statements, a useful exchange of views between the defense ministers took place, the communique concluded. It was reported that many of the speakers had concurred in the view that the military potential of the Soviet Union was steadily increasing, especially in the areas of atomic weapons and submarines, that the recently announced decision to reduce the armed forces in the Soviet Union and some of the people's democracies did not modify the potential of communist forces, and that it was therefore indispensable to intensify the NATO military effort, which so far had not met expectations for it.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Guyatt

This chapter discusses the history of the end of the Cold War. It describes different versions of what signified the end of the Cold War, which include the demolition of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev's declaration that the Soviet Union would no longer use its military to subdue the satellite states of the Warsaw Pact in 1988, and the reunification of Germany in October 1990. The chapter also considers the consequences of the end of the Cold War, which include a renewed search for international order and cooperation.


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