Authors

Discussion

This paper examines Soviet journalists as cultural intermediaries in Soviet-Nicaraguan relations during the 1980s, showing how ideological, revolutionary, and professional identities were reshaped through immersion in revolutionary environments.

Most studies of Soviet-Nicaraguan relations emphasise military assistance and high diplomacy, sustaining teleological narratives of Soviet decline and Central American revolutionary failure by overlooking the cultural and human dimensions of these exchanges. As a result, this relationship is portrayed as lacking any meaningful transformative impact on either side.

By centring journalists as non-state actors, the paper recovers an understudied dimension of Soviet foreign policy, framing foreign correspondence as a form of cultural diplomacy. It asks what it meant to embody and perform Soviet identity in revolutionary settings abroad, and to mediate Nicaraguan revolutionary realities for Soviet audiences at a time when ideological certainties at home were increasingly contested.

Drawing on illustrated Soviet periodicals such as Vokrug Sveta and Ogonyok, alongside other press coverage and journalists’ memoirs, the paper examines how Soviet foreign correspondents confronted unfamiliar conditions, navigated professional and personal challenges, and translated their experiences into narratives for domestic audiences. These sources reveal the everyday practices of late-Soviet journalism in revolutionary Nicaragua and the tensions that emerged between institutional expectations and lived experiences.

I argue that these journalists did more than cover events: they co-produced narratives of revolution and socialist internationalism, enacting a form of “lived” foreign policy. Operating in the grey zone between state mandates, editorial practice, and personal networks, they sustained late-Soviet global engagement and shaped ideological identities on both sides of the exchange. Their work raises broader questions about what it meant to participate in Soviet foreign policy as a journalist in the 1980s: how to present oneself as a Soviet citizen abroad, how to represent the Nicaraguan revolutionaries to Soviet audiences, and how to navigate such roles at a time when Soviet ideology itself was transforming.

Reframing Soviet-Nicaraguan ties through journalistic mediation highlights how non-state actors and everyday media not only shaped ideological identities, but also redefined what it meant to experience and participate in the late Cold War.