Arc of Complacency: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Monopoly over Burma
Mandelkorn, Michael.
2020
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Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2020.
Submitted to the Dept. of History.
Advisors: Ayesha Jalal, and Rachel Applebaum.
Committee: Ayesha Jalal, Rachel Applebaum, and Kris Manjapra.
Keywords: Modern history, South Asian studies, and Southeast Asian studies.
Situated between China and India, Burma is too seldom named in histories of the global Cold War. ... read moreBut Burma saw one of the earliest and most complex episodes of Cold War engagements across the Global South. The United States and the People's Republic of China were the first Cold War powers to target Burma. When Burma won independence from the British in 1948, it came at the cost of a civil war that continues to this day. By the early 1950s, Burma's civil war had been hijacked into a proxy war between the US and PRC. But by 1955, American and Chinese aid programs were largely banned from the country for gross violations of Burma's national sovereignty. The Soviets took notice, and from 1955 to 1974, the Soviet Union enjoyed an unprecedented monopoly over Burma's capital, Rangoon. The Soviets spent years in Burma building bridges before becoming complacent in their diplomatic hegemony. In 1973, two Soviet specialists were kidnapped by Shan militants, kicking off a series of events that abruptly dismantled the Soviet monopoly over Rangoon. That two-decade monopoly had been forged and destroyed by the same proxy war violence. This thesis follows that doomed arc of Soviet diplomacy in Rangoon, and situates it within the larger story of Burma's global Cold War experience.read less - ID:
- ff365k171
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