For the purposes of this entry, these are not a manifestation of the pacifist and conscientious objection traditions, but were those movements in western Europe that campaigned for unilateral disarmament between the world wars and during the Cold War. They could be sponsored openly by the local communist parties, or as ‘front’ organizations set up by the Soviet state security apparatus (NKVD Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, MGB (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Ministry of State Security), KGB), or could simply be semi-spontaneous organizations of what the Soviets called ‘useful fools’. The most successful was the anti-Fascist Popular Front stategy pursued by the Comintern in the 1930s, which elected centre-left governments in Spain, France, and elsewhere until Stalin reversed course in 1938, executed the Comintern organizers, and directed a rapprochement with Nazi Germany culminating in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. The least, although still impressive in their demonstration of the KGB's ability to turn the useful fools on and off like a light switch, were the widespread protests against the deployment of US Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe in the 1980s, which fizzled out as soon as Moscow changed diplomatic tack, a last reminder of the realpolitik that lay behind the ‘great betrayal’ of 1938.
Although after WW II the standing joke was that the Communist Party of the USA would collapse if all the deep-cover FBI agents resigned their memberships, before the war Soviet/Comintern influence was not only well placed in Roosevelt's inner circle, but also betrayed itself in the ‘light switch’ response of prominent isolationist organizations and media, which changed their tune without preamble the day that Hitler invaded the USSR. However, the Soviets could take no credit for either initiating or maintaining the ‘Peace Movement’ in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was largely a misnomer for a protest against the possibility of being sent to fight in the Vietnam war and deflated as soon as that possibility faded, although the war continued.
Ambrose Bierce's definition that to do a favour is to make an enemy comes to mind when considering the subculture of anti-Americanism that the Soviets were able to tap into among western European leftish intellectuals. Perhaps as a manifestation of wounded pride that their continent had so comprehensively sabotaged itself between 1914 and 1945, they demonstrated a knee-jerk willingness to side against the USA in any international conflict. This was not only in and of itself immensely helpful to the USSR, it also led the CIA to mount its own covert efforts to influence public opinion which, being discovered, were grist to the moral equivalence mill. Thanks very largely to the Vietnam war, it was the USA that was denounced as being a militarist regime and a unilateral threat to world peace, while the peaceful Soviets crushed Czechoslovakian freedom, forced the Poles to crush their own, and finally were imprudent enough to invade Afghanistan. While all this was going on, an organization known as Physicians for Social Responsibility continued to campaign against the build-up of nuclear weapons, for which somehow the USA alone was responsible, which culminated in their being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, courtesy of Soviet lobbying. And nobody laughed.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this bias, whether a manifestation of subconscious resentment or the product of manipulation by the very clever men and women of the V Directorate of the KGB, or a bit of both, was the hysterical reaction to Pres Reagan's so-called ‘Star Wars’ initiative, on the face of it a defensive system that a pacifist might approve of. Suddenly remarkably uniform articles about the essentially aggressive nature of the initiative surfaced in newspapers and magazines all over the world. Not that the argument lacked merit, merely that the same reasoning was never applied to the Soviets' own development of an ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) capability, or to their deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles in the European theatre, and so on and on. Four legs good, two legs bad.
— Hugh Bicheno
