The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene

A book review of The Cold War from the margins: a small socialist state on the global cultural scene, by Theodora K. Dragostinova, Cornell University Press, 2021.

There is a voluminous literature on the 20th century Cold War between the socialist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States of America and their ideological and military allies. This developed after the Second World War and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Do we need further contributions to this literature? Two important aspects which provide opportunities are, first, the specific contribution of the respective allied states to the conduct of the Cold War in its various dimensions and, secondly, the role of cultural diplomacy and “soft power” based on a wide-ranging ideological appeal that drew upon the arts, sciences, education, cultural exchange, and intellectual life generally which has become known as the “Cultural Cold War”.