PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Soviet cultural diplomacy drew significant attention of Western researchers from various fields, who tried to properly interpret the cultural expansion of the Soviet Union. The initial political approach to perception of cultural diplomacy as a form of competition and the struggle of superpowers for greater influence still retains its position in contemporary historiography, yet the institutional level of research dedicated to the mechanisms of authoritarian political systems finally gives us a chance to study the inner logic of the functioning of the Soviet bureaucratic system. The collective monograph edited by Oksana Nagornaya provides a detailed description of the institutions responsible for Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1950s-1980s, as well as its practical aims and goals. The authors’ refusal to use the traditional political timeframes of the post-war USSR associated with political leaders made it possible to state that the dominant impulses for developing and transforming Soviet cultural diplomacy were in fact the two great crises in the Socialist block in 1956 and 1968. In the aftermath of the Hungarian crisis, a radical turn took place in the Soviet system, with a new focus on creating systems of mass communication in the fields of interstate, academic and social relations. An important part of such policy change was ecclesiastic diplomacy of the Soviet Union, which previously had been outside the traditional framework because of the Bolsheviks’ negative view on religion. This form of diplomacy began to rapidly develop in the 1960s-1980s, turning church representatives into important actors of the Cold War. The expanding system of communication, growing more and more complex, led to unexpected transformations and privatization of discourses and narratives translated abroad or offered to foreign tourists, gradually changing the inner cultural landscape of the USSR.