Rachel Applebaum

I am a historian of the Soviet Union, communist Eastern Europe, and the global Cold War. My first book, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia was published by Cornell University Press in 2019. The book examines how Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials sought to unify their diverse countries during the Cold War by promoting a policy of transnational "friendship" between their citizens in the realm of everyday life. It tells the story of the rise and fall of this friendship project through a social and cultural history of the Soviet Union's relations with Czechoslovakia from the end of World War II until the collapse of communism. I argue that ordinary citizens in the superpower and its satellite, by engaging in the friendship project, were integral to the construction of the international socialist system—and ultimately, its demise. The book is based on extensive archival research in Russia and the Czech Republic, as well as in Hungary and the United States. Empire of Friends won the 2020 Radomír Luža Prize for an outstanding work in the field of Austrian/and or Czechoslovak history in the 20th century.

I am currently working on a new project about Russian language politics during and after the Cold War, tentatively titled, A Global History of Russian: From Soviet World Language to Putin's "Russian World." The book tells two interrelated stories. The first focuses on official Soviet campaigns during the Cold War to use Russian abroad as a form of soft power. These campaigns built upon domestic efforts to enshrine Russian as the common language of the linguistically diverse peoples of the USSR. By the 1960s, the Soviet government was actively promoting Russian in all three worlds of the Soviet geopolitical imagination: the socialist countries; the western, capitalist countries; and the "developing countries" in the Global South. The second story focuses on how local government officials, academics, and ordinary people in each of these "worlds" promoted and participated in Russian language study to assimilate, contest, or engage Soviet power. The book thus details the global proliferation of Russian in the context of Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States; decolonization; and international debates about educational reforms. To conclude the book, I examine how Soviet efforts to promote Russian as a world language have informed the Putin administration's concept of the "Russian World"—a community of Russian speakers inside the Russian Federation and beyond its borders, united by a unique "civilizational mission" and opposition to the West.

I have been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to work on A Global History of Russian in the 2024–25 academic year.

At Tufts, I have developed four survey courses: a two-semester survey of Russian history, from the medieval period to the present; as well as a survey of Eastern Europe from the 19th century to the present, and a course on Global Communism. I also teach courses on nationality, race, and religion in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Soviet foreign policy, Stalinism, World War II and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and Europe in the 1960s.