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Elidor Mëhilli, Louis Howard Porter. Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 479–480, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae577
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Extract
“Since wars begin in the minds of men,” announced the preamble of the constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), adopted in London in November 1945, “it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” The word “peace” made six appearances in the preamble, but not everyone was convinced. In Reds in Blue, Louis Porter explains that the Soviet Union at first shunned the organization, only joining in 1954, after Stalin’s death. How and why did Moscow go from profound suspicion of UNESCO’s “cosmopolitan designs for world governance” (34–35) to participation and engagement?
Drawing from a range of international archives and sources, Porter rightly sees here an opportunity to capture the two projects in internationalism as a set of parallel mirrors. The result is an argument that highlights their shared utopian impulses but also a more intimate view of the tensions and contradictions in the practice of internationalism. And though the argument about “homologous utopian aspirations” (12) can only go so far—given the epic scope of the Soviet experiment and its specific challenges of governance—it is a refreshing one. By viewing Soviet internationalism through the UNESCO lens, we get a sense of the public-facing choreography that twentieth-century internationalists have needed to deploy.
