Patryk Babiracki is an Associate Professor in Russian and East European history at the University of Texas at Arlington, USA. His first monograph is Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943-1957 (2015). He co-edited a collection of essays entitled Cold War Crossings: Travel and Exchange Across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s (2014) and wrote several articles on transnational dimensions of Soviet and East European communisms during the Cold War. Austin Jersild is Professor of History at Old Dominion University, USA, and the author of The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (2014). In 2016 he was a Research Fellow at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies.

• Editors’ Introduction.- PART I: THE SECOND WORLD UNDER STALIN.- Ch. 1. Lars Peder Haga, “Coming to Terms with Europe: Konstantin Simonov and Oles' Honchar's Literary Conquest of East Central Europe at the End of World War II”.- Ch. 2. Balázs Apor, “The Stalin Cult and the Construction of the Second World in Hungary in the Early Cold War Years, 1949–1953”.- PART II: POST-STALINIST ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE SECOND WORLD.- Ch. 3. Patryk Babiracki, “Two Stairways to Socialism: Soviet Youth Activists in Polish Spaces, 1957–1964”.- Ch. 4. David Crowley, “Staging for the End of History: Avant-garde Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communism in Eastern Europe”.- PART III: SECOND WORLD CULTURES.- Ch. 5. Kyrill Kunakhovich, “Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: Second-World Cultural Exchange at the Grassroots”.- Ch. 6. Marsha Siefert, “Second World Cinema: Soviet Film Outreach from 1955–1972”.- PART IV: INTERNATIONALISM AND THE IRON CURTAIN.- Ch. 7. Mark Keck-Szajbel, “Motocross Mayhem. Racingas Transnational Phenomena in Socialist Czechoslovakia.”.- Ch. 8. Pia Koivunen, “Friends, ‘Potential Friends’ and Enemies: Reimagining Soviet Relations to the First, the Second and the Third Worlds at the Moscow 1957 Youth Festival”.- PART V: BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THE THIRD WORLDS.- Ch. 9. Jeremiah Wishon, “‘Peace and Progress’: Building Indo-Soviet Friendship”.- Ch. 10. David Tompkins, “Imagining a Red China in Central Europe: Visions of an Ally and Enemy in Poland and the GDR”.- Ch. 11. Austin Jersild, Sino-Soviet Rivalry in Guinea-Conakry, 1956-1965: The Second World in the Third World.- AFTERWORD Ch. 12. Alfred Rieber, Promises and Paradoxes of Socialist Internationalism (Personal and Historical Reflections).