CC BY
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A
Media Culture
Media and the cold war: a comparative perspective
Prof. Dr. Thomas Heed
School of American and International Studies, RamapoCollege, NJ, USA, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah NJ 07430-1680, USA
e-mail theed@ramapo. edu,
Prof. Dr. Alexander Kubyshkin
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St-Petersburg State University, Russia, 199034 St- Petersburg, Universitetskaya emb., 7-9. e-mail Kubyshkin. alexander@gmail. com)
Abstract. For ten years Professor Kubushkin (St Petersburg University) and Professor Heed (Emeritus Ramapo College of New Jersey) have been team-teaching a course: "Cold War: A Comparative Perspective". When they started Prof Kubushkin was at Volgograd State University and Prof Heed at Ramapo College. Now Prof Kubushkin is at St Petersburg University and Prof Heed Emeritus. The course they designed, and continue to perfect over these ten years, is totally dependent on an extensive and evolving use of media; it is web-based and taught from the two locations via video conferencing. On a daily basis it integrates images, graphs, maps, video and music in telling the Cold War story. It is designed to use a cascade of media so the students gain both an intellectual understanding of this period as well an emotional experience and appreciation of those most pregnant years. Without media the course could not/would not work.
Keywords: cold War, Soviet/Russian-American relations, personality, ideology, technology, arms race, team-teaching, political satire, social media, primary sources, secondary sources, media.
Introduction
Today's students are children of a media tsunami; they do not gather most of their knowledge or emotional insights from texts or even their personal communications. Instead they withstand a flood of images, pictures,music, videos, movies, drawings from an ever expanding, ever more complex wave of media. Just relying upon text to teach a history class today is futile; the students of today are usedto a pace of information way beyond what we experienced as undergraduates decades ago. They are on their cell phones incessantly, they exchange images over Instagram,they follow YouTube for the most recent clips. They take their own selfies to share with all; they video their daily events to share with BBF. Every month a litany of new software programs cascades across the web to grab their attention. They are all captive to media: both as consumers and creators.
Materials and Methods
The materials referenced in this article were: 1) the primary books and articles read by the students; 2) the secondary texts read by all students; 3) the many video clips played during our sessions; 4) the varied, numerous maps, graphs, and photographs mounted on our website and viewed during class sessions; and 5) our extensive web site available to all students. The student
and faculty discussion and analysis of the class materials and their exams and research papers and discussion via email, Facebook et al were our principal method of instruction.
Discussion
As stated the course pairs western accounts with eastern accounts; often our sources are primary documents: for instance we use both Harry Truman's Memoirs (Truman ,1955) and Dwight Eisenhower's Mandate for Change [Eisenhower,1963] as well as Andrei Gromyko's Memoirs [Gromyko,1989] and Anatoly Dobrynin'sIn Confidence [Dobrynin,1995]. Another particularly valuable source was The Cambridge History of the Cold War, [Cambridge History of the Cold War, 2010], this three volume set collects some of the best articles on the Cold War and was invaluable to the course.enhawer . For the many media clips we use the "CNN Cold War History" series has been a treasure trove. Also we commonly use the extensive atlas the history department at United States Military Academy host on-line.
Our course, History of the Cold War: A Comparative Perspective, (https://pages.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/ColdWar_Syll_fall_%202016.html) is designed, warp and woof, as an intense, multi-media examination of this most crucial and frenetic period of world history. Not only do we have both a Professor from Russia, Dr. Alexander Kubyshkin, and a Professor from the Unites States, Dr. Thomas J. Heed, our students are consistently from nations around the world: both East and West. Also all our readings, for every class session, are balanced between accounts by Western authors and an equal number of authors from the East. If students read chapters from President Nixon's autobiography they also read chapters from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev memoirs.
When discussing such complicated problems as the nature of Russian nationalism our students are very interesting in interpretation of it from Russian point of view [Zubok, 2007, p. 213]. The students can compare the different position of role which secret services of West and East have played not only in development of Cold War confrontation but in the process of it elimination as well [Gaddis, 2008, pp.112-118; Zubok, 2007, pp.190-199]. To define who won in the Cold War competition the students have to analyze the arguments both La Feber and Zubok [La Feber, 2008, pp.338-340; Zubok, 2007, pp.305-310].
The international nature of the class makes media even more vital, more necessary. Many of the students in the class (It usually is half western students and half students from the east.) do not use their first language in the class and some struggle with the task of translation in that case media is a special blessing. All students can receive and assess the visual media used relentlessly in the course as a bridge across the language gap. The visual record does not rely upon one language but rather speaks with a universal language. The media speaks to all equally.
Our course has three themes that permeate the semesters study. While we are not advocates of Great Man history in the decades of the Cold War we concluded that those fifty some years were singularly marked by an exceptional array of men that shaped the era on both sides of the divide. Thus we adopted the role of Personality.
(https://pages.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/SideBar_Personality/a_SideBar_Personality_Matter s.htm) as one of our three themes. The next theme we selected was Ideology. (https://pages.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/Sidebar_Ideology/a_SideBar_Ideolgoy_Matters.ht m).We found that while it was easy for students to identify the ideological screeds in Soviet publications and speeches they were less skilled in identifying the ideological threads permeating US publications and utterances. This theme was the most difficult to illustrate using media. Our last theme was Technology/the Arms Race.
(https://pages.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/SideBar_Arms_Race/a_SideBar_Arms_Race.htm)
This perhaps was the easiest theme to illumine with media and the one that the students had the easiest time seeing and understanding.
But let us get back to the focus of this paper: media. How do we use media to illustratethe personality of the key leaders of the Cold War? As in any comparative study we are looking for the students to know and understand the similarities and differences that mark these men. We usually stress three elements of each leadersearly life that sharply shape his professional career. For instance we repeatedly mapped where each of the leaders were born, raised and studied. For instance Khrushchev, Truman, Ford, Reagan were all born in small towns in the middle ranges of their country. Few were from the major urban centers. Scholarship was another facet that was influential to each leader; both Khrushchev and Brezhnev went to technical schools that were far from the top-tier Universities available. Similarly Truman, Nixon and Reagan went to what Americans could easily term third tier colleges; Truman indeed never attended a college as we know them now. While the map of where these leaders lived for their formative years carried that lesson just the photo of the schools they attended toldour students a lot about the nature of that college.In this sense the cases of Mikhail Gorbachev who got two academic degrees(in Economics and agriculture) and George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama who attended the best American universities had illustrated the changes in quality of political elite clearly.
Another factor so vital, so telling, in the shaping of a personality and development of one's value system is the earliest years of ones' career. Again by using photographs, that were relatively easy to gather from the web and key biographies, we were able to walk the students through an assessment of those early career moments. For instance Reagan's early years in Hollywood are neatly recorded on film, Khrushchev's years in the provinces and his World War II years are likewise available. The war was a major influence on many of these men, Truman's World War I experiences made him, as WW II did for Khrushchev.
Our second theme, Ideology was not communicated well through media and for this we generally relied on textual analysis. Sure we try to analyze different approaches to ideological issues relying on historical context and delivering a differences in political thinking and practice of leaders from West and East. For instance we speak about domestic factors as a post -war -anti-americanism in USSR and McCarthy anti-communist campaign in US and its influence to international stage
However our third theme, Technology/Arms Race, was almost totally available through media. We constructed a "side bar" on the course web site and a course timeline. On both we built a rich photographic narration of the arms race; we constantly recorded the image of the weapons system, the numbers made and the unit costs for each. When possible we included videoclips that demonstrated the characteristics of that system. This was certainly the theme that the students learned most easily and retained. We are sure that the rich media use to illumine this factor explains why is has been most successful with the students.
Another media tool that was very successful was the constant use of political cartoons. It was surprisingly easy to find a host of political cartoons, both from the west and the east. These work especially well with our international mix of students; often the frequent iconic images that were common in cartoons needed to be explained, often we needed to place the cartoons in a historical context. But the students generally easily grasped the humor, the satire, the ridicule that populated so many of these works. Again the language of the imagery was often universal and accessible to all. They enabled us to raise an emotional reaction to the events and made the event under study more human.
A variation of the political cartoon that again worked well with all the students was comedy from film. (https://pages.ramapo.edu/~theed/Cold_War/Sidebar_Comedy/a_SideBar_Comedy.htm)
We do not have enough class time to play full length movies during class hours but we did mount another "side bar" on the web site devoted to comedy about the Cold War: samples again from both east and west. On our "side bar" on comedy we installed the trailers from key movies; from the west we referenced films like Dr. Strangelove, a film of dark humor and black satire, The Russians are Coming, a film ridiculing the paranoiac fear of each for the other, Blast
from the Past, a silly 1950's film on the caustic terror that many felt during the early years of the Cold War. From the east we posted a mini-series Hammer and Tickle that showed clips from comedians across Eastern Europe and their routines satirizing the drab, gray life under Soviet socialism and cartoons on local life. A most powerful film produced after the fall of the Berlin wall, Goodbye Lenin records a savage critique of East Berlin life prior to the fall of the Wall and again gave the students a most human, most emotional tale of the contrast between the two systems. With today's media revolution the students are easily able to gain access to the full version of any of these films.
As well as the films, videos also helped our students understand the goals of the course. For instance in 1959 Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev met at an Expo Fair in Moscow and a famous "Kitchen Debate" was recorded on video. The brief video clips captured the deep emotional context of the encounter and also the reactions of the audience surrounding the two antagonists. Khrushchev hated Nixon forever after this confrontation and again only the rich media rendering would enable our students to share the humanity of the moment.
When we teach the lesson on the year 1968 we devote a double session to the session, it is so vital to an understanding of that time. Again the video record is essential to the lesson. Riots cascade around the globe that year, from Berkeley, to Paris, to Berlin, to Washington DC, to Beijing, to Mexico City without the video record our students would not be able to see the vastness of the world turmoil and the raw anger and rage that flowed around the world that year. Media was necessary for that lesson to work. A lecture on this topic would never engage our students the way the video clips did.
Another media tool that is essential for our course are charts and graphs; our class is a continuing comparison of the US and the USSR and the numerical record of that comparison is best told with charts and graphs. These are the best tools to record the evolving narrative of the societal competition and their ability to isolate key factors and develop change over time work effectively for our students. For instance we showed them a population pyramid of the two nation from the 1950's to the late 1980's and they could easily see the sharp difference and then in their discussion extracted all the key factors explaining the birthrates, death rates and differences between males and females. It was a very successful lesson.
Many would say chronology is the core of historical analysis; however, often, for the sake of clarity and focus, historians isolate various events, various situations. But we all know that when you dissect the heart out of the body we kill the organism. In similar fashion often when historians isolate one issue to illuminate it they remove it from other factors that are as essential to the functioning of the whole as the lung is essential to the heart. For that reason we have constructed a substantial time-line for the course; this multi-media instrument, color coded, links the many issues of the semesters work on and place them side by side so the students can see how all the parts assemble though time.
The software we use enables us to insert images and even video clips. (http://timeglider.com/t/line_c7f3dc38ca71f7569b429d8a8eead392?min_zoom=1&max_zoom=100)
While it is important to know when Khrushchev came to power it is illuminating to see how that relates to the evolution of weaponry at that time and the relative timing of changes in the US government. While it is important to see when Reagan met with Gorbachev at Reykjavik it is also illuminating to see how the technology of international trade was impacting on the growth of the world economy and the Soviet Union's share of the world GDP. We want our students to have a feel and understanding for the interconnections between the many vivid disruptions coursing around the globe and our time-line is a powerful tool, another powerful media tool that helps us with that.
Maps are another media tool most essential for understanding the aims of our course. We use them extensively throughout the semester. Students of today must have spatial knowledge
and understanding. Any student of international studies must have a global awareness and a sense for and of geography. Geography impacts all that we do and a solid ability to assess those factors we can map and interpret through mapping is a necessary skill set for our students. Mapping is the media tool that opens that door.
But any course is an organic creature, it must grow and evolve as the environment, both student profiles and societal changes coarse throughout. So must it be with our class. This past semester the students answers on the final exam showed a weakness in their understanding of how the global economy surged during the decade of the 1980's. We need to add more material on the changes wrought by globalization during those years. For instance in 1955 the world GDP was $6,832,919 and the USSR accounted for over 9% of that; by 1990 the world GDP had soared to $27,136,041 and the Russian share fell to only 6.8%.
The explosion of the world economy was generally propelled by three factors we need to add to our curriculum: one, the role of intermodal containerization and the attendant explosion of ocean shipping with the dropping of costs, (This will be easy to illustrate for our students with the many ready images of this and the rich video sources at hand.) two, the rapid rise of international communications, the cell phone changed everything with its mass use in the mid 1980's, (This again will be easy to discuss with the students since they already are totally versed in Skype, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter et al; they know this subject better than their Professors.) and three , the arising of a new level and ease of international finance; capital had never been so readily, rapidly available.(This factor may be the most opaque to our students but again we believe that media, charts and graphs in this instance , may be our best tool.)
Another theme we have to discuss more carefully this is "new Cold War edition" problem as a trend of current international situation. We glad to see that our students(both Russian and international) don't afraid to touch some complicated and delicate problems concerning different approaches to solution of international confrontations. One of the main achievements of our course is that our students are open for discussion and ready to accept the opponent argumentation as well.
We are blessed to teach in this decade, with NetFlix, Amazon, Kodi/Exodus we have ready access to a huge library of international films and even international TV mini-series of extraordinary quality. Also documentaries from around the world grow in both quality and quantity at an amazing rate. We know these will endlessly enrich the media available to our course and our students; it is a most exciting time to be teaching an international course such as ours.
Results
The results of the course are measured from; 1) our digital recordings of each class session; 2) student discussions during class session as well as over email and Facebook exchanges; 3) students final exam essays and their semester research paper.
From these activities we know that the students analytical abilities regarding the role of ideology and personality blossom. They also not only have greater knowledge of the role of technology in our recent history but also have a greater ability to assess and critique the constant influence of technology in our present day.
Since the course offers an unusual model team teaching structure as well as a mixed class of "eastern" and "western" students they better understand the complexity of historical accounts. From their papers and discussions we see an enhanced ability to assess and critique the competing/conflicting views of historical narratives. The constant use of multi-media also propels the student's abilities to assess and critique the influence of various media and the particular power of video on shaping perceptions.
With both students and faculty from different lands and cultures, differing educational systems, and differing languages and religions the students are awash in varying interpretations
and they must master generating their own, new and relevant thesis to cope with their new and challenging environment.
Conclusions
It is our observation that team-teaching across cultures, massive and varied use of multimedia, constant reliance on conflicting, contentious texts and a classroom of superior, motivated students from widely varied nations and cultures excites substantial learning. They not only learn a new and complex narrative on the Cold War, they also gain new skills in observing and assessing a most broad array of media and in their heterogeneous class environment also gain new respect and understanding of diverse cultures.
References
Dobrynin, A. (1995). In Confidence. New York: Crown.
Engerman, D.C. (2010). Ideology and the origins of the Cold War: 1917-1962. In: Leffler, M.P. & Westad, O.M. (eds.), The Cambridge history of the cold war. Vol. I, origins. Lodon - New York: Cambridge university press. Gaddis, J.L. (2007). The Cold War. A New History. New York: Penguin Book. Gromyko, A. (1989). Memoirs. New York: Doubleday.
La Feber, W. (2008). America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-2006. Boston - New York: McGraw Hill. Leffler, M.P. (2007). For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, The Soviet Union, and the Cold War. New York: Hill and Wang.
Levering, R.B., Pechatnov, V.O., Botzenhart-Viehe, V., Edmondson, E.C. (2002). Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Mahnken, T.G. (2008). Technology and the American Way of War. New York: Columbia University Press. Truman, H.S. (1955). Memoirs. Year of Decisions Vol. 1. New York: Doubleday.
Volkogonov, D. (1998). Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders who Built the Soviet Regime. New York-London -Toronto: Free Press.
Zubok, V.M. (2007). A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold war from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
