Lifting the Iron Curtain: The Peace March to Moscow of 1960–1961

Abstract

of the most unusual events of the cold war occurred between 7 August and 8 October 1961, when a group of Western peace activists staged anti-military protests in three key countries of the Communist bloc. In the final stage of the San Francisco to Moscow March for Peace, several dozen American and West European pacifists criticizing the nuclear arms race and calling for unilateral disarmament paraded across 1,268 miles of East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. They carried anti-military banners, addressed public meetings, demonstrated outside military bases, and distributed more than 165,000 leaflets.1 Although 'peace' agitation had occurred previously in Communist states, it had been the work of the official peace organizations created and controlled by the Communist Party and government, and the message had stressed Communist virtue and Western villainy. Independent, nonaligned peace groups had been banned.2 Suddenly, however, the policy changed, despite the escalating tension over two cold war events with ominous implications: the building of the Berlin Wall and the resumption of Soviet nuclear testing. How did this happen? The idea for the march originated with the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), a tiny US pacifist group committed to non-violent direct action in the quest for nuclear disarmament and world peace. Although the CNVA was only a small component of a world-wide surge of protest against the nuclear arms race that characterized the late 1950s and the early 1960s,3 it played a role far out of proportion to its size. In part, this was