Maritime history has played a crucial role in global history, allowing us to reconstruct a multitude of inter-actions, entanglements and transfer processes that transcend political borders and orders. However, glob-al maritime history is mainly concerned with the connections between Western Europe or the Atlantic world with Asia, Latin America and Africa. Eastern Europe has so far played only a marginal role in maritime studies. At the same time, the history of socialism has been increasingly studied from a global perspective, focusing on (political, economic, cultural) relations between the Soviet Union on the one hand and socialist movements/countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America on the other. The maritime world of the socialist sphere has rarely been considered. In this panel, we address these missing dimensions of global and maritime history by investigating the global connections of the socialist maritime worlds in the Cold War era. On the one hand, we focus on socialist maritime history to challenge the common understanding of the Soviet Union as an empire that dominated the socialist world. Instead, we focus on the national merchant fleets from Eastern European countries and various Soviet republics, which grew immensely after the Second World War and sailed global routes while their ports also were visited regularly by ships of capitalist countries. This shifted the dynamics of global entanglement, and within the socialist world. Having a national fleet enabled several socialist republics to participate in globalization, challenging our historical narrative of them as peripheries. On the other hand, we explore socialist maritime history in its global dimension. We investigate places, infrastructures, people and ideas of the socialist maritime which reveal connections and entanglements that are hard to grasp in global histories of the territorial socialist world. We propose a double-panel on socialist maritime history during the Cold War period, focusing on three perspectives: Firstly, the global networks, exchanges and transfers of socialist merchant fleets (e.g. charter ships and charter organizing firms, global trade routes, workers on the ships etc.) and the intricacies of globalization; secondly, the globalization of socialist ports (foreign ownership and acquisition policies of landlocked countries) with their global connections; and thirdly, the international circulation of maritime knowledge and policies of Eastern Europe and their impact on international politics. Bringing together scholars from maritime history, global history, and Eastern European history, our panel aims to discuss global maritime entanglements and their implications from both a micro-historical per-spective on socialist ports and a radical global perspective based on fleets. Our objectives are: - To rethink the concept of a “divided globalization” and an “alternative globalization” of Eastern Europe during the Cold War: While we aim to investigate the linkages of socialist maritime trading networks on a global level (including examples from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe as well as Africa, Latin America and Asia); we also plan to highlight the participation of socialist fleets in a truly globalized maritime networks, beyond Cold War Bloc logic and an East-South-line of investigation. - To consider the local implications of maritime globalization in the organization, surveillance, and econom-ic relevance of port zones in Eastern Europe in the context of the world, thereby challenging the under-standing of “national” fleets, “national ports” and their histories by introducing the Socialist space into global maritime history - To recall the international circulation of maritime knowledge and policies from the socialist world and its impact on both national and international shipping policies and development.