In the past few years, a growing number of conference sessions and articles have been devoted to Soviet cultural relations with the global South. Tobias Rupprecht’s excellent new book on Soviet cultural interactions with Latin America shows that this subject richly merits more extended treatment. Although Latin America was always peripheral to Soviet geopolitical strategy, its cultural impact occurred at a number of levels, from the dissemination in the hundreds of thousands of translations of Latin American literature to the popularity of faux-Latin American settings in movies and popular song. For all the recent interest in the cultural dimension of the Cold War, as well as on Soviet-Third World interactions, surprisingly few studies highlight the diversity of global cultural influences on late Soviet culture. Rupprecht draws attention to a specific kind of Soviet cosmopolitanism, especially among the Soviet cultural elite.

Though often stereotypical, mutual assessments by Soviet and Latin American commentators were highly positive, especially during the 1960s. Soviet authors, filmmakers, and composers who incorporated Latin American themes into their work tended to combine tropical exoticism with a melodramatic story line centered on capitalist, often U.S., exploitation. The Cuban Revolution beautifully exemplified this Soviet narrative of a “heroic” people throwing off its chains through adherence to socialism. Even as the Soviet leadership distanced itself from “Maoist” elements in Havana, especially Che Guevara, an infatuation with the Cuban Revolution in both popular and high Soviet culture was tacitly encouraged. Fidel Castro was given rock star treatment during a 40-day visit to the USSR. It helped that top Soviet officials, right up to Nikita Khrushchev, associated Cuba with the revolutionary excitement of their own youth.

Latin America reinforced socialist internationalism, an element of official ideology that became central to Soviet identity after Stalin’s death. Rupprecht treats the socialist internationalism of the late 1950s and 1960s (the chronological center of the book) as an amalgam of Soviet internationalist traditions of the 1920s and the newer opening to the outside world during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Rupprecht finds that socialist internationalism was not imposed on Soviet artists, cultural figures, and academics, but rather enthusiastically embraced by them through at least 1968. Latin America experts, including the professionalized younger generation, invariably viewed the region through the internationalist ideological lens. More controversially, as this argument runs counter to prevailing assumptions about the decay of socialist ideology in the late Soviet period, Rupprecht suggests that socialist internationalism was accepted uncritically by the wider Soviet public of the period.

Rupprecht devotes two chapters to Latin American travelers’ and exchange students’ views of the Soviet Union. No less than Soviet travelers to Latin America, these visitors found their preconceptions reinforced rather than challenged by their visits—and their preconceptions were, up to the 1970s, overwhelmingly positive. As Rupprecht comments several times, such basic amenities as running water were much more impressive to visitors from the global South than to westerners, who were often turned off by trips to the USSR. Latin American leftists found the Soviet message of “non-capitalist development” compelling (in-line with what we know about Soviet foreign policy in this period, Rupprecht shows that communism and revolution were downplayed in favor of state-led modernization in Soviet propaganda in the Third World). Although some committed Latin American leftists gradually became disillusioned with the USSR for some of the same reasons as the west European and American left, the Soviets continued to win favor from indigenous writers from the poorer Latin American countries. More surprisingly, prominent Latin American conservatives and Catholics occasionally found common ground with the Soviet regime for its apparent social conservatism and success in keeping pornography, rock ‘n’ roll, and other contaminants from the American-inspired global popular culture at bay. Here, as elsewhere, Rupprecht’s arguments are tight, nuanced, and interesting.

Overall, this outstanding book deserves a wide audience among Soviet historians and cultural historians of the Cold War. It rests on deep and wide-ranging primary source research (Russian archives, Russian and Spanish-language publications, and a handful of interviews), as well as a thorough command of recent scholarship in English, German, Russian, and Spanish, yet it is well written and engaging. I would encourage Cambridge University Press to make it available in an affordable paperback edition so that it may be used in the advanced undergraduate and graduate classroom.