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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

Through a case-study of the World Youth Festival, the book provides new insights into the Soviet role in the cultural Cold War and offers an explanation why the USSR failed in the cultural battle against the USA and the capitalist system. With a detailed analysis of grass-roots interaction, it re-evaluates the agency of micro-level actors and argues that individuals had more chances for transnational contacts than previous scholarship has shown.

Neuvostoliiton viimeiseksi jäänyt johtaja Mihail Gorbatšov puolisoineen vieraili Suomessa ensimmäistä kertaa syksyllä 1989. Itänaapurin vierailua seurattiin Suomessa innostuneesti. Tuhannet ihmiset olivat vastaanottamassa Gorbatšoveja niin Helsingissä kuin matkan päätöskohteessa Oulussa. Kadunvarsilla tapahtumaa seurasi myös lapsia ja nuoria, jotka tervehtivät valtiovieraita Suomen ja Neuvostoliiton lippuja heilutellen. Tämä artikkeli tarkastelee valtiovierailun julkisia tapahtumia lasten muistelukerronnan ja aikalaismedian näkökulmista. Millä tavoin nykyään aikuiset muistelevat tätä 1980-luvulla lapsuudessa koettua tapahtumaa? Millaisia merkityksiä he vierailulle antavat ja millaisiin yhteyksiin vierailu heidän muisteluissaan kiinnittyy, ja mitä tämä kaikki kertoo lasten suhteesta poliittiseen maailmaan.

The volume Remembered and Imagined Soviet Union addresses memories, conceptions, and images relating to the Soviet past from the perspective of cultural memory. The book explores how the Soviet Union has been recalled and how it has been depicted in cultural products like literature, museum exhibitions, art and the media. Instead of trying to say what the Soviet Union was, the book analyses the ways in which Finns, Russians and Estonians have viewed the Soviet past at different times. The book answers the following questions: What is remembered about the Soviet past? How has the country been represented in various cultural texts? What is forgotten or not talked about?
The book consists of chapters by scholars of history, literature and art studies. They look at key themes of the Soviet past in the framework of cultural memory, with topics including space conquest, the superiority of the hockey team, known as the "Red machine", political propaganda, and persecution of minorities.

"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"--Provided by publisher