Introduction : the end of Soviet isolationism after 1953

Late Stalinism, the period between the end of the Second World War and the death of the dictator in 1953, was the most isolated period of Soviet history. The political leaders saw the world as divided into two parts, and everything outside their own camp as ruled by unalterably hostile capitalist and imperialist war-mongers, eager to annihilate the Soviet Union. Internationalism, once a fundamental Bolshevik principle, had long been subordinated to the political goals of ‘socialism in one country’ after Lenin’s death and Trotsky’s ousting; foreign contacts had abated from the mid 1930s. While the Second World War had forced a specific form of violent interaction with the world abroad upon Soviet citizens, the USSR, with the onset of the Cold War in 1947, isolated itself more than ever from foreign countries beyond the control of the Soviet Army. Scholars were cut off from most international scientific discourse, and compliant writers claimed any notable invention to be of Russian origin. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ came to be a perilous reproach during a renewed terror against the populations of now both the Soviet Union and its new satellite states and annexed territories in eastern Europe. A ‘myth of encirclement’ was to bond together Soviet citizens, devastated and traumatised by the war, behind their leaders. Only their wise policies, they claimed, could provide the peace and stability people so desperately wanted. By the late 1940s, the cultural and intellectual – if not the economic – isolation of the post-war Soviet Union was almost complete. Even international marriages were illegal. Western observers such as Isaiah Berlin noticed the complete ignorance of the Soviet intelligentsia about contemporary cultural life abroad. For ordinary Soviet citizens, Vladislav Zubok wrote, ‘meeting a foreigner was less likely than