Guest Post

 by Visiting Fellow Jessica Pearson-Patel

On May 9th, 2015, after months of fighting the outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Liberia to be Ebola-free.[1] While this success demonstrates that both local public health services and international organizations did something right, the experience of the past year—along with the ongoing epidemic in Sierra Leone and Guinea—also demonstrate a number of important things they did wrong. A slow global response compounded a crisis sparked by poorly developed public health infrastructure—a legacy of European colonial rule in Africa—and a limited local understanding of the ins and outs of how the disease is transmitted. To date, the outbreak has resulted in over 11,000 deaths, and, even if fully eradicated, will have social and economic consequences for years to come.[2] The Ebola epidemic in West Africa reminds us that the role politics inevitably plays in shaping public health often has catastrophic consequences for the affected populations, something that historians of public health know all too well. In the case of Ebola, the political concerns that stopped the WHO from responding quickly and effectively to the outbreak resulted in thousands of deaths, often-inhumane quarantine measures, and, in certain cities, even widespread riots.

Criticism of the WHO’s inaction has focused on the decision to hold off on declaring the epidemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a declaration that comes with legally binding recommendations for the 194 member countries and can help to facilitate a coordinated global response. In internal emails and memos from June 2014, senior officials in the WHO cited fears of disrupting African economies, interfering with the pilgrimage of African Muslims to Mecca, and the pressure that such a declaration would have on the already-overextended WHO emergency response services, who were in the midst of dealing with a resurgence of polio and the spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).[3] (The resurgence of polio was declared a global health emergency in late spring, while MERS was not given this designation.) Dr. Michael Osterholm, a disease expert at the University of Minnesota, likened the decision to not declare the outbreak an international health emergency to “saying you don’t want to call the fire department because you’re afraid the trucks will create a disturbance in the neighborhood.”[4]

Several news sources registered shock at this apparently deliberate decision to delay the process of enacting emergency measures. After all, both the 1946 constitution of the WHO and its current mission statement suggest a staunch commitment to put the physical, social, and psychological needs of its global constituents first. Indeed, one of the founding principles, according to the constitution, was that “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.”[5] But as Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Center for Disease Control, recently stated: “Too many times the technical is overruled by the political in W.H.O.”[6]

While contemporary media sources expressed surprise at the way politics shaped the Ebola response, for historians of global public health this story is a familiar one. In this particular context we can easily trace the entanglement of political imperatives and public health responses back to the earliest days of the World Health Organization’s involvement on the Africa continent. When the WHO was founded in 1946, it also created six regional offices to respond to varying health needs on the ground in different places. Of the six regional offices (Europe, the Americas, Western Pacific, Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and Africa), the creation of the WHO Africa Office was the most rife with political drama and backroom diplomatic maneuverings. In colonial Africa, imperial powers feared that opening the door to the WHO would be akin to inviting international criticism of colonialism. Doctors and government officials worried that international health workers might use their work in Africa as a chance to spy on the inner-workings of their African empires. One French official wrote that a WHO Africa office would become a meeting ground for various kinds of “troublemakers: African, political, and medical.” He worried that by allowing the WHO to operate in Africa, they would be allowing outsiders a chance to create “a political climate unfavorable to French rule.”[7] Instead of thinking first about how to stop the spread of epidemic disease, these doctors and bureaucrats were thinking first about how to stop the spread of decolonization.

Despite their best diplomatic efforts, the French, British, and Belgians ultimately failed to keep the WHO out of Africa and a regional office was established in Brazzaville (French Congo) in the late 1940s. The decision to build the headquarters in Brazzaville was based on the idea that one should “keep one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer.” Colonial doctors thought that by setting up the office in the capital of French Equatorial Africa they would be able to more closely regulate the office’s programs. The first few years of the Africa office’s existence were not spent setting up the kinds of public health programs we have come to associate with the WHO. Instead, these years were plagued by bickering between WHO officials and colonial doctors about things like the creation of a public relations position, a role that the French administration claimed would allow the WHO to spread anti-colonial propaganda. It was not until the late 1950s, as European colonial rule in Africa was winding down, that the WHO was able to launch large-scale disease eradication campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa.

Both the current Ebola epidemic and this longer history of public health cooperation in Africa remind us that international health organizations like the WHO are often driven by broader local, regional, and international political contexts. As we consider the lessons that we can draw from the WHO’s failure to effectively respond to the current public health crisis brought on by the Ebola virus—and as the WHO considers reforms that will shape the way it responds to future public health emergencies—we should also consider the longer history of the way that politics have constrained the organization’s ability to execute its crucial mission.[8]

   [1] WHO Statement: “The Ebola Outbreak in Liberia is Over,” 9 May 2015, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2015/liberia-ends-ebola/en/

   [2] For current case counts, see the Center for Disease Control, 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa – Case Counts, http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/case-counts.html

   [3] “Bungling Ebola Documents,” The Associated Press, http://interactives.ap.org/specials/interactives/_documents/who-ebola/

   [4] “Emails: UN Health Agency Resisted Declaring Ebola an Emergency,” The New York Times, 20 March 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/03/20/world/ap-un-who-bungling-ebola.html

   [5] WHO constitution, 1946. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hist/official_records/constitution.pdf

   [6] Sheri Fink, “W.H.O. Members Endorse Resolution to Improve Response to Health Emergencies,” New York Times, 25 January 2015.

   [7] Archives de l’Institut de Médecine Tropicale du Service de Santé des Armées 238, Note pour Monsieur le Directeur des Affaires Politiques – 3^ème Bureau, no. 6843, DSS/4, 4 Juil 1951, 1-2.

   [8] For an outline of proposed WHO reforms in the wake of the Ebola outbreak, see “WHO reform: overview of reform implementation,” World Health Organization Executive Board, 136^th Session, 19 December 2014, http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/EB136/B136_7-en.pdf?ua=1

Jessica Reinisch’s The Perils of Peace has just been published as an Open Access monograph. You can download the full pdf from the OUP catalogue, here: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199660797.do

In The Perils of Peace Jessica Reinisch considers how the four occupiers – Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States – attempted to keep their own troops and the ex-enemy population alive. While the war was still being fought, German public health was a secondary consideration for them: an unaffordable and undeserved luxury. But once fighting ceased and the occupation began, it rapidly turned into an urgent priority. Public health was then recognized as an indispensable component of creating order, keeping the population governable, and facilitating the reconstruction of German society.

But they faced a number of problems in the process. Which Germans could be trusted to work with the occupiers and how were they to be identified? Who could be tolerated because of a lack of alternatives? How, if at all, could former Nazis be reformed and reintegrated into German society? What was the purpose of the occupation in the first place?

This is the first carefully researched comparison of the four occupation zones which looks at the occupation through the prism of public health, an essential service fundamentally shaped by political and economic criteria, and which in turn was to determine the success or failure of the occupation.

Dora Vargha has been selected to be a 2015–2016 Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, for her project “Road to Eradication: Global Polio Vaccine Testing in the Cold War.” During her stay, she will be visiting the collections at American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University.

By Philippa Hetherington

Reposted from Cosmopolites: The Blog of the Laureate Research Program in International History at University of Sydney.

Early last month, Laureate postdoctoral fellow Philippa Hetherington took part in an intellectually rich conference on the comparative and connective history of the Black Sea region at Birkbeck, University of London. The workshop was convened by Johanna Conterio, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, and part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project “The Reluctant Internationalists: A History of Public Health and International Organisations, Movements and Experts in Twentieth Century Europe, led by Dr Jessica Reinisch. The February event, ‘Landscapes of Health: the Black Sea in the Socialist World,’ brought together historians working on both the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, and explored the idea of the Black Sea region as a particularly important node in the geography of socialism. Coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference (4-11 February 1945), the conference highlighted the unique position of the Black Sea in international history, as well as in the economic, social and cultural history of tourism, health, and migration in the region. Mirroring the international focus of the conference, speakers came to Birkbeck from across the world, including Russia, Australia and Switzerland as well as Texas, California and Illinois.

The opening panel explored the singular trajectory of the Black Sea in the Cold War. Samuel Hirst (European University, St Petersburg), spoke about the shared antipathy of both Soviet and Turkish policy-makers towards Western economic dominance in the 1920s. As Hirst explained, for a brief moment in the interwar period, anti-Westernism and economic cooperation bound the Soviet and Turkish states into an unlikely trans-Black Sea alliance. In her examination of the transnational politics of Soviet deaf activism, Claire Shaw (Bristol) turned from Turkey to France, exploring the sites of miscommunication and misunderstanding between French and Soviet understandings of welfare and support for deaf communities. Finally, Stephen Bittner (Sonoma State), discussed the visit of international wine experts to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, on the invitation of the Soviet wine industry. As Bittner outlined, definitions of ‘taste’ and ‘quality’ vis-à-vis wine proved fundamentally untranslatable, as wine occupied a different social role for the Soviets and their guests. All three papers emphasised the contingent nature of cross-cultural cultural and economic ties between the Soviets and their neighbours, and highlighted the importance of attention to the ruptures, as well as the points of connection, produced by trans-national ties.

The second panel discussed population mobility on the Black Sea, through the prisms of both short-term travel (for tourism) and long-term departure (emigration and defection). Diane Koenker (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) explored the particular place of Black Sea tourism in the internationalization of Soviet culinary tastes. Any visitor to the former Soviet Union will notice the ubiquity of Georgian cuisine across the region: Koenker uncovered the longer history of this love affair with shashlyk, which she explained was complicated by fears of Caucasian ‘danger’ alongside a desire for ‘Eastern exoticism.’ Mary Neuberger (University of Texas, Austin) gave the first paper of the day focusing on Bulgaria, tracing the highs and lows of the country’s Black Sea resort industry since 1949, and particularly the initially highly successful Balkanturist state tourism agency. Erik Scott (Kansas) explored the politics of the Turkish-Georgian border in the post-war Soviet Union, highlighting the importance of studying immobility alongside mobility in the migratory dynamics of the region. He then discussed a notorious example of a defection from Georgia, on a plane traveling from Tblisi to Trabzon, and the long lasting effects of this event on the imagination of the space between Turkey and Georgia. Finally, Philippa Hetherington (Sydney) spoke about the importance of the Black Sea as a ‘laboratory of mobility’ in the interwar period, and in particular the special place occupied by displaced Russians crossing the sea in the refugee regime instigated by the Nansen Office at the League of Nations.

The final panel of the first day focused on a topic particularly close to the heart of the Reluctant Internationalists project: the Black Sea as a site of experimentation in health resorts after 1945. Juliana Maxim (San Diego) discussed the architecture of early Romanian socialist resorts from the perspective of art history, arguing that the bright new seaside resorts of the late 1950s operated as vehicles of cultural engineering, turning a ‘backward’ region into a hub of socialist modernity. Johanna Conterio (Birkbeck) emphasised the Black Sea as a site of aesthetic exchange, through which the Soviet authorities learned a new architectural language of ‘mass healthcare resort’ from their Bulgarian and Romanian neighbours. As she pointed out, examples such as this are an important corrective to a historical narrative that assumes the Soviet Union always imposed its political and aesthetic preferences on the rest of the Eastern Bloc. In the third paper, William Nickell (Chicago) examined the instrumental use of Sochi as the ‘model resort’ within Russia and the Soviet Union since the 1930s, and its role as a palimpsest serving as a paradigm of both socialist and capitalist development. Arguably, it was more viable in the former incarnation than in the more recent latter, and Nickell ended by speculating that new development plans in the city would be undermined by their decidedly un-democratic nature.

Day two of the conference opened with a rich panel on mapping, both literal and imaginary. Kelly O’Neill (Harvard) discussed a remarkably diverse set of maps inspired by the archeological exploration of the Russian/Ukrainian Black Sea Coast since the eighteenth century. As she argued, maps of the Black Sea, and visualizations of its archeological riches, could convey highly disparate ideological messages, from presenting the coast as a sum of its ports, to highlighting the great distances between the origin point of archeological treasures and their homes in museums. Susan Grant (University College, Dublin) explored the production, and sometimes unraveling, of Sochi as the ideal ‘place of rest’ through the perspective of the ‘middle’ health care workers, the nurses and feldshers who tended to patient needs for health through ‘cultured rest’ from the 1930s to the 1970s. Finally, Ruxandra Petrinca (McGill) introduced conference participants to 2 Mai and Vama Veche, two Romanian socialist-era resorts that she argued were ‘oases of individual freedom’ for the middle-class holiday-makers in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, participants learned about the various ways in which the Black Sea Coast was imagined as site of historical authenticity, idealized space of health, and even rare arena for political freedom, in the context of socialism(s).

Rounding off the conference, three distinguished discussants summed up the weekend’s proceedings and pointed to directions for future research. Diane Koenker (Illinois, Urbana Champaign) highlighted the need to pay more attention to both gender and class in our analyses of the region, and to question whether we are writing specifically connective histories of the different national spaces around the Black Sea, or more comparative ones. Elidor Mehilli (Hunter College) reminded participants that the Black Sea historically was not only a space of mobility and freedom, but also a space of Communist careerism, political posturing and the socialisation of Communist elites. Further, he raised the question of whether the socialist model of interconnectedness across this space was distinctive. Valeska Huber (German Historical Institute, London), meanwhile, called speakers’ attention to the need to think about the space of the sea itself, and not merely the coastline, and thus to engage with maritime historians who have discussed the social and cultural role of water. She also reiterated the need to historicize not only the dynamics of movement across the region, but also of immobility – moments of acceleration and deceleration in population and cultural exchange, as well as points of flow and spaces of blockage.

Ultimately, this conference sought both to place the Black Sea region in the burgeoning scholarship on global and transnational history, and also to problematize both comparative and connective perspectives on the region. Participants agreed that thinking more broadly in terms of the region as an ‘inter’ or ‘trans’-national space, albeit one ideologically divided at specific moments along nationalist lines, was enriching for scholars of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. However, many participants also felt that it was important to remember how national boundaries were also reified at various points in the twentieth century, and processes such as cultural, economic and population exchange could sometimes serve to concretize imagined notions of essential difference, rather than break them down. Podcasts of the discussions at the conference are available here; readers are also encouraged to look out for the proceedings of the conference, which are to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Slavonic and East European Review.

This week you can find The Reluctant Internationalists in Lausanne, Switzerland at the “Globalization of medicine and public health: economic and social perspectives (1850-2000)” conference organized by Sanjoy Bhattacharya (University of York), Thomas David (University of Lausanne, EPFL), Pierre-Yves Donzé (Kyoto University), and Davide Rodogno (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies).

At this exciting event Jessica Reinisch will be chairing the panel “Global Public Health After The Second World War: Non-Western Visions”, Johanna Conterio will be presenting a paper titled “The Global Botanical Roots of the Soviet Pharmaceutical Industry: The Case of Quinine” and Dora Vargha will be talking about “The Globalization of Vaccine Trials: Networks and Rivalries in Live Poliovirus Vaccine Development”.

For more information about the conference and the detailed program, see the official website. 

In our second Newsletter (see the first one here), we will include a noticeboard for announcements about events, publications, new projects or initiatives relating to the history of internationalism. If you have any news you would like to include, please email it to reluctant.internationalists@gmail.com by Friday, 13 March.

We are pleased to announce our 2015 Visiting Fellows. This summer we will host three visiting fellows:

Jessica Pearson-Patel is a historian of France, the French empire, international organisations, public health and development. During her residence at Birkbeck, Jessica will work on a book manuscript, The Colonial Politics of Global Public Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa. She will conduct more research on the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara, a joint Franco-British organisation active in developing public health in the French and British African colonies after the Second World War.

Brigid O’Keeffe is a specialist in late imperial Russian and Soviet history, with interests in internationalism, ethnicity, citizenship and everyday Soviet life. Brigid is the author of New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is currently working on a new book, Speaking Transnationally: Esperanto, Citizen Diplomacy and Internationalism in Russia, 1887-1939.

Friederike Kind-Kovacs is a historian of childhood, central, eastern and southern Europe, and the author of Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014). During her fellowship she will be conducting research for her second book, The Embattled Child: Child Welfare in Interwar Hungary between International Philanthropy and National Propaganda, 1918-1944, in which she explores the effects of the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on children in central Europe, with a special focus on Hungary.

The Reluctant Internationalists project is also delighted to host Francesca Piana’s extended stay at Birkbeck from May 2015 to November 2016. Francesca is a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and currently working on two projects: a book manuscript on the history of international initiatives for prisoners of war and refugees after the First World War, and a project entitled Women and Humanitarian Work: Three Parallel Lives, ca.1880s-1950.

You can read more about them on our website under ‘people’.

We look forward to welcoming the fellows to London, and to spending a productive summer of discussions and collaborations with them. Our new round of visiting fellowship applications will open in the autumn.

Johanna Conterio will be giving a talk on Monday, 23 February, 2015 at 6pm in the Modern Russian History Seminar at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. No RSVP necessary — please stop by if you are in Bloomsbury and have a free hour!

Researchers from all over the world, from Australia through Bulgaria came together in Paris for a two-day workshop titled ‘Medicine and Public Health in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc 1945-1991‘ on January 23-24, 2015.  Convened by Grégory Dufaud (l’EHESS, LabEx TEPSIS, France) and Susan Gross Solomon (University of Toronto, Canada), the workshop’s aim was to explore the intersection between Soviet medicine and public health and that of the Socialist Bloc in Eastern Europe after World War II. The papers focused on knowledge circulation, the transfer and local adaptation of public health practices and scientific interaction. Many participants addressed these issues through a comparative perspective, either between the Soviet Union and individual Eastern European countries, East and West or among the members of the Socialist Bloc.

Setting up the theme of the workshop, Lion Murard (Cermes3, France) gave an overview of the “Story Before the Story” and demonstrated the significance of Eastern European public health practitioners and experiences in shaping international public health in the Interwar era. Alain Blum (l’EHESS, Cercec, France) followed with an analysis of the methods of Soviet demographers and the accessibility of demographic data for contemporary and historical researchers.

Focusing on the emphasis of PREVENTION in Soviet and Eastern European public health policy, Donald Filtzer (University of East London, UK) revealed a fascinating story of factory medicine in the Soviet Union during and after the war. He highlighted how the Soviet health system attempted to counter lost work time due to starvation and illness, the prominence of skin infections due to lack of access to hygiene and the long term consequences of the home front experience on both the health of workers and the organization of medical practice. Chris Burton (University of Lethbridge, Canada) argued that the particular direction of Soviet medicine may have been a result of practical solution and intended as temporary, as much as it was based on ideology. For instance, the synthesis of preventive and clinical work, promoted from the beginning of the Soviet regime, stemmed from an insufficient number of doctors in the Civil War. In her talk titled ‘Personal hygiene and public health care in the Polish countryside after 1945 – confrontation of propaganda and reality’, Ewelina Szpak (Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, Poland) argued that the end of the 1950s and 60s was a time of crucial social changes and attitudes toward hygiene in Poland. This was especially the case in Polish villages that were seen as a bastion of backwardness, and therefore became the focus of an experimental top-down program of village hygienisation. Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas, US) investigated what addiction means and how that meaning affects the image of the addict. Looking at cigarette addiction and alcoholism, she contended that throughought the 20^th century, Russian addiction therapies remained rooted in the mind and the will, not the brain and body. Starks’s presentation was guided by the question that if will is based upon Enlightenment concepts of freedom, how is this will in addiction conceptualized in the USSR.

The second large theme explored in the workshop was PRO-NATALISM AND REPRODUCTIVE POLICIES. Paula Michaels (Monash University, Australia) presented a comparative research project jointly conducted with Ema Hresanova (University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic) on Pain and Paternalism in Soviet and Czechoslovak Maternity Care. The paper explored the circulation and adaptation of psycho-prophylaxis in the respective medical and social contexts and demonstrated a heterogeneous pattern of practices that do not map on to the concept of Sovietization. Muriel Blaive (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) shifted the temporal focus of the birthing experience to post-communist Czech Republic and placed it in comparison with North American feminist and patient’s rights movements, hospital practices and power structures in maternity care.  Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska (University of Warsaw, Poland) examined contraception and abortion law and practice in postwar Poland as situated between East and West. She showed that Polish legislation followed a Soviet type of abortion culture, and at the same time professional contacts with the West were facilitated by the International Family Planning Organization, which Poland joined as the first Eastern European country in 1959. In the case of Bulgaria, Anelia Kassabova (Sofia University, Bulgaria) pointed out that the legalization of abortion was based on the civil rights of the socialist woman, that is the right to take independent decisions on the matter of motherhood according to her own conscience. The gradual tightening of the law towards prohibition did not reduce the number of total abortions significantly, but raised the proportions of medically justified ones – with the lack of access to contraceptive technologies, abortion remained the main method of family planning.

The second day brought the workshops focus to clinical trials, treatment and international collaboration in public health and medicine. Grégory Dufaud’s paper analyzed the ways in which Soviet psychiatrists reconsidered psychiatry and its therapeutic ambitions in the context of the competition between clinical and experimental models after World War II. In her paper, Galina Orlova (The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) looked at the discursive practices and shifts of nuclear physicists on the subject of the health risks of radiation.  Pascal Grosse (Charité, Germany) presented a paper on clinical trials conducted in East Germany by Western pharmaceutical companies in the 1970s and 80s. Grosse argued that the trials were part of the GDR’s trade with the West, in this case the expertise of clinical staff and the bodies of patients were the commodity provided by the state in exchange for hard currency. The clinical trials were situated in a complex network of state bureaucracies and became sites of power struggles among their different factions. Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) focused on the interactions of local German policymakers and their Soviet counterparts in the Soviet Occupation Zone after World War II. She argued that the public health policies heralded by the Soviet military and public health experts found fertile ground in Germany, since its core ideas were considered to be inherently German by the local experts. Finally, Dora Vargha (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) gave an overview of Sabin vaccination trials conducted in Eastern Europe and investigated how ideas about socialist public health and Cold War politics in general propelled the region to a prominent place in polio prevention and eradication.

In her concluding comments, Susan Gross Solomon called to attention the importance of the prewar legacy in public health and medicine and to examine what was carried forward to the postwar era and by whom, what was resisted or scrubbed, and who debated what was to be kept. She invited the researchers of Soviet and Eastern European health and medicine to investigate the assumptions that influence research through archival research and in order to critically approach the concept of Sovietisation and to see what the dynamics was in acceptance, pseudo-acceptance, adaptation, resistance, etc. of Soviet ideas. Solomon also pointed out that many papers addressed collaboration and interaction between East and West, the existence and intensity of which seemed to depend on the scientific field, the presence of intermediators, the number of players and changed over time, e.g. intensified as the Iron Curtain wore out and became more porous.

Atina Grossmann will give a talk entitled “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran and India” on January 28, 2015. In this lecture, Professor Grossmann addresses a transnational Holocaust story that has been marginalized in both historiography and commemoration. The majority of the c.250,000 Jews who gathered in Allied Displaced Persons camps following World War II survived because they had been “deported to life” in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Iran became a central site for Jewish relief efforts and thousands of Jewish refugees, “enemy alien” as well as allied Jewish refugees in British India, worked with the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay.

Professor Grossmann seeks to integrate these largely unexamined experiences and lost memories of displacement and trauma into our understanding of the Shoah, and to remap the landscape of persecution, survival, relief and rescue during and after World War II. She also asks how this “Asiatic” experience shaped definitions (and self-definitions) as “survivors” in the immediate postwar context of displacement and up to the present globalization of Holocaust memory.

The talk will be held at the Great Hall, British Medical Association House, Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9JP, from 6:30-8pm. This event is organized by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck and the Institute for Historical Research. For more information and to register, click here.

Shortly after Stalin’s death, a British television company, Associated Rediffusion, established the first television exchange between Britain and the USSR (ruffling feathers at the BBC). Partnering with the Moscow Television Studio, during the fall of 1957, the company produced a documentary film, USSR Now. The 1958 film is a tour of the USSR that reaches from the Far North to the Black Sea, and is a look inside a country that had been largely closed for two decades. A 35 mm print from the British Film Institute National Archive will be screened.

The film will be introduced and discussed by Ian Christie, Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies and Raisa Sidenova, a PhD Candidate at Yale University, who discovered the film while conducting dissertation research. The discussion will be moderated by Johanna Conterio, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Birkbeck in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.

This event is being held in conjunction with the workshop, “The Black Sea in the Socialist World,” which is supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, the Wellcome Trust, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. The screening is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a wine reception. We hope to see you there!

6 February 2015 at 18:00
Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London

Registration essential – book your place here.

Jessica Reinisch is on the organizing committee of the Fifth international multidisciplinary conference on current international research on survivors of Nazi persecution, “Beyond Camps and Forced Labour,” which will be held at the Imperial War Museum in London, on 7-9 January, 2015.
The preliminary conference programme is available and registration is now open.

The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are engaged in research on all groups of survivors of Nazi persecution, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, Slavonic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, members of underground movements, the disabled, the so-called ‘racially impure’, and forced labourers.

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Professor of Modern European History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London, will give the keynote lecture, “After Liberation – Legacies of the Nazi Concentration Camps,” at 7pm on Wednesday, 7 January in Macmillan Hall, Senate House, University of London.

Do not miss Ana Antic’s talk titled “Parenting the Nation: Child Psychiatry, ‘Therapeutic Violence’ and Political Reeducation in WWII and Cold War Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe”

Oxford Brookes on December 9, 2014 from 4:30pm, JHB 204 Headington Campus

Following the Soviet-Yugoslav split in 1948, the Yugoslav political and military authorities devised an exceptionally violent yet psychoanalytically informed political ‘re-education’ programme for those Communists who ‘failed’ to understand the meaning of the break with the USSR and who might have remained loyal to the Soviet Party. The history of this brutal psychological experiment is at the centre of my lecture: in a series of labour camps and prisons, tens of thousands of Party members and military functionaries underwent torture and violence, but the ‘re-education’ effort also involved participation of psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. The Yugoslav ‘re-education’ experiment was hardly unique: throughout the 1950s similar camps and projects emerged in other countries of the Eastern bloc (Romania in particular) as well as in places as far away as China and Korea, and my talk aims to place Eastern Europe in this global web of psychological experimentation. In that sense, the focus on ‘re-education’ camps opens up a number of core questions regarding the history of mental health sciences in the context of authoritarianism. Firstly, it highlights the tremendous role of WWII in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and reveals unexpected continuities in conceptualizations of psychological ‘re-education’ across the year of 1945. Secondly, it emphasises the significance of ‘psy’ professions for the political history of communism and anti-communism. Thirdly, these authoritarian applications of psychiatry and psychoanalysis sat uncomfortably with the intense trend of Westernization and liberalization of Yugoslav mental health sciences – child psychiatry and psychoanalysis in particular – after the 1948 split. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis then emerge as the lens through which to study the complicated history of Cold War alliances. After Yugoslavia dropped out of the Soviet sphere of influence, it developed a rich scientific and professional cooperation with Western Europe and the US. But Yugoslav psychoanalysts and progressive psychiatrists were also tightly – and centrally – involved in violent anti-Stalinist processes, purges and ‘re-education’ projects, and in the subsequent East European psychiatric and pedagogical networks. Therefore, it is in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry that unexpected alliances formed and crossed the traditional Cold War faultlines: the history of postwar mental health professions in Yugoslavia opens up a much larger social and political story of liberalization and authoritarianism in socialist Eastern Europe.

On October 16, Dora Vargha gave a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as a part of the Centre for History in Public Health and the Vaccine Centre lunchtime seminar series. Her talk, ‘ When polio became global: a pre-history of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative,’ addressed the development of international concepts and practices in polio prevention in the post-war decades, and explores how these developments formed part of the foundation of the current polio eradication campaign.

Listen to it here