Globalisation and Internationalism Beyond the North Atlantic: Soviet-Brazilian Encounters and Interactions During the Cold War

Abstract

This contribution examines commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil during the Cold War. Transforming its image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR from the mid-1950s, instead, presented itself as a non-Western role model for quick industrial modernisation. To many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from Presidents Kubitschek to Goulart, the Soviet Union indeed served as an inspiration for fast development and industrialisation and it helped them to pursue an independent foreign policy and thus expand Brazil’s influence in the world. Contacts with the Soviet Union were one of the justifications of the military putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. But the new military leaders, too, had their own interests in and surprisingly good relations with the stagnating Soviet Union. This cross-ideological agreement was based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain—and also on the popularity of Brazilian popular culture in the Soviet Union. Impulses for international economic and political integration and cultural exchange in the second half of the twentieth century, it is argued here, were not limited to the spread of Western European and North American ideas of internationalism and globalisation. Cold War contacts between Brazil and the Soviet Union laid the groundwork for today’s collaboration of the two states within the BRICS group of emerging economies.