How the Soviet Union Opened to the World - Cold War DOCUMENTARY

Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video in on the Moscow Youth Festival of 1957 - the event that opened the Soviet Union to the world and allowed the leadership of the USSR to present a new side of the country to a wider public
Taiwan Under the Kuomintang Dictatorship: • Taiwan Under the Kuomi...
What Happened to the German and Japanese POWs?: • What Happened to the G...
Operation Paperclip: • Operation Paperclip - ...
German Expulsions: • German Expulsions Afte...
Soviet Education System: • Soviet Education Syste...
How Khrushchev Fed the Soviet People: • How Khrushchev Fed the...
Novocherkassk Massacre 1962: • Novocherkassk Massacre...
Soviet Tourism: • Soviet Tourism: How di...
Soviet Passport System: New Serfdom or Reform?: • Soviet Passport System...
Kaliningrad: How Russia Got a Stronghold in Europe: • Kaliningrad: How Russi...
How the Soviets Won the Early Space Race: • How the Soviets Won th...
Soviet Television and Radio: • Soviet Television and ...
Top-5 Myths About the Soviet Union: • Top-5 Myths About the ...
Support us on Patreon: / thecoldwar
KZbin membership / @thecoldwartv
✔ Merch store ► teespring.com/stores/thecoldwar
✔ Patreon ► / thecoldwar
✔ Facebook ► / thecoldwartv
✔ Instagram ► / thecoldwartv
Sources
Peacock, Margaret, “The perils of building Cold War consensus at the 1957 Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students,” Cold War History, Vol.12, No.3 (2012)
Koivunen, Pia, Performing Peace and Friendship: The World Youth Festivals and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (Oldenbourg, De Gruyter: 2022)
Tsipursky, Gleb, Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, & State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945-70 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
​​www.rbth.com/history/335295-w...
www.rbth.com/history/330727-h...
vestnik-mgou.ru/Articles/View... (Russian)
soviet-art.ru/6th-world-festi...
www.academia.edu/19007478/MOS...
www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/...
#ColdWar #USSR #Communism #WorldYouthFestival #Khrushchev #Soviet #SovietUnion #Moscow

[@fathermattguckin6375]

This is an excellent documentary series. Thank you for sharing your passion and gifts.

[@reginabillotti]

Martinique and Reunion are still considered French territories ("overseas departments" / "departements outre-mer")

[@twistedyogert]

The Cold War ended a few years before my time (I was born in 1996), but as an American, I'm still fascinated by how "the other half" lived. I still wonder what things would be like if the USSR were still around. How would they handle the rise of the internet and later smartphones? How would they handle the post-9/11 era and the ever-present danger of international terrorism.

[@GENIUSGT]

"international terrorism" lol.

[@tgdm]

I'd say it would be likely that a 9/11-type event wouldn't have happened, or at least not when/how it did because of their presence on the world stage. Though they were moving towards a more socially liberal stance by the end, they were still pretty severe in exerting influence over areas like Afghanistan. While they had pulled out of that area in the 80s, it's quite possible the Taliban would still have considered them to be an existential threat on their doorstep and continued to focus on the USSR instead of turning their gaze toward America.

[@JohnSmith-rw2yn]

20:20 DPRK still repping the village method 😅

[@jasonkinzie8835]

If I had been around in 1957 I definitely would have gone! I think Marxist/Leninist governments are terrible. I believe in democracy. But this seems like it was a positive thing regardless of the intentions of the people who sponsored it. Celebrating peace and friendship among nations is always a good thing.

[@boilingwateronthestove]

I do think that in principle Khrushchev did mean good as a political leader. I'm not a communist, far from it. However, looking at the things he tried achieving, it does suggest that he recognized the shortcomings of the system and tried giving it logical solutions. We can joke about how ugly the Soviet commiebuildings look, but he promoted building them in a time of a severe housing problem, and while they aren't much to write home about, it was actually an achievement that gave millions of Soviets for the first time in history a propper home to call theirs with modern facilities. He recognized that Stalin put too much focus on industrial things and he tried giving citizens more consumer goods. Were they of good quality? No, but you did see under his leadership a shift towards more daily life focused things. All in all, I don't think he was a bad leader. Far from it. He had good intentions, and I genuinely think that history has somewhat forgotten him for who he was. He wasn't perfect, but he did have some good intentions I feel. His international politics was also more in the line of reason. Stalin was a classic dictator. Khrushchev was more of an autocrat. Like Breshnev is where it really went downhill with the USSR. Under Krushchev at the very least, life of a USSR citizen actually got better each year. A lot slower than in the west, but it did have a positive trend, while under Breshnev it levelled and declined.

[@danielutriabrooks477]

Brezhnev's strategy would have worked in almost any other point in history, but he had the bad luck of trying it right during the third industrial revolution

[@SciehashYT]

As participant of World Youth Festival 2024, I find this interesting and insightful

[@simoncarlile1965]

Saxamaphones 23.50.😂😂😂❤

[@BradSchmor]

Pretty sure that's a Simpsons reference.

[@simoncarlile1965]

@@BradSchmor That's where I got it from.😅😅😅👍👏

[@Bob.W.]

Brezhnev's mother, after seeing her son's dacha and other property and privilege: Is good, Leonid, but what if the reds come back?

[@alabama2uz]

That was the year one of their former American agents, Manning Johnson, wrote "Color, Communism, and Common Sense". He tried to blow the whistle.

[@yardleybottles6025]

He was trying to blow something, like J. Edgar.

[@sankarchaya]

The distaste for jazz is curious if also because Adorno, an anti-stalinist Marxist from the Frankfurt School, also disliked jazz. I have yet to grasp how jazz is supposed to be counter-revolutionary.

[@SpaceDolphinPosadist]

Promotion of cannabis and dope back then was tyed to jazz culture

[@DuranmanX]

It's no different than most millennial rolling their eyes at what zoomers like. It's a generational thing, with aspects like racism making it worse.

[@DuranmanX]

Even in the US, Jazz was a love it or hate it thing, and if anything I feel Americans dislike it even more now

[@christopherconard2831]

A lot of jazz fans at the time didn't fit well into society, they were seen as less likely to follow orders just because they were orders. Non conformity is usually perceived as a threat by those in power, even more so in totalitarian nations. There's also the factor of it being both foreign and new therefore not understood. Anything not understood is feared.

[@remybien3277]

Saxamaphone, lol. Love the low-key Simpsons references.

[@DuranmanX]

The last one was in 2017, I wonder why...

[@d-boyzinfinity1614]

Video about the Olympics? 👀

[@saooran7364]

Ohh the '57 LeninPalooza

[@carlospargamendez7012]

Excellent doc!

[@BradSchmor]

"Saxamaphone" - love the Simpsons reference there.

[@Numba003]

Soviet history is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. Re-engineering a whole society and keeping it running for nearly a century was quite the social experiment for the communists, and it's very interesting to see all of the different ways they did it. Thank you for all the history. God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)

[@user-ko5ul7yi1x]

*Then the first metal concert at Tushino Airfield in 1991 happened and all hell broke loose XD*

[@memofromessex]

I like the ones on the Soviet Union - just because it's the only ones where they make Britain out to be the bad guy, instead of the country that bankrupted itself fighting fascism and was trying to leave the awful expense of empire behind.

[@dr.victorvs]

Britain was both things. It's always reductive to collapse an entire time period and population into a single descriptor. Unfortunately, some people are completely incapable of nuance and ambiguity, and we just don't have the tools to describe these things accurately in few words anyway.

[@dr.victorvs]

Having said that, I personally have to always remind people who call Churchill a hero of the criminal famines in Iran and Benghal. So I can certainly see why people might object to ambivalent history nearly always being represented in a certain light.

[@neiloflongbeck5705]

​@@dr.victorvsI hope you remind them that in Bengal the population had been rising and farm productivity had been falling prior to the start of the famine. Coip.e this to the Japanese army livi g off the land in the countries they invaded and those in day-to-day charge in India not setting up proper food controls on the food supplies withdrawn from the border regions..

[@memofromessex]

@@neiloflongbeck5705 Bengal famine is a great example of the myths about empire - why would Britain actively kill its own citizens? For what purpose? It was an ecological, demographic and environmental crisis - clearly not helped by the collapse of governance of the Raj (they lost their heads and panicked in advance of the Japanese army), the lack of supply ships (you can thank the war for that) and profiteering by local Indian merchants. No doubt the deaths would be far fewer without WWII, but there would have been still a famine - as evidenced by repeated famines to hit India after the end of the Raj.

[@neiloflongbeck5705]

@@memofromessex do you think the Germans would have reach the Channel coast in 1940 so quickly if the French had removed the petrol from the border area and limited the supplies? The German army refueled from French civilian supplies. In the far east, the Japanese army lived off the land taking whatever food they wanted. There was no guarantee that the British and Indian armies were going to hold them in Burma, so they removed food supplies from the border regions. This wasx a measured response, not the panicked move you make it out to be.

[@MrBelmont79]

When it came to culture wars, the Soviets could not compete against the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater, Jeans, Disney…✋🏻

[@neeljavia2965]

Exactly

[@johano-go]

I think you should do an episode about Esperanto in the USSR. It had the biggest movement in the world, and tried to use the language to spread propaganda. The Bolsheviks however were always sceptical of the language, and Stalin eventually classified it as a language for spies, arrested the leaders and had them shot during the purge. The language was banned until after Stalin's death, only able to propagate openly again from the mid 60's, and officially able to organise in 1979. It is a fascinating, but hardly known, chapter of the cold war. (Hitler hated Esperanto, and among the first to be arrested after Germany's invasion of Poland was the children of Ludvig Zamenhof, the jewish creator of Esperanto. All of his children died in concentration camps.) I recommend the books Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia by Brigid O'Keeffe, and Dangerous Language by Ulrich Lins.

[@danielutriabrooks477]

An international esperanto-reactionary-capitalist global conspiracy, most assuredly

[@ecom_professor]

I hope whoever is reading this have a good day 💗

[@changingpeopleslivesmoon2993]

Same with you

[@ReaperCH90]

I can totally see how people felt like. I was part of something similar in a big student's sports tournament in Putin's Moscow in 2016.

[@samwill7259]

You know, if a country only offers guided tours to tourists that should probably act as something of a red flag America may not be perfect, I'd be the first one to say so. But if you come to visit America you can go to New York, Los Angeles or friggin...Gary, Indiana if you really want to. If you need to guide the hand of visitors, you're hiding something

[@michaelsamuel9841]

Most socialist countries do that

[@mi-lo4ec]

Not Really during the Cold War Soviet Tourist that came to the Us,only 70% of US territory was open to Soviet Tourists while 30% were restricted to them. Here is a link:blogs.loc.gov/maps/2017/08/restricting-soviet-travel-in-the-u-s-during-the-cold-war/#:~:text=Soviet%20citizens%20were%20permitted%20to,when%20visiting%20the%20Soviet%20Union.

[@ShadowPhoenixMaximus]

Its funny how we're witnessing in real time how China (under the CCP) is becoming more and more like North Korea

[@DuranmanX]

To be fair, if a tour is unguided, most people would just end up lost and confused

[@reginabillotti]

@@DuranmanX You can get a guided tour in the US if you choose, but it's not required. The "only" is the key part.

[@thelexkex]

I understand that "not demonising" seems to be a way if journalism today but it is now transformed into "not demonising demon".

[@ontheleveltk]

Sneaking in a saxamaphone reference. Nice!

[@skeetrix5577]

thanks for getting me interested in soviet history what a strange place what a odd country it was and i was just a baby when it collapsed so i grew up after it was already gone

[@deshaun9473]

Hey, what role did Burger King play during the Cold War? Can you do a video on the role of US fast food industries and how they helped spread American influence during the Cold War?

[@caseclosed9342]

Party in the USSR!

[@changingpeopleslivesmoon2993]

🚩 ☭

[@roo72]

I spoke with a few people who attended the festival. They all have very different experiences and memories but there was one constant, something almost never mentioned on that side of the Iron Curtain - lots and lots of sex.

[@DuranmanX]

The more rural people are, the more sex there tends to be. It's as countries become more developed that birth rates begin to drop off

[@TheBucketSkill]

Zayumm... detained for dishonorable behavior???? sheeeeeeesh....

[@okancanarslan3730]

500 festival babies born! It seems the make love not war narrative was put into the action long before the hippies 😂

[@bigsarge2085]

Interesting.

[@shanshajahan8160]

Can you make videos on historical content post Cold war?

[@youngimperialistmkii]

I prolly would have gone to this thing. Even as an American. Only problem. Red scare back home. I would have gone because it seems intresting. But I would have been branded a communist for life.

[@TheWedabest]

It did seem like a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

[@ethanpf449]

Why do you only post every two weeks now?

[@noice_catto4910]

Yo you should make a video about the only communist country in arabia, Democratic Yemen (PDRY)

[@Neversa]

The only place in Moscow where I wasn't a churka - People's Friendship University of Russia. Everyone there was a churka.

[@deniseproxima2601]

But on the other side, they where very selective who goes to uni. And make all other to privat and Hilfsarbeiter

[@deniseproxima2601]

Hilfsarbeiterin

[@brad3042]

Such an event could never take place in today's polarized world. Blame Russia's invasion of Ukraine for that one. I remember before Putin when people were hopeful that the former USSR would join the international community and embrace democracy.

[@dr.victorvs]

Well, they could have stopped Western companies from actively corrupting government officials in Warsaw Pact countries. The ressurgeance of authoritarian politics in those countries is a direct consequence of how the right-wing practices of the Western world conflicted with the left-wing lip service that they paid to Western Pact countries in their state propaganda and to their own constituents. People in those countries were simply not equipped to deal with corrupt government officials and the Western world stopped caring about their "brothers and sisters" living behind the "iron curtain" the second the Warsaw Pact dissolved and all those sweet state companies that belonged to the population started being sold by private parties for pennies on the dollar. To be clear, I'm not endorsing any authoritarian person or policy, period. Just explaining how those people feel.

[@Siempre1978]

The 2024 World Youth and Students Festival took place this year at Sochi the Russian Federation Black Sea Restort Last Month over 30,000 people from across the World

[@brad3042]

@@Siempre1978 huh. Had no idea.

[@psychotripnerdstuff]

Gee, it's almost like the collapse of the Soviet Union was a huge mistake. Now Russia is just a nihilistic, oligarchic gang-state that believes in nothing but it's own power. This is what western capitalist "democracy" did to the former USSR.

[@Siempre1978]

@brad3042 there was strong representation from Latin America, Africa and Asia. Russia has a lot of support and sympathy globally - it is the Collective West that is increasingly isolated within its own propaganda bubble

[@teekey1754]

"Saxomophomes" ?

[@davidrees9745]

Possible Simpsons reference: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aGLbaH6Fl6qGjJI

[@TheColdWarTV]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/sH3XgoqhadaBpJI

[@TheColdWarTV]

100% a Simpsons reference

[@teekey1754]

@@TheColdWarTV Why would he use it this video ? Freudian slip ?

[@TheColdWarTV]

We put little things like this in plenty of videos. Call it an easter egg.

[@RoboticDragon]

What is a sax-a-ma-phone?

[@TheColdWarTV]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/sH3XgoqhadaBpJI

[@RoboticDragon]

@@TheColdWarTV lol

[@BloatedBearucraticNightmare]

The USA should persue a large youth based cultural festival.

[@neeljavia2965]

They already do with Hollywood

[@ThorDog16]

The more I learn about the USSR the more I think both countries could have prospered and the world would have been better off with cooperation. Instead we have the mess we are in now.

[@xandervk2371]

There are no "what-ifs" in history, but the Marxist ideology was not compatible with any such cooperation. How would it work, anyway, if the citizens were not allowed to freely travel outside the USSR? It was not until early 1970s that the Soviets officially declared the possibility of "peaceful coexistence" as Brezhnev visited the US. Crumbling economy was the most likely motivation, and the "détente" didn't last anyway.

[@tylerclayton6081]

It’s too bad their economy collapsed in the 1980’s. They bankrupted themselves competing with the US. Spending 15% of GDP on the military is not sustainable

[@DuranmanX]

Peace was never an option

[@danielutriabrooks477]

The whole "global revolution" part makes it easy to make a few enemies

[@thorthewolf8801]

Sure, if the USSR stopped being a dictatorship and didnt have political prisoners.

[@anglo-irishbolshevik3425]

He keeps saying communism when he should be saying socialism.

[@deniseproxima2601]

Till they crushed it. The other side

[@changingpeopleslivesmoon2993]

@@deniseproxima2601yeah

[@xxcoopcoopxx]

Who does Communism better? Russia or America? There's a joke: "What's the difference between America and Russia? In America, the Communist Party is legal." -Mort Sahl West is Supreme!

[@SpaceDolphinPosadist]

You squat with two heels up

[@xxcoopcoopxx]

@@SpaceDolphinPosadist Tell someone who gives a shit.

[@SpaceDolphinPosadist]

@@xxcoopcoopxx calm down I liked Mort

[@TerminalConstipation]

if only the commies had known about the subversive origins and nature of jazz

[@mohammedsaysrashid3587]

After WW2,...USA practiced capturing British colonial countries by encouraging and backing independent movements , backing military Aristocrats Coups,and backing conservative authorities in 3rd worldcountries, while USSR spent a lot of Warsaw pact finances for organizing social-national,and left wing L🪽 movements in 3rd world countries uselessness for the USSR future. Those labeled youths Festivals influenced (bright) remaind only amongst Communist youths in 3rd world countries without theirs whole populations interested due to different reasons. Those( left national )movements when they reached and sized power they switched side towards USA influenced and alliance ( they betrayed USSR😂) under global anitbiased associations movements...including China ,India ,Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Cuba and others .... Poor Russia 🇷🇺 inherited the consequences of all those USSR faults . But US ( NATO) plots and aggressions against Russia 🇷🇺 remained transformed from first cold War to 2nd cold War continuesly because Russia 🇷🇺 is big & multi ethnicities country 🤔?

[@user-yx2ji8rp6z]

Let's not forget that the secret speech K made critized Stalins crimes against the nomenklatura, not the Russian people!

[@stephennenadov6709]

Great series! I suggest doing an episode on the 1952 Moscow economic conference. Pierre Trudeau, quebec communist,attended and 2 decades later became prime minister of Canada. Communists infiltrated Canada.