A Socialist Empire

The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.

Excerpt from Socialism or Empire: A Danger There is an undercurrent of political thought today in the United States, which drifts toward socialism, and this unconscious drift, leads up to a grant of power to our Executive Department quite necessary under a socialistic government, but which creates a danger to our institutions. Successive grants of power to an executive, have always ended in Empire with Republics of the past, and usually the additional power has been given, at the instance of the "common people." While the theory of socialism is a beautiful one, human nature must be changed to make it a success. There are two well denned classes of socialists. The educated theorist who claims to have eliminated greed from his nature, and who prates of the equality of man; and the uneducated socialist who thinks it wrong for any man to have more than himself. The Theorist is a fraud, and should be watched by the police, as mild forms of lunacy soon drift to violence. His only danger is in injury to himself and the advice he gives others. It is but a step from the theory that it is only right to work entirely for the public good, to the position that the public should receive the benefit of all personal endeavor. The theoretical socialist talks of the beauties of socialism from the stand point of the "giver," while his ignorant followers interpret this to mean that the public should have the power to "take." The unfortunate thing about this agitation is the fact that the later class is gaining the most headway. This under current of thought is so sweeping, that I have been surprised in conversation with Senators, Congressmen and Managing Editors of several of our great dailies, when I have suggested that this agitation was a tendency toward socialism, to hear the expression, "that possibly it was coming." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This year we will see a cascade of patriotic froth surrounding the anniversary of the First World War, which is to be reinvented as a time when the whole nation united against an external threat and through immense sacrifice and heroism triumphed. WWI was, however, a clash of empires. Both the British and the German ruling classes were prepared for any number of dead and maimed to advance their imperial interests. As Dave Sherry shows in this accessible history, working class people suffered during WWI, but also began to fight back in the Russian and German revolutions.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

What are the roots of murderous ethnic cleansing, extreme nationalism and the re-invention of historical myths in the modern Balkans? This study of socialism among the Ottoman communities of Macedonians, Bulgarians, Armenians, Greeks and Jews of Salonika, in the late-Ottoman and early Turkish period (1876-1923), seeks to lay bare these origins.

This groundbreaking comparative study rediscovers the socialists of Russia’s borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics and the Russian Revolution. Researched in eight languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy challenges long-held assumptions by scholars and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change.