Joel Kotek
Translated by Ralph Blumenau
Macmillan 1996 £40
An edited version of a PhD thesis, this is an extremely interesting and massively detailed account of the politics of the student movement before and during the early years of the Cold War. Centrally it shows how Communist Party members from various countries, under presumed if not illustrated Soviet control, created the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students; with the subsequent retaliatory creation, by the UK and USA, of the World Assembly of Youth (WAY), the International Student Conference and COSEC (Coordinating Secretariat).
The final chapter and the conclusion discuss the CIA funding of various youth and student bodies in the fifties and sixties. These two chapters will be of particular interest to anyone who has not read the material produced in the 1960s when the CIA funding was ‘blown’ by Ramparts magazine.
Almost completely missing is information on the British contribution to all this after 1948. Was there none in the thesis? Or have the British sections been removed? The fact that this was published by Macmillan in conjunction with St Antony’s College makes me wonder. For St. Antony’s in the fifties and sixties certainly was something like an annexe to the Foreign Office/SIS end of Whitehall.