A History of Soviet and Russian Friendship Societies in Europe

In her illustrated talk, Dr Pia Koivunen will provide a general overview of Soviet and Russian “friendship societies” over the last 100 years in different European countries, including the United Kingdom, and will explore their similarities and differences.

Dr Koivunen will show how “friendship” had long roots in the socialist movement and Russian revolutionary thinking and how friendship societies in the period between World War I and World War II disseminated information on socialism and the USSR and sought to gather potential supporters of the USSR, for example by engaging to good effect in popular front campaigns against Fascism in the1930s. She will go on to tell us how World War II and its outcome radically changed the Soviet Union’s approach to foreign policy, which paved the way for new friendship societies in the post-World War II period.

The history of the friendship societies in the different European countries to some extent necessarily reflected the ups and downs of each country's relations with the USSR and then with the Russian Federation. Against this background, Dr Koivunen will show how friendship societies changed and developed throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, which may give us an interesting new perspective on Soviet/Russian relations with European countries throughout the period.

Dr Pia Koivunen is a Senior Lecturer in European and World History at the University of Turku in Finland. Before coming to Turku in 2017, Dr Koivunen worked at the University of Tampere, where she was awarded her Ph.D in 2014. Her doctoral dissertation examined Soviet cultural diplomacy in the early period of the Cold War through a biennial international event called “The World Youth Festival”. Currently, Dr Koivunen is leading a four-year project, Mission Finland. Cold War Cultural Diplomacy at the Crossroads of East and West". This project is studying foreign “cultural diplomacy” in Finland during the Cold War. It is looking at a range of cultural and informational activities in Finland sponsored by different countries during this period, including the USA, UK and the Soviet Union, and the significance of these (for example, the Lenin Museum, which the Soviet Union established in Tampere in 1946).

Since 2022 Dr Koivunen has been the chair of the Finnish Association for Russian and East European Studies. She is the editor of the Lähihistoria journal (Contemporary History) and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Slavonic Library at the Finnish National Library. Dr Koivunen has also been a visiting scholar at the Aarhus University in Denmark, the University of Cheltenham in the UK and the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.