For forty-six years, a Soviet tank stood on a pedestal in the center of Prague. To many observers, this prominently placed tank symbolized Czechoslovakia's subjugation to Soviet power. Yet, as Rachel Applebaum argues in her captivating new book, the Soviet empire was not only based on military force. Instead, the Soviets envisioned a socialist world bound together by mutual understanding and even affection: an “empire of friends.” Applebaum's book examines the multifaceted attempt to build friendship between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia throughout the socialist period. This “friendship project” encompassed a wide array of activities based around the exchange of ideas, cultural products, people, and goods. Applebaum concentrates on how efforts to stimulate Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship worked their way into everyday life through activities such as tourism, pen-pal programs, friendship societies, the commemoration of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops, and the showing of Soviet films.
Before 1956, these exchanges were one-sided: Czechoslovaks were urged to follow the Soviet model in all things. In one particularly fascinating example, Applebaum details how Czechoslovak students in Moscow learned to become good Stalinists by denouncing each other for insufficient appreciation of their host country and its people. In the late 1950s and 1960s, attempts to build understanding between the two countries became more reciprocal. A Czech-language magazine about the Soviet Union, Svět sovětů (World of Soviets) provided Czechoslovaks with Russian language lessons, recipes for borscht, and articles about Soviet youth and fashion, while a Russian-language magazine about Czechoslovakia, Sotsialisticheskaia Chekhoslovakiia (Socialist Czechoslovakia, interestingly also produced by Czechoslovaks), introduced Soviet citizens to Czechoslovakia's modern trends, like big beat bands, self-service stores, and interior design. Yet some signs pointed to the difficulty of engineering mutual understanding. As their contacts with the west increased in the 1960s, Czechoslovaks scorned Soviet films, while Soviet officials often rejected experimental Czech New Wave cinema as too risqué for Soviet audiences.
The narrative of the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia was an important element of the friendship project. At first, monuments and memorials stressed Czechoslovak indebtedness to the Soviet Union. Soviet soldiers were heroes who liberated helpless Czechoslovaks from fascism. After 1956, this narrative widened to include Czechoslovaks as actors who aided Soviet soldiers and even deserved their gratitude. In 1965, Sotsialisticheskaia Chekhoslovakiia featured a photo of a Red Army veteran who traveled back to Prague for the twentieth anniversary of the liberation kissing the hand of the Czech nurse who had tended his wounds. The photo transformed Czechoslovak-Soviet relations into an intimate and personal relationship that nonetheless adhered to a traditionally gendered representation of power, making it a fitting encapsulation of the power and the limitations of the friendship project as a whole.
The Prague Spring was the ultimate test of Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship. Czechoslovaks began to emphasize the differences between the two countries rather than their similarities, showing how little the countries had in common besides their socialist ideals. Soviet tourists visiting Czechoslovakia experienced this first-hand. While a few exulted in Prague's openness, most were shocked to see abstract art in the museums and hippies on the streets. They were even more appalled to find guides who criticized the USSR and promoted the radical reforms of Ludvík Vaculík's “2000 Words.”
After the Soviet invasion in August 1968, it seemed like Czechoslovaks and Soviets would never be friends again. Angry Czechoslovaks called Soviet tourists “occupiers” and “fascists” and vandalized their buses (161). State officials refused to show Soviet films in local theaters and authorized the screening of pre-feature shorts that supported the reforms and criticized the USSR. Membership in the Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship society collapsed; even its leaders stopped communicating with their Soviet counterparts. But the friendship project did not die. The reason, Applebaum argues, was that friendship had become essential component of Soviet-Czechoslovak relations. Normalization—the process of restoring calm and order after the upheavals of 1968—required maintaining the friendship project. On the surface, the effort worked. By 1977, membership in the Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship society had actually increased by 50%. Participation, however, was less a sign of enthusiasm than a badge of loyalty.
Unlike some accounts of socialist internationalism that stress its failures, Applebaum emphasizes the ways in which the friendship project succeeded. The friendship project, she argues, was a technique of empire, but one that altered the texture of everyday life for both sides. Czechoslovaks and Soviet citizens may not really have been friends, but Applebaum's excellent book shows us how they occupied a common socialist world, one that they built together.
