Stanford University

A Bridge between East and West? Czechoslovakia's Road to the Soviet Bloc

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Although Czechoslovak politicians in exile frequently proclaimed towards the end of the Second World War an ambition for their country to mediate between the U.S.S.R. and the Western powers, their deeds and utterances, imprinted in Soviet, Czech and other archival materials, testify to something else.  With their faith in the West fatally shaken by Munich 1938, which was only amplified by the U.S. failure to liberate Prague in May 1945, they relied on a Soviet security guarantee against any further German aggression and on Stalin's promises of non-interference in internal Czechoslovak affairs. However, numerous concessions to the Soviet wishes and a growing domestic power of the Czechoslovak Communists undermined this cardboard castle that in the atmosphere of the growing East-West confrontation finally collapsed in February 1948.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Department of History

Building 200 (History Corner),
Room 307

Vit Smetana

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C205-4
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Scholar, The Europe Center
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Vit Smetana is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History – Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and also teaches modern international history at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague.  His professional interest lies primarily in the policies of the great powers towards Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. His research during his stay at Stanford focuses on the topic “The Czech, Slovak and other Central European exiles in the Second World War and beyond”.

Dr. Smetana is the author of In the Shadow of Munich. British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement (1938-1942) (2008) and co-author of Draze zaplacená svoboda. Osvobození Československa 1944-45  (Dearly Paid Freedom. The Liberation of Czechoslovakia 1944-45) in two volumes (2009).  He also edited  the Czech version of the Robert F. Kennedy memoir of the Cuban Missle Crisis, Thirteen Days (1999).

Vit Smetana Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History – Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center Speaker
Seminars

Democratization and Freedom of Speech: A Focus on Turkey, Arab World, and Ukraine

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Co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program on Islamic Studies, CDDRL Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, the Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Nuray Mert 2012-13 FSI-Humanities International Visitor Speaker
Lina Khatib Speaker
Lucan Way Speaker
Ali Yaycioğlu Speaker
Panel Discussions

Nuclear arms control in 2012

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Steven Pifer, former United States Ambassador to Ukraine and senior fellow and director of the Arms Control Initiative at Brookings, offers his insight into the current status of nuclear arms control and the issues impacting future prospects for negotiation in a presentation posted on the Brookings Institute website

Steven Pifer’s career as a Foreign Service officer centered around Europe, the former Soviet Union and arms control. In addition to Kyiv, he has had postings in London, Moscow, Geneva and Warsaw as well as on the National Security Council. Ambassador Pifer is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, focusing on Ukraine and Russia issues. He is a frequent invited expert speaker at The Europe Center. 

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In the Name of Freedom: Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Former President of Latvia

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Professor Ausma Cimdina is a prominent Latvian literary scholar and critic specializing in Latvian, Baltic, and East European literary relationships as well as Feminist Studies and Theory of Literature.  Her talk will focus on Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former president of Latvia and scholar of psychology and Latvian folklore.  Professor Cimdina's talk will discuss Vike-Freiberga's political biography, her role in international relations, and her contributions to Baltic Studies.

Sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Europe Center, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center

 

Encina Hall West, Room 208

Ausma Cimdina Professor Speaker University of Latvia, Riga
Seminars

Ukraine’s Foreign Policy: Losing its Balance

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This talk will address a primary foreign policy challenge for independent Ukraine which has been to strike a proper balance between its relations with the West and those with Russia.  Today, democratic backsliding is upsetting the balance, which will undermine President Yanukovych’s ability to achieve his professed foreign policy aims.


Steven Pifer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative.  He focuses on nuclear arms control, Russia and Ukraine.  He has offered commentary on these issues on CNN, Fox News, BBC, National Public Radio and VOA, and his articles have run in the International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post and Moscow Times, among others.

A retired Foreign Service officer, his more than 25 years with the State Department focused on U.S. relations with the former Soviet Union and Europe, as well as arms control and security issues.  He served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs with responsibilities for Russia and Ukraine (2001-2004), U.S. ambassador to Ukraine (1998-2000), and special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council (1996-1997).

His publications include “Ukraine’s Perilous Balancing Act,” Current History (March 2012), “NATO, Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control,” Brookings Arms Control Series (July 2011); “The Next Round:  The United States and Nuclear Arms Reductions After New START,” Brookings Arms Control Series (November 2010); “Ukraine’s Geopolitical Choice, 2009,” Eurasian Geography and Economics (July 2009); and “Reversing the Decline:  An Agenda for U.S.-Russian Relations in 2009,” Brookings Foreign Policy Paper (January 2009).

Ambassador Pifer is a 1976 graduate of Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics.  He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 


Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Steve Pifer Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and Director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative Speaker
Seminars

European Involvement in Serbia: From Intervention to Integration?

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In this lecture, Professor Radeljic will discuss the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, discuss the post-Milosevic era in Serbia and examine the challenges Serbia faces on its way toward EU membership.

Branislav Radeljic is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics. His main research interests focus on the study of European Union politics and Eastern Europe. Accordingly, his forthcoming book will look at European Community involvement in the Yugoslav state crisis and the role of non-state actors. In addition to these, Professor Radeljic is interested in and has written about the presence of Islam in the EU and its impact on future EU policy-making.

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES)

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CISAC Conference Room

Branislav Radeljic Senior Lecturer Speaker School of Law and Social Sciences, University of East London
Seminars

Historian Edith Sheffer discusses the barrier between East and West Germany

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Listen to Stanford historian Edith Sheffer's seminar about what truly divided Germany. Her talk was co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), The Europe Center and the German Studies department.
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Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain

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This talk presents an unconventional look at the creation of a deadly barrier between East and West Germany.  It reveals how the Iron Curtain was not simply imposed by communism, but had been emerging haphazardly in both East and West long before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.  From the end of the Third Reich, ad hoc enforcement of the tenuous border between the two Germanys led to the creation of difference where there was no difference, institutionalization of violence among neighbors, popular participation in a system that was deeply unpopular--and people normalizing a monstrosity in their midst.

Edith Sheffer is assistant professor of Modern European History at Stanford. Edith Sheffer came to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008 and joined the History Department faculty in 2010.  She recently completed Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, and was the winner of the 2011 Fraenkel Prize, awarded by the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History, London. 

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center (TEC), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Department of German Studies

 

Event Summary

Professor Sheffer's presentation includes a social history of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. She examines the process by which culturally homogenous populations internalized ideas of difference, and erected arbitrary physical and mental borders accordingly. She argues that the Iron Curtain was a "wall of the mind" reinforced not only by Communist authorities but by the everyday actions of ordinary Germans. 

Professor Sheffer first outlines her recent book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain. Drawing on archives, news stories, and personal interviews with people from East and West Germany, she argues that the Berlin Wall was simply a visible manifestation of an existing rift within the country that had been building for 16 years.  She examines the process of institutionalization of difference, by which people living in a once-cohesive community with no stark religious or cultural differences began to view those on the opposite side of an arbitrary border as "other." Professor Sheffer offers several explanations for why Germans largely accepted the divide, including the gradual internalization by individual citizens, on both sides of the wall, of what Sheffer describes as "the living wall" and a "wall in the head formed by a wall on the ground."  The fact that the wall was a structural response to a social set of conflicts can explain why it both went up and came down so quickly, as the result of many small steps and individual actions.

CISAC Conference Room

Edith Sheffer

Department of History 200-120

(650) 724-0074
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Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
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Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Edith Sheffer Speaker

Norman M. Naimark

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C235
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 723-6927 (650) 725-0597
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Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Robert & Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies
Professor of History
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
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Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, a Professor of History and (by courtesy) of German Studies, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and (by courtesy) of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Norman formerly served as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division, the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program, the Convener of the European Forum (predecessor to The Europe Center), Chair of the History Department, and the Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Norman earned his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 1972 and before returning to join the faculty in 1988, he was a professor of history at Boston University and a fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He also held the visiting Catherine Wasserman Davis Chair of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1996), the Richard W. Lyman Award for outstanding faculty volunteer service (1995), and the Dean's Teaching Award from Stanford University for 1991-92 and 2002-3.

Norman is interested in modern Eastern European and Russian history and his research focuses on Soviet policies and actions in Europe after World War II and on genocide and ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. His published monographs on these topics include The History of the "Proletariat": The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870–1887 (1979, Columbia University Press), Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (1983, Harvard University Press), The Russians in Germany: The History of The Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (1995, Harvard University Press), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe (1998, Westview Press), Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing In 20th Century Europe (2001, Harvard University Press), Stalin's Genocides (2010, Princeton University Press), and Genocide: A World History (2016, Oxford University Press). Naimark’s latest book, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Harvard 2019), explores seven case studies that illuminate Soviet policy in Europe and European attempts to build new, independent countries after World War II.

 

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
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