In the last decade scholars in both Slavic and postcolonial studies have begun to reassess Cold War cultural production and the Soviet-sponsored institutions that helped to facilitate it. Rossen Djagalov's From Internationalism to Postcolonialism is a major contribution to this still-bourgeoning area of study, as well as to the larger fields of World Literature and World Cinema Studies. In this path breaking work, Djagalov reconstructs the history of a “Cold War Republic of Letters” and cinema that sought to create alternative channels for the production and circulation of culture, delinked from the capitalist and imperialist imperatives of the west. In mapping the way these channels flowed in and out of the Soviet Union, Djagalov offers an intellectual history of anti-colonial thought that locates the origins of postcolonial theory in the literary, cinematic, and intellectual output of those who participated in Soviet-Third World networks and institutions.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism's impressively wide temporal and geographic scope takes readers from world literature publishing initiatives in interwar Moscow to Latin American Third Cinema of the 1970s. But the book's biggest contributions to Cold War historiography are its immersive accounts of the Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958–91) and the Tashkent Film Festival (1968–88). Djagalov approaches the study of the former and its literary magazine, Lotus, as a Bordieuan field in which Afro-Asian literature achieved a “degree of internal cohesion and boundedness with respect to the outside” (81). Drawing upon dependency theory, he shows how the Association aimed at “delinking from the larger (literary) world-system, which kept them in a subordinate position; by developing their (literary) resources through interconnections; and by setting the terms of their own presence on the world (literary) stage” (81). The Tashkent Film Festival, hosted annually in the Uzbek capital, played a similar role for Afro-Asian filmmakers. Djagalov mobilizes Mary Louise Pratts's concept of the contact zone to make a case for understanding the Tashkent festival as a vital space of exchange in which Third World filmmakers came to know each other and each other's work.

While the focus on Soviet-sponsored institutions and initiatives might make some readers wary of swapping one eurocentrism (that of western Europe) for another (Russia), From Internationalism to Postcolonialism emphasizes the relative autonomy with which writers and filmmakers moved within these spaces. Members of the Afro-Asian Writers Association often participated in multiple internationalisms (Pan-Africanism, Francophonie, Maoism). The Association's magazine, Lotus, was published in English, French, and Arabic, and headquartered at different times in Colombo, Cairo, and Beirut. Moreover, Djagalov shows how Third World writers drew upon the aesthetics of nineteenth-century Russian literature and the interwar avant-garde to produce innovative, electrifying work at a time when Soviet culture was comparatively stagnant. With regard to film, Djagalov reminds readers that there was no “house style” of cinema imposed upon international graduates of Moscow's All-Soviet State Institute of Cinematography (which educated many of the most celebrated filmmakers of the World Cinema canon). The location of the Tashkent Film Festival further testifies to the geographic and cultural de-centering of Moscow. The Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus played important (and very intentional) mediating roles between the majority-white USSR and the Third World.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism makes a strong case for ridding ourselves once and for all of the Cold Warrior frame of mind that viewed Third World nations as pawns and the Soviet Union as omnipotent. At the same time, it also asks readers to consider the profound impact the collapse of the Soviet Union had on cultural production in the non-west. It is with a tone of regret that Djagalov narrates the rapid disappearance of funds that supported Internationalist initiatives (and Third World nations) in the aftermath of the Cold War. Russia's so-called “opening up to the world,” he argues, amounted to an abandonment and rejection of its former Third World allies.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism extends a bridge between Slavic and postcolonial studies by inviting scholars in both fields to reassess Cold War history and post-Cold War categories of thought. Scholars of World Literature and World Cinema will also find much in this work that productively challenges the assumptions and principles of their respective areas of study. It is essential reading for those who are engaged in excavating the rich field of Cold War cultural production, and seeking to understand the Internationalist commitments that shaped it. It is also a work that will, hopefully, help to generate new theories and practices of global solidarity for our own times.