Today, there is plenty of evidence that Russia has become a prominent external actor in Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet, few books have attempted to better understand the reasons behind Russia s return and Moscow's continuous engagement in the region. In order to fill the gap, this volume offers the first interdisciplinary study of Russian-Latin American relations after the end of the Cold War. Across 16 chapters, leading experts from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America collectively re-examine the Soviet legacy to reveal the conditions in which Russia operates today and identify the key trends of contemporary Russian relations with this part of the world. The book then moves on to provide a detailed case study analysis of Russia's bilateral relations with Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, identifying the most critical dimensions of Russian engagement. Rethinking Post Cold-War Russian-Latin American Relations allows readers to identify the fundamental driving forces of Russia's renewed commitment to the area, its strategies and experiences. The book will be of interest to readers of international relations and area studies, historians of modern Latin America, migration studies, political economy, and any political scientists interested in Russian decision-making.

Pointing to the dramatic changes in Soviet policy in Latin America over the past few years, this work demonstrates that the fear of Soviet penetration of region, which drove US policy during the Cold War, has become groundless: Moscow wants normal state-to-state relations with the countries in Latin America, and may want an end to the conflict in Central America even more than Washington does.

Over the last decade, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. Unfortunately, work on Latin America has not been well represented in either theoretical or empirical discussions of the broader conflict. With some notable exceptions, studies have proceeded in rather conventional channels, focusing on U.S. policy objectives and high-profile leaders (Fidel Castro) and events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and drawing largely on U.S. government sources. Moreover, only rarely have U.S. foreign relations scholars engaged productively with Latin American historians who analyze how the international conflict transformed the region's political, social, and cultural life. Representing a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, this volume attempts to facilitate such a cross-fertilization. In the process, In From the Cold shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called "new Cold War history," in order to showcase research, discussion, and an array of new archival and oral sources centering on the grassroots, where conflicts actually brewed. The collection's contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south. Contributors. Ariel C. Armony, Steven J. Bachelor, Thomas S. Blanton, Seth Fein, Piero Gleijeses, Gilbert M. Joseph, Victoria Langland, Carlota McAllister, Stephen Pitti, Daniela Spenser, Eric Zolov

The Soviet Union is often presented as a largely isolated and idiosyncratic state. Soviet Internationalism after Stalin challenges this view by telling the story of Soviet and Latin American intellectuals, students, political figures and artists, and their encounters with the 'other' from the 1950s through the 1980s. In this first multi-archival study of Soviet relations with Latin America, Tobias Rupprecht reveals that, for people in the Second and Third Worlds, the Cold War meant not only confrontation with an ideological enemy but also increased interconnectedness with distant world regions. He shows that the Soviet Union looked quite different from a southern rather than a Western point of view and also charts the impact of the new internationalism on the Soviet Union itself in terms of popular perceptions of the USSR's place in the world and its political, scientific, intellectual and cultural reintegration into the global community.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of axes: European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.