Culture

Abstract

From the early 1950s onward, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe sought to take advantage of a fast-changing political world by forging cultural relations with non-aligned, decolonizing and newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. By the late 1960s the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies had established contacts with no less than thirty-two African countries, fourteen Latin American countries, and seventeen countries in South East Asia and the Middle East to ‘help fortify the spirit of solidarity between peoples of these countries’. According to one 1967 brochure, the Union had held over 16,000 exhibitions, meetings and evening events at its flagship house in Moscow since 1956, with reportedly over 2 million attendees. In the late 1950s the USSR mounted numerous art shows featuring the work of Eastern European artists as well as those from socialist countries farther afield such as China, North Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia. Such events were becoming ever more common, serving as they did as the vehicles of Communist cultural diplomacy, a trend worryingly noted by western observers at the time.