Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia by Rachel Applebaum (review)

Internationalism, often laughed off as a mere propaganda slogan meant to justify Soviet hegemony, has received some renewed scholarly attention in the past years. While most researchers have mainly focused on internationalism during the Cold War in relation to the decolonized Global South and international organizations, Rachel Applebaum turns to the role of internationalism within the Eastern Bloc. More specifically, she studies what she calls the friendship project between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. The book's very title Empire of Friends already addresses the paradox inherent in an attempt to build and solidify a united socialist world that promoted friendship and equality while being based on the assumption and enforcement of Moscow's dominant position. While the title may allude to Francine Hirsch's and Terry Martin's books on Soviet nationalities policies in the 1920s and 1930s,¹ the book explores not so much the legacies, parallels, and interconnections of these policies within the larger realm of the Eastern Bloc. Nor does Applebaum discuss the potential of reconceptualizing the bloc along the lines of discussions held in the context of (post)colonial/imperial studies of Eastern Europe, including the "imperial situation." Her book can instead be grouped with recent publications that aspire to transcend the themes of control and high politics still prevalent in Cold War studies. Instead of registering the success or failure of consumer-oriented policies or cultural exchange, these works focus on various dynamics inherent in the negotiation of transnational connections in the context of the Cold War. Applebaum explores Soviet–Czechoslovak cultural diplomacy as conveyed via monuments, films and magazines, consumer culture, and tourism. The book assesses the productivity and dynamism of the exchange between the two countries from 1945 to the 1980s.

Three central theses sustain the longue durée perspective of Applebaum's approach. First of all, she turns against the traditional claim that internationalism was a failure by stating that the project, despite its contradictions and fissures, proved to be surprisingly durable and flexible, surviving different turning points in Soviet–Czechoslovak relations. Second, she posits that the friendship project provided cohesion in the socialist world, not just in the imagination of party planners but also in the everyday lives of people, by forging cultural and interpersonal connections. Last, but not least, Applebaum asserts that the friendship project succeeded even where its immediate political goals failed: during the post-1968 normalization, the friendship project was embraced at some level by the population, and not only by officials eager to restore good relations between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Even open critics, who condemned the 1968 Soviet invasion by contrasting it to the Soviet liberation of the country in 1945 and Soviet–Czechoslovak friendship over the next two decades, eventually endorsed the foundation myth of the friendship project: that Czechoslovakia had been liberated by the Soviet troops in 1945.

The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 reconstructs the origins of the Soviet–Czechoslovak friendship project in the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945. Applebaum discusses how the master narrative of this event was forged in the context of the genuine celebration of Soviet soldiers, but also highlights the darker sides of the Soviet occupation and early discussions about military, cultural, and economic hegemony of the USSR in the immediate postwar years. Against the background of the growing literature on postwar public debate in Czechoslovakia, this chapter is a good, if somewhat repetitive introduction to the intellectual climate in the country just before and after the communist takeover in 1948. Initially, the discourse of internationalism served as a format for the critical discussion of Czechoslovakia's national future in the socialist world. Soviet culture was regarded as an antipode to the German occupation and political model – intended as the great role model. In the wake of the 1948 communist coup, the rhetoric of internationalist friendship rapidly evolved into ritualized...