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Reds in Blue investigates Soviet relations with UNESCO in the mid-twentieth century to offer a new way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Applying social, cultural, and intellectual historical methodologies to the study of multilateral diplomacy, it provides the first history of the Soviet reception of the idea of world governance through noncommunist international organizations.
List of contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Really-Existing World Governance and Soviet Socialism
- Part I: Converging Internationalisms
- Chapter 1: Dual Power in World Governance: The USSR out of UNESCO, 1945-1953
- Chapter 2: The Key to the Whole System: The USSR in UNESCO, 1954-1959
- Chapter 3: Strange Bedfellows: The USSR and UNESCO in a Changing World, 1960-1967
- Part II: Everyday World Governance
- Chapter 4: "No Neutral Men": Soviet International Civil Servants and Life in the Soviet Colony in Paris
- Chapter 5: Working for the World: Soviet International Civil Servants in the UNESCO Secretariat
- Chapter 6: Gathering for One World: Soviet Participation in UNESCO's International Public Sphere
- Chapter 7: Reading a Better World: Soviet Participation in UNESCO's Reading Public
- Conclusion: A University in the Air
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
This meticulously researched and elegantly written book will be a welcome addition to our knowledge of the history of UNESCO and the role of the Soviet Union in it, with a focus on individuals rather than the state.
