Authors

Discussion

This project aims to analyse and compare quantitative and qualitative data about Brazilian delegations at world youth festivals throughout the second half of the 1950s. From a domestic point of view, the period was marked by growing anti-communism, distrust, and vigilance towards Brazilians who travelled to Soviet bloc countries. Simultaneously, a diplomatic rapprochement between Brazil and the USSR was being pursued, involving visits by parliamentary delegations and Soviet diplomatic efforts aimed at rapprochement, which culminated in the re-establishment of commercial relations in 1959. Internationally, the Chinese Revolution in 1949 would raise the red alert in Washington, exacerbating domestic anti-communist fears and spreading them globally. After Stalin's death in 1953, a renewed Soviet internationalism emerged, focusing on winning hearts and minds among young people and expanding contacts beyond local communist parties. Under Moscow's primacy, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students (IUS) gained notoriety by organizing youth festivals that allowed the circulation of political actors from the Soviet bloc and the Third World, including Brazil. The culmination of these meetings would be the World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957. By collecting, analysing and comparing Brazilian and American records of the youth festivals in Warsaw (1955), Moscow (1957) and Vienna (1959), this research aims to contribute to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Soviet internationalism and its relations with Brazilian actors, the role of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in these contacts (even illegally) and new interpretations of the agency of peripheral political actors.