This fine book meets all its stated goals and offers more. At its simplest, it narrates the story of national branding through culture (aptly defined as cultural extravaganza), when tiny Bulgaria organized 38,854 cultural events across the world between 1977 and 1981 to highlight its history and achievements, coinciding with the 1,300th anniversary of the state's creation. Bringing together two bodies of scholarship on the Cold War—international relations and cultural history—Theodora Dragostinova's analysis emphasizes the real power of soft power. There are already impressive works on the porousness of economic, political, and cultural boundaries across the Iron Curtain, but this one extends it beyond Europe and the West and is one of the pioneers of several fresh attempts to chart the contours of an alternative global network between the so-called Second and Third Worlds, thus linking the socialist project with decolonization. The work also buttresses and further develops several other theoretical strands, most importantly adopting Tony Smith's pericentric framework that highlights the role of the global periphery and emphasizes actors at the margins and, in this case, puts small Bulgaria at the center. The “advantages of smallness” is another important trope pursued successfully in this book. According to the author, as the superpowers stressed political, economic, and military objectives, and deemed culture secondary to them, tiny Bulgaria found in culture the ideal means to project its global vision.

All of this is developed in six crisp chapters, all of them the results of deep research in the Bulgarian archives and a thorough knowledge of the local scholarship. The first chapter introduces the Bulgarian framework and gives a convincing explanation for the clichéd reputation of the country as Moscow's most loyal satellite by attributing it to the successful maneuvering of the party elite headed by Todor Zhivkov. Chapter 2 brings in the regional Balkan framework by showcasing paradoxical examples of cooperation across the Cold War line, and rivalry and enmity within the socialist bloc. The next two chapters are devoted to the cultural exchanges with the capitalist world, including relations with the Bulgarian émigré diaspora, mostly in West Germany and the USA. This latter aspect—“forging a diaspora”—gets a thoroughly original treatment, particularly by changing the lens to close-ups on the local and personal levels. The last two chapters, focusing on the cultural offensive in the developing world, are the most evocative of the usefulness of the pericentric approach. There were 15,413 cultural events in Asia; 3,442 in the Arab counties; 2,973 in Latin America; and 1,170 in Africa, dwarfing the 7,420 in capitalist countries. While warm relations on an equal footing with the two large countries of ancient civilizations, India and Mexico, allowed Bulgaria to develop a self-perception as a grand world civilization, relations with Africa (exemplified by Nigeria) displayed a more ambivalent approach, where cultural initiatives were not as lavishly funded and were subordinate to economic considerations, and where talk of anti-imperialist solidarity was often mired by paternalism and superiority, if not outright racism. Culture was often the veneer of economic and political interests in the quest for hard currency and markets, but it provided a shrewd template for an alternative modernization to the postcolonial world.

Especially interesting for this reviewer is the emancipation (called “normalization” in the book) of the 1970s. For a 1968er like myself, clearly a generation older than Dragostinova, the 1970s were boring, conformist, disappointing, and at times laughable, and I share Tony Judt's (coming from the same generation) verdict of a “dispiriting decade” not only for the West. But Dragostinova convincingly makes the case that the decade in Bulgaria saw silent efforts at resolving contradictions and a relatively stable economic and political situation. More importantly, this was also true globally where the western crisis was felt less acutely, and the Third World could articulate specific demands. Most importantly, the book pleads for “allowing room for the agency of people who lived through the 1970s and not simply condemn them to gloom and doom” (19).

This book, like any good book, also raises many questions and longs for further elaborations. What is the part of contingency in this narrative? What is the (contingent) role of individuals (in the cases of, among others, both Zhivkov and Liudmila Zhivkova)? What was the share of their specific entourages, their social provenance and views? Is there a place for religion, including the Universal White Brotherhood (Dunovism)? Did the mix of diverse intellectual and ideological influences end up in something like a sustained (and sustainable) platform beyond nationalism? Can we weigh (and how) the relative role of the cultural program and diplomacy at home and for export? Reception is consciously absent from this coverage and left for future research because of the source base, but how about tacit motivations? Is socialism going global the same as socialist globalization? What is the tangible difference between capitalist and socialist globalization? Again, these and many more questions are raised only and precisely because this is an excellent and rich book that invites us to further inquiry.