The Western Image of Soviet Camps in a Changing World, 1947–57

The western campaign against Soviet forced labour camps was undoubtedly one of the most significant aspects in the western organization of the Cold War. Rarely, however, have historians adequately treated this subject in all its historical implications, perhaps seeing it as just one of many tools of propaganda associated with the Truman Doctrine. An effort to connect different levels of analysis has been lacking until now. But the point is precisely to assess what social, political and cultural forces have been called together to realize a design on a global scale. Three different forces acted in a transnational sphere against Soviet-style forced labour: the morality of civil societies, the power of governments and the law of international organizations. The making of such a coalition had much to do with the logic of the global Cold War, that is reducing the risk that elites emerging from the decolonization process would look to the Soviet regime to reproduce its pattern of development. This strategy soon showed its limitations in a changing world, where decolonization imposed a global anti-imperialist discourse that did not fit within the anti-totalitarianism of the early Cold War.