Empire of Friends

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.

Rachel Applebaum is Associate Professor of History at Tufts University.

Empire of Friends presents some intriguing new findings about bilateral relations between the two countries. [I]t is a valuable addition to the growing scholarly literature on the ways in which ordinary citizens participated in the Communist experiment.

Applebaum's book opens up important new perspectives on the transnational ties between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

Applebaum's book is an exemplary scholarly achievement, thanks to its wide-ranging sources, meticulous analysis, and the author's stimulating approach to the subject matter. Empire of Friends will not only be of interest to historians of Central and East European communism, transnational experience and the Cold War but to scholars in the broader social sciences who wish to enrich their theoretical assumptions of Soviet hegemony and soft power through this nuanced empirical analysis of socialist lived experience.

Applebaum makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics of the socialist bloc... her book will be read with interest by specialists and could be successful in graduate courses on Eastern Europe or the Cold War.

Applebaum has written an outstanding, well-researched, nuanced, and honest book.

Well documented and including an extensive bibliography, this is a book for those interested in the Soviet empire and its political methods.