John Boynton Priestley – a Guide to Great Britain's Public Diplomacy in the Post-War Soviet Union

Aim. To identify the conditions for the formation of public diplomacy between cultural figures in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and to analyze the trip of the English writer John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984) to the USSR, his meetings, cultural contacts with scientists and artists, and his assessment of the heroic deeds of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War.

Methodology. Content analysis was the primary research method. Materials from the Soviet periodicals Pravda, Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Ogonyok, Sovetskaya Abkhaziya, Moskovsky Bolshevik, Vechernyaya Moskva, and Leningradskaya Pravda, as well as scholarly publications, were analyzed. An analysis of the writer's creative legacy was also conducted, in particular, the collection of journalism «Notes in the Margins", which includes six essays about the English writer's trip through the USSR in 1945. The principles of historicism and scientific objectivity served as the methodological basis for the study. The article utilized historical-genetic, comparative-historical, and chronological methods.

Results. In the 1930s, John B. Priestley was a staunch anti-fascist and sympathetic to the Soviet Union. His work had a distinctly social character, emphasizing important everyday, psychological, and criminal themes. The English writer headed the writers' section of the British Society for Cultural Relations between the British Commonwealth and the USSR. Priestley was a supporter of public diplomacy and the development of active cultural dialogue and exchange between the USSR and Great Britain.

Research implication lies in the contribution of the English writer John B. Priestley to the development of public diplomacy in the post-war period, as well as in the assessment of the potential of intercultural dialogue in the context of contemporary international tensions.

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