Cold War Crossings. International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s. Ed. by Patryk Babiracki und Kenyon Zimmer. Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 225 S., 10 Abb., 1 Tab. ISBN: 978-1-62349-030-0

Cold War Crossings. International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s. Ed. by Patryk Babiracki / Kenyon Zimmer. Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 225 S., 10 Abb., 1 Tab. ISBN: 978-1-62349-030-0.

In recent years research into the Cold War has taken a decidedly social and cultural turn, shifting its centre of gravity from the realm of high politics to a range of new locales, and opening research up to a variety of new approaches. This volume, the offshoot of a lecture series held at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2011, exemplifies this trend by focusing on international exchange across Cold War borders, by actors on both sides of the divide. In doing so, the book shifts scholarly attention to the thoughts and impressions of the individuals who physically crossed borders, some with grand and hopeful expectations, others with a good deal more suspicion. The volume also exemplifies a recent trend in the scholarship to shift emphasis away from US-Soviet contacts: here, only one of the six chapters in this volume focuses on the two superpowers, although their guiding hand is often in the background.

After a brief introduction by Sergei Zhuk, Cold War Crossings begins with a contribution by Michael David-Fox, who reflects on the notion of the ‘Iron Curtain’, and suggests that even at the height of Stalinist xenophobia in the 1945–53 period, the borders between east and west were minimally porous. David-Fox describes the apparently “iron” curtain as a “semi-permeable membrane”, which selectively allowed certain kinds of transit through its cellular walls. The author also draws attention to the erosion of the Stalinist superiority complex during the Thaw, as the growing turn towards consumerism led to questioning whether the country was as advanced as its propaganda made out.

David-Fox’s contribution provides useful context for the five contributions that follow, all of which are based on archival research. Patrick Babiracki’s contribution focuses on a series of cross-border exchanges which saw Polish peasants visiting Soviet collective farms as a means of advertising the material benefits of Soviet-style agriculture. Babiracki’s chapter introduces a theme that resonates throughout the volume: trust. While the Soviet authorities rolled out the red carpet for their guests, the Poles were liable to draw negative conclusions from the dishevelled appearance of Soviet representatives or else to mistrust entirely the positive picture that they had been shown as so much window-dressing. Nick Rutter’s discussion of the 1951 youth festival in Berlin similarly illustrates the importance of perceptions during the cultural Cold War. Rutter shows how communist officials attempted to show that the GDR was a space of freedom, and that the Iron Curtain was something created less by socialist authoritarianism as by western intransigence. While communist authorities removed border controls for those travelling to the festival, giving the impression that the Iron Curtain was something of a western fiction, western governments were intolerant of those westerners travelling to the festival: US military policemen boarded trains, beat those who argued, and incarcerated and humiliated their ‘captives’. In this case, attempts to show off the eastern bloc as a Potemkin village of fraternity and freedom while simultaneously exposing western intolerance was highly successful in the battle of Cold War perceptions.

Elidor Mëhilli’s chapter focuses on the exchange of experts within the socialist bloc. While some accounts suggest that knowledge and resources flowed largely from the periphery to the Soviet centre, on the basis of research in Albanian, Russian, and German archives Mëhilli shows how such expertise could also flow in the opposite direction. Yet inflows of expertise from Soviet, Czechoslovakian and East German specialists led to argument and recrimination over pay differentials and technical issues. Mëhilli shows that while German specialists were apt to blame problems on technological backwardness and “chronic laziness”, their Albanian hosts were inclined to pin those setbacks on the shortcomings of their foreign counterparts, illustrating the inequalities within the socialist bloc and the feelings of superiority and inferiority that they gave rise to.

Constantin Katsakioris’s chapter on Soviet attempts to harness the African decolonization movement for its own ends shows the paradoxes of the Soviet turn towards the global south. African leaders and intellectuals were repelled both by the Soviets’ ambivalent attitudes to the Algerian independence struggle and also by the Soviet political elite’s paternalistic attitudes. When a wave of African students arrived in Soviet universities in the 1960s they were confronted with physical abuse and physical violence fuelled both by racism and by resentment at the benefits enjoyed by foreign students. Ultimately, then, Katsakioris’s chapter shows that the Soviet turn towards the south led not to greater harmony, but to mutual recrimination.

Marsha Siefert concludes the volume with an account of negotiations between Soviet officials and US film producers over what would have been the first jointly produced feature film, Meeting at a Far Meridian. While the film was intended to illustrate the benefits of peaceful coexistence, behind the scenes wrangling belied the film’s intended message. The reason for the failure of negotiations remains ambiguous. International tensions in a time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War played their part, but the failure can also be attributed to a culture clash, with the Soviet side eventually losing patience with US dithering: Soviet negotiator Vladimir Surin bemoaned the fact that the Americans had placed them in the position of ‘disrespected partner’. Once again, the chapter suggests that perceptions mattered.

The editors of the volume are to be commended in putting together a collection with a high level of thematic coherence, with the themes of trust, perceptions, superiority and inferiority and consumerism at its heart. Of particular interest is the way the authors are able to home in on the impressions of individuals, reminding us that Cold War exchange was not only about high-level agreements, but also based on the concrete perceptions of individuals who were thrust into an alien environment. The volume has the great virtue of bringing into focus a new range of historical actors in a novel range of locales, from Polish peasants suspiciously examining Soviet collective farms to African students confronting the unhappy paradoxes of Soviet internationalism in Moscow, allowing scholars to test existing theories of cultural and technological exchange. The volume’s key strength lies in its detailed and well-elaborated case studies, each of which provides a telling vantage point from which to view the vicissitudes of Cold War exchange. While more case studies may have allowed more scope for generalising about the wider applicability of the findings, in an era in which some collected volumes restrict authors to 10-12 page contributions, this volume appears to have been guided by the Russian saying “better fewer, but better”. Thus Cold War Crossings represents a valuable addition to the scholarship on the nature of the Iron Curtain, which will offer much, not just to historians of the Cold War, but also to researchers focusing on transnational exchanges within the ‘second world’, and historians of post-war Eastern Europe more widely.

Simon Huxtable, London