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Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two
warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This
volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there
were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting
like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the
fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations,
and individuals who brought people from the East and the West
together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even
through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII
histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking
at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland,
and others.
Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two
warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This
volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there
were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting
like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the
fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations,
and individuals who brought people from the East and the West
together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even
through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII
histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking
at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland,
and others.
Performing Peace and Friendship tells the story of how the Soviet
Union succeeded in utilizing the World Festival of Youth and
Students in its cultural diplomacy from late Stalinism through the
early Khrushchev period. Pia Koivunen discusses the evolution of
the youth gathering into a Soviet cultural product starting from
the first festival held in Prague in 1947 and ending with the
Moscow 1957 gathering, the latter becoming one of the most
frequently referred moments of Khrushchev's Thaw. By combining both
institutional and grass-roots' perspectives, the book widens our
understanding of what Soviet cultural diplomacy was in practice,
re-evaluates the agency of young people and provides new insights
into the Soviet role in the cultural Cold War. Koivunen argues that
rather than simply being orchestrated rallies by the Kremlin
bureaucrats, the World Youth Festivals also became significant
spaces of transnational encounters for young people, who found ways
to employ the event for overcoming the various restrictions and
boundaries of the Cold War world.
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