Yale Richmond, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer and author of 11 books on intercultural communication, worked on U.S.-Soviet cultural and other exchanges for more than 20 years. He delivered the following speech at the Aleksanteri Institute’s 9th Annual Conference “Cold War Interactions Reconsidered” 29-31 October 2009, University of Helsinki, Finland.
There are a few grains of truth in some of those explanations, and more than a few in others, but I will provide today many grains of another explanation—that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism were consequences of Soviet contacts and cultural exchanges with the West, and with the United States in particular, over the years that followed the death of Stalin in 1953.
When cultural exchange with the Soviets is mentioned, most people think of Soviet dancers, symphony orchestras, ice shows, and circuses that came to the West and filled our halls with admiring spectators. But cultural exchange consisted of much more--exhibitions, motion pictures, and most important, exchanges of people.
For most Russians who came to the United States —and most were Russians—their visits were an early form of shock therapy. When the first Soviet students were shown a U.S. supermarket, they thought it was a Potemkin Village created to impress them. Even Boris Yeltsin, when he visited the United States in 1989, was amazed at the variety of food products he saw in a Texas supermarket. But the most important impression Soviets brought back from travels in the United States was not amazement at our consumer goods but a redefinition of what is “normal,” a word with special meaning for Russians who long to live in a normal society.
The flagship of the exchanges was the Graduate Student and Young Faculty Exchange. In preparations for the negotiation of the Cultural Agreement, President Eisenhower, a strong supporter of exchanges – we could not have had them without Eisenhower—Eisenhower wanted to bring 10,000 Soviet students to the United States, pay all their costs, and not require reciprocity. He even got FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to approve the proposal. But the State Department, in negotiations with the Soviets at the time, was trying for 100 students, and eventually the Soviets agreed to exchange only 20 each year. During, the first year, however, only 17 students were exchanged after the Soviets withdrew 3 of their nominations, and because the exchange was numerically reciprocal, the United States could also send only17.
The American students were in their mid- 20s and real graduate students, selected in an open competition, and mostly in Russian studies—language, literature, and history. The Soviet students were in their mid-30s, had their Kandidat degrees, were mostly in science and technology, and came on a kommandirovka (official assignment). Nevertheless, the number of so-called “students” exchanged each year was gradually increased, and over the next 30 years, several thousand graduate students and young scholars were exchanged.
Twelve years later, by then a full professor, founder of an American studies center at MSU, and head of the Communist Party cell at his university, he proposed a “Five-Year Plan”—to invite U.S. professors of American history to lecture in Moscow during each of the 5 years of study for Soviet history students. Since 1973, every student of American history at MSU has studied with 5 different American professors, several of whom have told me that they delivered the same lectures in Moscow that they give to students in the United States, and without any self-censorship. Today almost every Russian professor of American history has had that experience. Their best student, say the early American lecturers, was Vyacheslav Nikonov, a grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister.
Next I discuss motion pictures, and I will open with the customary quote from Lenin--Kak skazal nasz veliki Lenin: “Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.” Lenin was correct in predicting that the cinema would be an important medium for indoctrinating Russians. But the founder of the Soviet state could not have foreseen the influence that foreign films would have on the Soviet Union.
Soviet audiences were not so much listening to the sound tracks or reading subtitles as watching people in the films—how they lived in their homes, the clothes they wore, and the cars they drove. And when refrigerators were opened in Western films, they were always full of food. Such details of how people lived in West were very revealing.
Equally revealing was the remark of choreographer Igor Moiseyev: "I'm amazed,” he said, “that all your workers are fat and all your millionaires are thin." It was quite the opposite of what he had been led to believe from the caricatures of Americans in Soviet political cartoons.
Willis Conover, a name some of you may not know, hosted a program, “Music USA,” for the Voice of America for 41 years until his death in 1996. For much of the world, and especially for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, he was the voice of America, and to his listeners he epitomized jazz. Conover was estimated to have 30 million listeners worldwide, and many millions of them were in the Soviet Union where his broadcasts are believed to have been a major factor in the revival of Soviet jazz after the death of Stalin.
The U.S. motivation was primarily political--to encourage cooperation and interdependence that would hopefully lead to shared interests and more moderate behavior on the part of the Soviet Union. But there was also U.S. interest in using the exchanges to solve practical problems in S&T and to learn what the Soviets were doing in fields of interest to the United States. The Soviet motivation, as in the past, was primarily to gain access to U.S. S&T, but there were also other factors–to have the Soviet Union seen as equal to the United States, and to give vent to the demand of Soviet scientists and engineers for foreign travel and joint research.
Each exchange consisted of a 5-day seminar with young (under 41) political leaders of the two countries debating domestic and foreign policy issues, followed by a tour of 1-- 2 weeks in the host country including, for the Soviets, stays in American homes. The CYO, as host, emphasized showing the visiting Americans how young people lived, were educated, and grew up in the Soviet Union; ACYPL, as host, concentrated on U.S. politics and the American way of life. Through those visits, a generation of future political leaders gained a first-hand experience in the other country that served most of them well in their future careers.
Thanks to exchanges, the United States and the Soviet Union came to know more about each other. In universities, scholarly and scientific institutions, business, and government, there are people who have the experience that comes only with having spent some time in another country, mastering its language, and becoming familiar with its culture. They can distinguish fact from fiction and understand what is really going on. Their expertise has provided some assurance that the two governments would not misjudge each other's actions and intentions, as they had so often in the past.