This article examines ‘the village’ as a category of development knowledge used by policymakers and experts to remake the ‘Third World’ during the Cold War. The idea of the village as a universal category of underdevelopment, capable of being remade by expert-led social reform, structured efforts to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of people from Asia to Latin America and Africa. Rooted in a transnational interwar movement for rural reconstruction, village projects were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by a scientization of development that narrowed the range of experts in the field and by Cold War politics that increasingly tied development to anti-communism and counterinsurgency. From India to Central America, strategic efforts to control rural populations won out over concerns for rural welfare.

This article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War history by examining commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. After outlining the common characteristics of both states around 1960, it analyses the cultural diplomacy of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union towards Brazil. Transforming its hitherto prevailing image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR now represented itself as a role model for the quick industrialization of the economy and education of the masses. Many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from President Kubitschek to President Goulart shared with the Soviets an interest in what is here called ‘socialist high modernity’. Contacts with the Soviet Union were connected to the putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. However, the new military leaders also had their own interests in, and surprisingly good relations with, the stagnating Soviet Union. This was again based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain. Eschewing teleological interpretations of the period and exploring the ideational basis of actors in the conflict, this article – based on new documents from Moscow archives and recently declassified sources from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry – aims to link Cold War historiography to the debates on global history, which have lately neglected both Latin America and eastern Europe.