War of Words: The USSR and Cold War Linguistic Competition in the Global South

In the aftermath of decolonization, Soviet officials viewed themselves as having been drawn into a new field of Cold War competition with their western rivals—not only for the hearts and minds of Asian and African citizens—but also for their tongues. Soviet officials anxiously interpreted British, American, and French efforts to promote English and French language instruction in postcolonial Asia and Africa as a threat to their own, emerging interests in the Global South. In response, they developed their own project to use Russian as a form of soft power on the two continents—a project that derived heavily from the very countries whose influence it was designed to combat. This paper argues language politics played an important role in the Global Cold War. It draws on archives from Russia, England, and the United States to contend that linguistic competition in postcolonial Africa and Asia reveals the misconceptions Soviet and western officials had about one another.