Introduction: The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective

The 1960s have reemerged in scholarly and popular culture as a protean moment of cultural revolution and social transformation, a generational shift through which age and seniority lost their authority, perhaps never to be regained. In Europe and the United States, civil rights, feminist, environmentalist, peace, and other movements drew in millions of participants. New media and cultural technologies emerged to circulate ideas and trends that provided the cultural substrata of these movements. The era also saw explosive urbanization in all parts of the globe that generated its own technological possibilities and spaces for cultural cross-fertilization, spurred by unprecedented human, technological, and cultural mobility. Revolution in Cuba and Cultural Revolution in China presented new models for transition and of the future. This was a time of world competition for the hegemony of two antagonistic systems – capitalism and socialism, but also of contest and competition within both systems. As a moment when decolonization created immense possibilities for political and social transformation throughout the world, the 1960s became the heyday of efforts from both the developed capitalist “First World” and the emerging socialist “Second World” for the allegiance and patronage over these newly liberated states and societies, the “Third World.”1 Against the backdrop of Cold War tension and the political violence that it spawned across the globe, the First and Second Worlds also engaged in peaceful contest to demonstrate the superiority of their systems and the certainty of their triumph. The 1960s, writ large, was a moment when the “orderedness” of these three worlds was arguably the most prominent in popular discourse and culture, and a moment when that order was contested and destabilized. The patterns that first emerged in the 1960s – cultural and political contest, identity politics, urbanization, youth movements, new patterns of mass consumption, the hegemony of popular over “high” culture as driven by new media – form the bases of today’s discussions of globalization.

The Russian Revolution As a Tourist Attraction

Looking at Soviet guidebooks from the 1920s to the 1960s, this essay argues that 1905 and 1917 revolutionary places as “tourist attractions” were mostly tangential to the tourist experience, although one could argue that the entire USSR was a monument to the “revolution.” The revolution remained one destination of many possible tourist excursions, its memory one building block of many that made up the basis of Soviet citizenship. The revolution as tourist attraction did not celebrate 1917 as a rupture, but rather a point of entry, the moment from which the many and not the few could share in a culture of world importance

Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.PostprintPeer reviewe