As World War II drew to a close, the US State Department began publishing Amerika, a Russian language magazine aimed at informing Soviet citizens, especially women, about the comforts and advantages of the American way of life. In this monograph, Diana Cucuz explores the origins, evolution, and significance of Amerika and analyzes the conformist and consumerist gender order portrayed in its glossy pages. Amerika first ran from 1945–52. It was initially well-received, but as the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the Soviet government limited circulation. The newly formed United States Information Agency (USIA) revived Amerika in 1956 and the magazine outlived the Cold War itself, ceasing publication only in 1994.
In part one of the book, Cucuz describes the journalistic depictions of women and domesticity that shaped Amerika’s content during the early Cold War. American women, as presented in the most popular women’s magazine in the country, The Ladies Home Journal, were white, middle class, and devoted to family and home, enjoying the choices afforded by a growing consumer economy, but also participating in the life of the community through volunteer work or, more rarely, paid employment. Soviet women, by contrast, were portrayed as bedraggled, deprived, and pitiable “babushkas,” who were forced into exhausting labor by the oppressive communist system.
The second part of the book details how Amerika transmitted such idealized images of American life to the Soviet public as part of a larger effort to undermine communism. Cucuz carefully highlights the delicate balance editors and writers strove to maintain; they had to convey the advantages of capitalist abundance without reinforcing Soviet preconceptions about American women’s shallow materialism. Covering social change was even more difficult, because it required both acknowledging and downplaying American inequities. After many years of neglecting the issues, in the 1960s the magazine began to discuss civil rights activism, but it avoided mentioning the women’s movement. In 1971, Amerika finally published a special issue on American women, which explored women’s changing roles without employing the terms feminism or women’s liberation.
Cucuz’s book contributes to the growing body of work that reconceptualizes the Cold War by focusing on cultural diplomacy, gender, and consumption. Like scholars such as Margaret Peacock, Cucuz uncovers important similarities between the Cold War rivals’ use of propaganda, showing that both Amerika, and its Soviet analog, USSR obscured social divisions and ignored many of the real challenges to women’s everyday lives.
Cucuz is a specialist in US history and culture and draws mainly on American media and government sources; her consideration of the Soviet context is more limited. Cucuz demonstrates that Amerika was popular in the Soviet Union and attributes Soviet citizens’ demands for better living standards and more consumer goods to its influence. This argument is intriguing but not wholly convincing because Cucuz does not present evidence for how Soviet readers responded to and interpreted Amerika’s contents. It is possible that the popularity of Amerika resulted from Soviet consumer desires, rather than causing them.
The strength of Cucuz’s book lies in her analysis of the motivations, assumptions about gender, and contradictions of American cultural diplomacy. As Cucuz writes in an accessible style and includes engaging textual and visual examples, this work will be of great interest to students as well as scholars concerned with gender and the Cold War.
