Overview

"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."

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9780197656303

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Reviews

Over the past decade, historians have finally begun to prise open the 'multiverse' of international institutions, revealing people, ideas, and practices we had long forgotten. Finally, we have a study that begins to fill a persistent gap: the role of people, ideas, and practices hailing from the Soviet Union. Porter's archival work is the foundation for an invaluable new contribution to our understanding of the history of internationalism that pushes us to overhaul our view of the Cold War and later twentieth century. * Glenda Sluga, author of The Invention of International Order * In this original and fascinating study, Louis Porter shows how participation in UNESCO opened up new worlds of possibility and meaning for patriotic Soviet citizens-even for those who would never travel beyond the USSR's own borders. Reds in Blue reveals how world governance became an arena of both Cold War competition and cooperation as ordinary people on both sides of the Iron Curtain worked to build UNESC's networks of global solidarity and cross-cultural exchange. With its faithful attention to lived experience, Porter's book is an important contribution to studies of Soviet internationalism, Cold War cultural diplomacy, and of the UN's twentieth-century endeavors to promote peace within a persistently fractured and unruly world. * Brigid O'Keeffe, Brooklyn College * This book is a well-written and groundbreaking account of Soviet internationalism during the Cold War. It demonstrates how a small elite of Soviet patriotic cosmopolitans influenced UNESCO and its member states and vice versa. Reds in Blue is a must-read for everyone interested in the history of the USSR and its international relations. * Poul Duedahl, Aalborg University * In this remarkable book, Louis Porter demonstrates the surprising parallels that existed between Soviet internationalism and the ideals of world governance promoted by UNESCO and other non-communist international institutions. While Soviet history and the history of international organizations have long been approached separately, Porter shows how deeply they were intertwined. * Rachel Applebaum, author of Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia *

Author Information

Louis Howard Porter is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. His research was awarded the Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

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