'All roads lead to Moscow': The United States, Great Britain, and the Communist monolith.

摘要

During the height of the Cold War, U.S. and British observers displayed a marked tendency to regard international Communism as a coordinated international conspiracy. The "Communist monolith," the word-symbol which came to represent that conspiracy, emerged as perhaps the most dominant image of the movement. As a term of political shorthand, it distilled the messy realities of international relations into a neat, comprehensible formula. Its lesson was that all Communists, regardless of their native land or political program, were essentially tools of the Kremlin. This dissertation will attempt to recreate the manner in which the "monolith" emerged as a perceptual construct on both sides of the Atlantic.; The obeisance that Americans and Britons paid to the monolithic framework stemmed from dynamics that were deeply embedded as well as close to the surface of their respective political cultures. While numerous observers in both countries would comment on fissures in the Communist world, practically all of them did so from a monolithic perspective, interpreting schismatic movements as a residual development rather than a primal condition of the Communist life-cycle; hardly anyone in a position of responsibility assumed that Communist Parties were "born free" from the Soviet gravitational pull. As a result, British and American propaganda would depict native Communists as firm supporters of Soviet policy.; Nevertheless, a handful of policymakers sought to modify that image of international Communism. Attempts to characterize the movement as home to both nationalist and internationalist elements picked up in the wake of the Tito-Cominform split of 1948. Those efforts fell on deaf ears, however; as Moscow reined in its minions worldwide, British and American observers came to interpret the Tito split as an historical aberration. As a result, the "monolith"---which had entered political discourse following the split as a term loaded with irony---came to assume its more literal meaning. In doing so, however, it offered that generation of Britons and Americans a portrayal of the Communist world that later scholarship would largely uphold.