Thinking about the title, This Soviet World implies a sort of familiarity and tangibility, a sense of being at hand, very much with the zeitgeist. It could be The Soviet World, but that reads like a memorandum from George Kennan circa 1950- “The Soviet World seeks the free world’s destruction.” Strong talks early on about how people conceptualize eachother. In the Great Depression-era US, the unemployed ask, “If it gets any worse, they’ll have to do something.” She rightly considers this a statement of alienation. There’s a divide between I/They/Us that betrays class society. Soviet people would ask what we are to do in response to a challenge, and that’s why it’s This Soviet World.

The book evocatively takes you to that moment, where “questing hope that hardly yet dares call itself belief” stands. It’s not a history or a prose but one of those lovely primary sources that isn’t afraid to document and analyze and actively be a part of ongoing events. Living in the long 20th century, the weight still feels heavy and heavier when it comes to every attempt against that hope. “For this war differs from other battles in that all men, even the conquered foes, are absorbed into the ranks of the conquerors—joint heirs to all the fruits of victory.” It’s hard to read in the wake of the Cold War. Colonial war, total war, nuclear war, psychological war, while the process of one class asserting itself over another is so, the 20th century’s global anticommunist dirty war lingers, Killing Hope (Blum 1995).

“What happened to that faith in inevitable progress? If it still survives in some circles as a despairing habit, elsewhere it has been replaced by belief in inevitable doom. ‘Inevitable drift to fascism,’ ‘inevitable twilight of the West,’ ‘the old standard of prosperity can never return,’ are phrases common on lips that not long since hailed inevitable advance [of progress under capitalism].” The fact that such a passage can be read as a contemporary commentary proves the mission of that Soviet project is not irrelevant.