She is currently completing her first book, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia. The book is a transnational study of socialist friendship between the USSR and its satellite state, Czechoslovakia, from the end of World War II through the collapse of Communism. She has also begun work on a new book project, on the development of Russian as a world language during the Cold War. Rachel’s research has been published in Slavic Review and in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World (Indiana, 2013).