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.

This thesis, an entangled history of the Soviet Union and Latin America from the 1950s through the 1970s, explores Soviet internationalism as it re-emerged after the self-inflicted isolation of the USSR during late Stalinism. Referring to an idealised notion of pre-Stalin socialism, Soviet politicians and intellectuals, after 1953, revived internationalism as a guiding principle in relation to internal as well as external audiences. De-Stalinization at home happened against the backdrop of the Cold War, which had shifted its focus from Europe to the emerging Third World. Latin America, unlike South-East Asia or Africa with a distinct history of relations with the Soviets from early on, became again a target of Soviet advances. No longer, however, did the Soviets propagate the violent overthrow of governments; they now sought to win over anti-imperialist politicians in office, intellectuals of different political leanings and future elites as friends of the Soviet state. The first chapter analyses a range of activities that were meant to present the Soviet Union to Latin Americans as a technologically and culturally advanced modern state. The chapters three and four examine the surprising successes and some shortcomings of these endeavours with Latin American intellectuals and students respectively. Before that, however, the second chapter looks at the impact that the new internationalist activities had on the Soviet Union itself. It will be argued that the cautious re-opening of the country to the world did not, as is sometimes suggested, immediately undermine Soviet values and spread Western ideas of liberalism and consumerism instead. Contacts with countries of the Global South, which were often less developed than the Soviet Union, and that were in many cases victims of imperialist policies, initially proved to many Soviet politicians and intellectuals the ostensible superiority of their own system, while the majority of the Soviet population enjoyed internationalism through the consumption of a politicised exoticist popular culture. Stalin's successors announced a return to socialist internationalism, and a number of its most active promoters are presented in the last chapter. But at the same time, the end of isolation also meant a reintegration of the Soviet Union, at political, scientific, intellectual and cultural levels, into a global community under the conditions of the Cold War. I refer to this specific conglomeration of revolutionary and integrative ideals as 'Soviet internationalism after Stalin'.

This volume examines how numerous international transfers, circulations, and exchanges shaped the world of socialism during the Cold War. Over the course of half a century, the Soviets shaped politics, values and material culture throughout the vast space of Eurasia, and foreign forces in turn often influenced Soviet policies and society. The result was the distinct and interconnected world of socialism, or the Socialist Second World. Drawing on previously unavailable archival sources and cutting-edge insights from “New Cold War” and transnational histories, the twelve contributors to this volume focus on diverse cultural and social forms of this global socialist exchange: the cults of communist leaders, literature, cinema, television, music, architecture, youth festivals, and cultural diplomacy. The book’s contributors seek to understand the forces that enabled and impeded the cultural consolidation of the Socialist Second World. The efforts of those who created this world, and the limitations on what they could do, remain key to understanding both the outcomes of the Cold War and a recent legacy that continues to shape lives, cultures and policies in post-communist states today.

The first multi-archive-based study of Soviet relations with Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Well organized appraisal based on carefully researched Soviet sources.

Before Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organizations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organizations for the first time, including the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. As a result, it enabled Soviet diplomats, scholars, teachers, and even some blue-collar workers to participate in global discussions on topics ranging from their professional specialties to worldwide problems. Reds in Blue investigates Soviet relations with one of the most prominent of these organizations, UNESCO, to present a novel way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Drawing on unused archival material from the former USSR and elsewhere, the book examines the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations and lesser-known activities of world governance. These unexamined dimensions of everyday participation in the UN's bureaucracy, conferences, publications, and technical assistance show the body's importance for a group of Soviet "one-worlders," who used the UN to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev governments sought to use their participation as a means of spreading Soviet influence within Western-dominated international organizations but discovered that this required risk-taking and a degree of openness for which the Soviet leadership and domestic institutions were often unprepared. Moving beyond debates over the successes and failures of UN diplomatic activities, Reds in Blue offers fresh perspectives on how Soviet citizens became citizens of the world and advocated for opening up Soviet society in ways that transcended Cold War categories without abandoning a sense of loyalty to their homeland. In doing so, it recaptures a space where East and West worked together towards a future without international conflict in the years before détente.