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Arts, History, Russia, Society, Soviet Union, United States

Short Essay: The Start of The ‘Cold War’

(1946-1948)

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR the responsibility for supervising the defeated Germany was divided among the Allied victors. West Germany was occupied by British and American troops, while East Germany was occupied by Russia. Berlin, the capital of Germany, was also divided into East and West, but embedded within East German territory.

On 24 July 1948, Soviet troops set up a blockade, severing the road and rail links between West Germany and Berlin. It was a calculated act of aggression against the West, and was felt as such. The West came close to declaring war on Russia and was only put off by the thought of Stalingrad. In fact, it later turned out that Stalin did not have sufficient troops or equipment in the Russian sector (later East Germany) to launch a war on the British and American sectors (later West Germany). If the British and American troops had fought their way through the Soviet blockade, there would probably have been no further military action from Moscow, but at the time the level of risk was unknown.

The day after the Berlin blockade started an airlift began, with British and US aircraft flying in food and supplies for the people living in West Berlin – some 2million of them. The blockade continued and by September the aircraft were ferrying in 4,500 tons of supplies a day. The blockade was maintained for almost 18 months.

Relations between the West and the Soviet Union naturally cooled over the Berlin blockade. The US Presidential adviser Bernard Baruch described the situation as a “Cold War”, coining the phrase that would characterise the state of the world for the next half-century. The Soviets were not firing guns at anyone, but their behaviour was certainly hostile and intimidating.

This state of frozen hostility went on for over 40 years. It led directly to a dangerous arms race in which the latest atomic weapons were stockpiled. As the science of rocketry developed, America and the Soviet Union equipped their arsenals with rockets and missiles that could carry nuclear warheads right across the Arctic Ocean or from one side of Europe to the other. The cost of these intercontinental ballistic missiles (IBMs) was enormous, a huge drain on the economic resources of the countries involved.

A climate of fear was generated. Both sides wanted to test their latest nuclear bombs, and the bomb test explosions were in themselves intended to deter the enemy. By the late 1950s it was evident that dangerous levels of radiation were being pumped into the atmosphere by these test explosions, and anxious people were concerned their life expectancy was being shortened by the increase risk of serious illness. In the West, there was also a heightened fear that real, full-scale war would break out, a Third World War that might be shorter but far more violent than the two previous world wars, a war that could and probably would destroy both sides.

Perhaps in the knowledge that an old-style military war would probably annihilate everything and everyone, America and the Soviet Union played out their fierce rivalry in a Space Race. The competition to launch satellites, space probes and land men on the Moon was a kind of displacement activity, an acting-out of the Cold War in a contest of supremacy over space technology.

. Appendage

Cold War

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Arts, Drama

Whodunnit: The Captive

LATERAL THINKING DRAMA & CONUNDRUM

Issue No. 7 in the Whodunnit crime series. Tap into your inner detective by explaining why Inspector Parnacki has become more suspicious of one the suspects in this case.

ROSALYN Reyes had been missing for three days, and when she was discovered, it was only by the thinnest thread of luck. Andrew Baum was an enthusiastic walker and knew much of the local countryside like the back of his hand. Taking a welcome day off from work, he decided to go for a hike in Easton woods and follow a trail he had not tried before. After walking for some time, he took a wrong turn and found himself at odds with his map.

. Previously Whodunnit: ‘The Necklace’

He was about to retrace his steps when he realised he could hear a very faint sound of someone crying. Following the sound led him to a clearing, in which stood a rickety shack. Inside, he discovered the missing young woman, uninjured, but chained securely to a pole. As soon as she was safe, the police put up a dragnet around that part of the woods and waited. Over the course of the afternoon, three men were apprehended in the area.

That was where the good luck ended. Miss Reyes knew nothing whatsoever about her captor. She had woken on the first day to find herself restrained and blindfolded, and had remained that way throughout. Not only had she not seen her captor, he had also refrained from touching her, and had only spoken to her very minimally in a highly contrived hoarse whisper. Material found in the shack suggested that he was preparing a ransom demand to deliver to her parents, but again, there was nothing in it that would help identify the kidnapper. As a final blow, none of the three suspects had been carrying anything incriminating on their persons.

Inspector Parnacki smoothed out his moustache, fiddling with the ends irritably. He needed a lead suspect in order to justify an in-depth investigation. A stroll would help him to gather his thoughts, he decided. He packed a pipe, picked up the interview reports, and made his way to a local park.

Newton Stevens was an impecunious odd-job man who lived at Easton, a couple of miles from the woods. His transcript was quite irascible. “Of course I was in the woods. I’m always in the woods, aren’t I? No crime to trap rabbits, leastways not last time I looked. I was going to check on my snares. Friday, ain’t it? What else I am supposed to do on a Friday? Nothing, that’s what, not since darned Adrian stopped work on that darned wall. Eh? Shack? Of course I don’t live in a shack, you darned fool. It’s a cabin, and it’s in Easton. Shack indeed. You better turn me loose quickly, or so help me, I’ll lose the light, and then it’ll be boiled greens for dinner. No way for a man to live, boiled greens. Not without some rabbit.”

Terence Moss worked at a drinking establishment in Easton. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” his transcript began. “You’ve got no right to arrest a man like that for just having a walk. If you worked in a bar like the Imperial, you’d want to get some peace and quiet of an afternoon yourself. I don’t know what you’re after, but you’ve got the wrong man. No opium, no hashish, I don’t do any of that stuff. I haven’t stolen anything since I was twelve. No, I don’t recognise that shack. Never been near it. Don’t even know where it is. Never seen that woman. I’d remember if anyone even slightly like that had ever been into the Imperial. Look, you know where I work and live. Just let me out of here, will you? I really can’t afford to lose this job. I haven’t done anything!”

Matthew Bird, finally, was a service engineer with a pipe-manufacturing company in Easton. “My last job had run long, so I decided to stroll in the woods while I had my packed lunch. Cheese and pickle sandwich. Very nice. I often do go for a little lunchtime walk, if it’s been a tough morning. Nice to have a little break from it all, you know? My boss won’t be very sympathetic about the amount of time this is taking now, however. I understand you’re just doing your job, but surely, we can get this sorted out swiftly. Why don’t you put me in a line-up? I’d be delighted to . . . Well yes, of course, I want to be helpful. No, that shack doesn’t look familiar, I’m afraid. Hardly seems the sort of place to develop steam-pipe problems. No, I’m afraid that girl doesn’t look familiar either.”

Parnacki tapped his pipe thoughtfully, and read over the transcripts again. His eyes brightened, and he turned to start back to the station.

Who has made Inspector Parnacki suspicious, and why?

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Arts, Books, China, History

Book Review: Blood Letters

REVIEW

Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao.

ON THE outskirts of Suzhou, near Shanghai, there’s a tomb in a cemetery that has a surveillance camera trained on it, keeping a perpetual eye on visitors.

Once a year, on the anniversary of the deceased, plain-clothes policemen arrive to block access to the tomb and to rough up any persistent pilgrims.

It’s the tomb of a remarkable woman called Lin Zhao, who was shot by firing squad at the age of 35 in 1968, at the height of the Mao regime.

“In death even more than in life,” writes the author of this important and significant biography, “Lin Zhao has become a nemesis of the Communist state.”

. You might also like Book Review: No Wall Too High

A letter of protest that Lin wrote from her prison cell to the editor of the People’s Daily newspaper, never sent and long-suppressed, appeared on the internet in China in 2004.

It caused a sensation and became a manifesto for dissent in China that applies to this very day. Because it’s incendiary and remains a live story some of it can’t yet be told.

All of Lin’s interrogation records, which document the endless hours of questioning, probably conducted under duress and torture, are still filed away as part of the “criminal evidence” in her case.

Lin was an inveterate protestor and letter-writer. Astonishingly, the letters she wrote to her mother from prison, though they were confiscated at the time and not sent, were saved and eventually returned to the family.

Those letters were not written in ink, but in blood. As a punishment for he refusal to comply with the rules of the brutal Shanghai Municipal Prison, where she was incarcerated for being an “impatient counter-revolutionary”, Lin was deprived of ink. That was not going to stop her.

 

SHE had grasped the evils and depravities of Mao’s regime and refused to keep silent. In her cold, damp and freezing cell, she pricked her thumbs, dripped the blood into a small plastic spoon and wrote to her mother with a bamboo pick, a hair clip or the plastic handle of her toothbrush sharpened against the concrete floor, sometimes on a strip of bedsheet, rather than paper.

“Alas, Mama, they have communised China into a country of beggars.” She continued: “When the morning light of freedom shines upon the vast land of this country, we shall pour out our hearts to each other.”

But that yearned-for moment of reunion never came.

To make us appreciate Lin’s bravery and courage, Lian Xi, who has pieced together her life story, reminds us just how rare it was during Mao’s reign for anyone to dare to speak out. Lin was “the rare one who stood upright in an era when the entire country prostrated themselves”.

It was so much easier to keep quiet and go along with it all – and so much safer for the rest of the family.

There was a Chinese scholar in the prison, a once-renowned Yale Shakespeare expert, who submitted to copying and learning by heart reams and reams of Mao’s Little Red Book. He did so in order to earn remission points. Lin refused to do any such thing. When we’re most angry, it’s often because we’re angry with ourselves – and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that Lin’s fury was directed partly at herself. As a student in the early 1950s, she had fallen head-over-heals in love with Communism – to such an extent that she referred to Chairman Mao as “Dear Father” and reported her own father to the Government for illegally listening to an American radio programme.

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Chairman Mao declared. “It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Landlords were made to wear tall paper hats and paraded through the streets, denounced by jeering crowds.

Lin, at first, thought this a necessary stage towards the birth of a fairer society.

Then Mao pulled a really dirty trick. He announced a movement with the slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Students were encouraged to voice their feelings about the less nice aspects of his regime, which many did, including Lin.

It turned out to be a ploy to “enforce the snakes out of their lairs”. All who had dared to voice protests were labelled “Rightists”. Many were sent off to exile for years of “redemption through labour” in the frozen north.

Lin managed to evade that exile; but her brief, passionate love affair with a student called Gan Cui was brutally cut off when he was banished to work on a construction battalion seven days’ journey away – an exile that would last for 20 years. The two never saw each other again.

Lin was arrested in 1960 for her contribution to an underground magazine in which she’d written a poem calling Mao’s regime “the Fascist rule of a centralised state” and ridiculing his Great Leap Forward as “a Great Leap Backward”.

On hearing of his daughter’s arrest, Lin’s father committed suicide by taking rat poison. “His darkest fear about where Lin Zhao’s adolescent pursuit of communism might lead her was realised.”

A simple and efficient method of torture was used as a matter of course in Chinese prisons: handcuffs, and not one pair but two, the upper and lower arms cuffed together behind the back. At one point, after causing trouble, Lin was put into double handcuffs for six-and-a-half months.

With no public trial or defence lawyer, she was sentenced to 20 years. Cajoled and tortured to confess, she refused.

 

MOST other inmates were soon begging for a chance to confess, so as to have an easier life. Not Lin, even though she was ill with recurring and worsening tuberculosis.

Out of handcuffs, she took five months to compose a long letter to the People’s Daily. “Mao must be the first to bear responsibility for the tragedy of our land swarming with famished refugees and the corpses of the starved filling up the valleys,” she wrote.

She predicted the course of the regime’s escalating orgy of violence brought on by Mao’s 1966 exhortation to smash “the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting class”.

She kept the prison guards in a state of perpetual exasperation with her shouting, her ranting and her refusal to comply.

Her cheerful spirit was never crushed: she sketched her favourite Disney characters (Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse) on a flattened toothpaste tube using a small nail. From October 1967, she was writing one blood-inked protest per day to the prison authorities.

The Military Control Committee authorised the death sentence, pronouncing her “truly a diehard, unrepentant counter-revolutionary”. Her Christian faith kept her going, to the end. “Let me turn over all my pains, hopes and dreams to my Lord,” she wrote.

Forced to wear a “monkey king cap” – a rubber hood placed over her face with slits for the eyes – she was taken out to the prison’s execution ground and shot.

The next morning, officials arrived at her mother’s door to deliver the news – and to demand a 5-cent “bullet fee”, as her daughter had “wasted a people’s bullet”. Mao’s officials knew just how to inflict the highest degree of pain on bereaved families of the condemned.

They, though, are now forgotten, while Lin Zhao is remembered; revered for her refusal to be silent in the face of Mao’s inhumane and appalling regime. This book is a worthy and credible tribute to her.

– Blood Letters by Lian Xi is published by Basic Books for £25

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