All This Is Your World

Features

Description

In the Khrushchev era, Soviet citizens were newly encouraged to imagine themselves exploring the medieval towers of Tallinn's Old Town, relaxing on the Romanian Black Sea coast, even climbing the Eiffel Tower. By the mid 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens each year crossed previously closed Soviet borders to travel abroad.

All this is your World explores the revolutionary integration of the Soviet Union into global processes of cultural exchange in which a de-Stalinizing Soviet Union increasingly, if anxiously, participated in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items. Anne E. Gorsuch examines what it meant to be Soviet in a country no longer defined as Stalinist.

All this is your World is situated at the intersection of a number of topics of scholarly and popular interest: the history of tourism and mobility; the cultural history of international relations, specifically the Cold War; the history of the Soviet Union after Stalin. It also offers a new perspective on our view of the European continent as a whole by probing the Soviet Union's relationship with both eastern and western Europe using archival materials from Russia, Estonia, Hungary, Great Britain, and the United States.

Beginning with a domestic tour of the Soviet Union in late Stalinism, the book moves outwards in concentric circles to consider travel to the inner abroad of Estonia, to the near abroad of eastern Europe, and to the capitalist West, finally returning home again with a discussion of Soviet films about tourism.

Review: the bookas contribution lies in its ability to put us inside the Soviet experience of post-war tourism, with all its frustrations, hopes and rewards. In this it is a rich read. * Sally West, European History Quarterly * The book integrates several topics and approaches that are the focus of current scholarly interest; it will be especially valuable for those concerned with the Khrushchev period, transnational approaches to history, and the Cold War. * Russian Review * The book represents a signal contribution, not only to the rapidly expanding scholarly literature on this period of Soviet history, but also to the global study of tourismespecially across international bordersand to cultural approaches to the history of the Cold War. * Slavic Review * All This is Your World offers a meticulously researched and engagingly written account of Soviet tourism within and outside the Iron Curtain in the 30 years after Stalins deathGorsuchs analyses are subtle and perceptive; her conclusions are insightful and consequential.

This book deserves to be read widely. * Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity * This book is a thrilling academic adventure for the reader and a valuable contribution to Soviet, Russian and East European studies, human geography, tourism and leisure studies, and colonial and post colonial theory.

Through its analysis of rich empirical materials it illuminates significant aspects of the Soviet experience and of Soviet propaganda, ideology and identity. * Europe-Asia Studies *