One Place, Three Memories
Hiroshima from the Soviet Point of View
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
From the Soviet point of view, the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 was not the end of the Second World War, but the prelude to the Cold War. The event represented a huge military, scientific, and ideological challenge for the Soviet Union, but officials systematically downplayed its significance. Fear of the atomic bomb and nuclear power were not supposed to take root at all. Under Stalin, Hiroshima went largely ignored; in the 1950s, it emerged as a symbol of looming nuclear war and U.S. imperialism. But it was only during the Second Cold War in the 1980s that the Soviets also came to see Hiroshima as a place of memory to recall the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse.
(Osteuropa 7/2013, pp. 139–168)