Brother or Other? East European Students in Soviet Higher Education Establishments, 1948–1956

Abstract

After World War II, bilateral agreements within the Eastern bloc brought youth from the newly established satellite states of Eastern Europe to study in higher education establishments in the USSR. Designed to impart Soviet knowledge and practices in the countries of people’s democracy as well as to create a sense of solidarity within the bloc, the training of East Europeans in the center of world communism proved a tension-filled affair. Spurred by the xenophobia and chauvinism of the Soviet home front during the early Cold War, Soviet administrators, faculty members and students related to the foreign students, despite their socialist credentials, as outsiders and sometimes as carriers of unwanted influences. For this reason, the educational agreements deepened the sense that fundamental differences existed between the Soviet Union and its client states in Europe.

‘Socialising’ primary care? The Soviet Union, WHO and the 1978 Alma-Ata Conference

“…Complementing overseas cooperation, the USSR became a hub for professional training. 16 Starting in the 1960s, student fellowships, such as those held at the famed Patrice Lumumba Moscow Peoples’ Friendship University (so named shortly after the 1961 assassination of the Congolese liberation leader), trained tens of thousands of doctors, engineers, social scientists, agriculturalists and other professionals from across Asia, Africa and Latin America (with roughly one-third from each region), who served as important interlocutors encouraging support for socialism (if not necessarily the Soviet variant) to thrive in distinct milieus. 17–20 …”