GRASSROOTS DIPLOMACY: AMERICAN COLD WAR TRAVELERS and the MAKING of a POPULAR DÉTENTE, 1958-1972 by MICHAEL METSNER Submitted

Home , Adolph Dubs, Georgy Malenkov, Leonid Ivanov (pilot), Robert Lefkowitz, Soviet art, Spaso House

GRASSROOTS DIPLOMACY: AMERICAN COLD WAR TRAVELERS

AND THE MAKING OF A POPULAR DÉTENTE, 1958-1972

MICHAEL METSNER

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2018

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Michael Metsner

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*.

Committee Chair

Peter A. Shulman

Committee Member

Kenneth F. Ledford

Committee Member

David C. Hammack

Committee Member

Tatiana Zilotina

Date of Defense

February 26, 2018

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained

for any proprietary material contained therein.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: “An adventure into the unknown” 27

Chapter 2: “Smiling faces” 89

Chapter 3: “An Underdeveloped Country” 142

Chapter 4: A New Sparta 201

Conclusion 261

Bibliography 275

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their support and feedback in the process of completing my dissertation. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr. Peter Shulman for helping me to refine my main argument and guiding me to the successful completion of this project. A special thanks to Dr. Kenneth Ledford for coining the evocative phrase “popular détente.”

Many thanks to my fellow graduate students, past and present, in the History Department

for their friendship and camaraderie.

I have been fortunate to receive financial support for dissertation research from the

History Associates at Case Western Reserve University, the Baker-Nord Center for the

Humanities, and the CWRU Department of History.

Last but certainly not least, I thank my parents, Nina and Efim, for their faith in me and

their abiding love and support.

Grassroots Diplomacy: American Cold War Travelers and the Making of a Popular

Détente, 1958-1972

Abstract

MICHAEL METSNER

This dissertation focuses on the experiences of American men and women who

traveled to the Soviet Union for leisure, work, or study during the long sixties (1958-

1972). It draws on mass-published travelogues, private correspondence, government

records, and newspaper articles to analyze the observations that Americans made about everyday life in the USSR, the opinions they expressed about the socialist system, and the conversations they had with ordinary Soviet citizens. On the one hand, Americans met friendly and warm people who were curious about the United States, infatuated with

American culture and technology, and yearned for peace and mutual understanding. On the other hand, personal contact with Soviets, coupled with unfavorable firsthand impressions, left no doubt in Americans’ minds concerning the superiority of their way of life. This descriptive duality allowed American Cold War travelers to simultaneously humanize and individualize the faceless Soviet masses and criticize what they considered to be deficiencies inherent (and detrimental) to the Soviet system. Nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers was not inevitable, they concluded, given the longing for

iii

peaceful coexistence expressed by Soviet men and women, but the triumph of the United

States in the Cold War was, given the alleged inferiority of the Soviet way of life.

I argue that that their personal experiences on the other shore convinced Americans of the necessity of finding a peaceful modus vivendi with the Soviet foe, given the dim chances for the long-term success of the socialist experiment in the absence of a nuclear confrontation. Their physical presence behind the “Iron Curtain” laid the groundwork for a popular détente. There was a shared desire on the part of American guests and Soviet hosts to place the competition for global supremacy between the capitalist and socialist systems on a peaceful footing and avoid suicidal conflict at all costs. Therefore, détente

was not simply imposed on docile and indifferent subjects from above; it was also made

at the grassroots by American men and women who traversed geographical and

ideological boundaries and observed how the other half lived with their own eyes.

Introduction

“Where do you buy these clothes?” Debbie Sherwood asked a Soviet woman after

watching a surprisingly impressive, if somewhat eclectic, fashion show at Leningrad’s

House of Fashion (Dom modelei).1 The twenty-nine-year-old magazine writer from New

York City was spending a few weeks in the state of Soviets in the summer of 1968. “Oh, you don’t buy them already made,” the woman replied with an air of astonishment.2

Sensing that the naïve American standing in front of her desperately needed assistance in

navigating the unfamiliar terrain of Soviet consumerism, she led Sherwood to a long

counter located in the House of Fashion’s foyer and asked her which outfit from the

fashion show she had liked. Sherwood’s description of a green miniskirt prompted the

woman to give her “an I-should-have-known look” but she held her tongue and only

asked Sherwood for seven kopecks before making her way to the busy counter. As she

waited expectantly for the woman to return, Sherwood congratulated herself for finding a

real bargain: “A pattern for only seven cents!” Elation gave way to confusion, however,

when the woman handed her “a small piece of paper on which was sketched the green

mini skirt.”3

Sherwood’s protestations that she needed a pattern—rather than a sketch—to give a

friend back home did not garner much sympathy. “If she can sew, she will be able to

make the skirt from this [sketch],” the woman stated decisively. Sewing clothes from

sketches was exactly what Soviet women did on a regular basis, she informed her

perplexed American acquaintance, and proudly brandished the sketches of “a three-piece

1 Debbie Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1969), 159. 2 Ibid., 159-160. 3 Ibid., 160.

suit with a pleated skirt and fitted jacket,” “a frothy cocktail dress with a scooped neck

and heavily embroidered bodice,” and a “pants suit” she was planning to make.

Scrutinizing the attire of Soviet women around her, Sherwood noticed that some of them

did indeed wear dresses that had “a unique and unusual look about them,” which she

attributed to the fact that “somewhere between the sketches and the sewing machines the

fashionable lines had got lost, the result being that the wearers looked as if they hadn’t

been able to decide whether to go mod or not and had settled for a ‘half and half’ look.”4

Instead of relying on the free market to provide them with affordable, fashionable, and

durable ready-made clothes, these women had to rely on home production, with all its inherent shortcomings.

Sherwood’s anecdote exemplifies the dichotomous depiction of everyday life in the post-Stalinist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the published accounts and official correspondence produced by Americans, regardless of the purpose or duration of their stay behind the “Iron Curtain.” On the one hand, ordinary Soviet citizens revealed a friendliness toward, a curiosity about, and even an admiration for the United States and its people in casual conversations with American visitors. On the other hand, the very same conversations, coupled with unfavorable impressions of a hardscrabble existence eked out by ordinary Soviets, left no doubt in Americans’ minds concerning the superiority of their way of life. This descriptive duality allowed American visitors to simultaneously humanize and individualize the faceless Soviet masses and criticize what they considered to be deficiencies inherent (and detrimental) to the Soviet system.

Nuclear conflict between the two superpowers was not inevitable, they concluded, given

4 Ibid., 161.

the longing for peaceful coexistence expressed by Soviet men and women, but the

triumph of the United States in the Cold War was, given the alleged inferiority of the

Soviet way of life.

The fact that some 57,000 Americans visited the Soviet Union in 1971 alone

underscores the inherent permeability of the so-called “Iron Curtain” in the post-Stalinist

era.5 It certainly made sense for Winston Churchill to evoke the powerful image of “an

iron curtain” bisecting the war-torn European continent “[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to

Trieste in the Adriatic” in 1946.6 A decade later, however, such stark and foreboding

symbolism was out of touch with reality. The sudden death of Joseph Stalin on March 5,

1953, fundamentally recast the Cold War’s rules of engagement. Stalin’s successors in

the Kremlin publicly disavowed his paranoid policy of self-imposed isolation by opening

the Soviet Union in “teaspoon-size doses” to foreign tourists, including Americans.7 The

Soviet historian Michael David-Fox has described the impact of that decision as “nothing less than revelatory.”8 A historic transformation did not happen overnight, especially given the ongoing power struggle between Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, but

by 1956 there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the dark days of Stalinist

xenophobia were a thing of the past. Like Francoist Spain, another much maligned

European dictatorship, the USSR desperately “needed both friendship and money” and

5 Martin J. Hillenbrand, “Visitors To and From the Soviet Union,” February 10, 1972, p. 2, RG 59, Bilateral Political Relations (hereafter BPR), American Visits to the USSR, 1971-1973, Box 19, TRV – American Visits, 1972, National Archives. 6 For a history of the Cold War’s most famous metaphor, see Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7 Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 8 Michael David-Fox, “The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex,” in Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 31.

“large-scale foreign tourism had the potential to provide both.”9 Soviet officials, not

without reservations, welcomed foreign tourists for both ideological and practical

reasons.

From the mid-1950s onward, according to cultural historian Richard Pells, the Cold

War was “fought with greater subtlety” and sophistication as the superpower rivalry

became “less ideological, the issues less clear-cut,” and the attitudes less rigid.10 In the

era of mutually assured destruction, Soviet and American policymakers “devoted

enormous resources to demonstrating the superiority of their competing ways of life” in

the court of public opinion.11 The contest for hearts and minds complemented, if not

necessarily eclipsed, the struggle for nuclear supremacy. Propagandists on both sides

touted their “political systems, economic organizations, ideological foundations, cultural

and artistic accomplishments, scientific and technological progress, and relations between

races, classes, and genders” as irrefutable proof that socialism and capitalism “provided

the most equitable, effective, and just paths to individual and national progress.”12 The

Cold War had entered a new phase in which the actions of the two adversaries were

increasingly dictated by psychological, ideological, and cultural considerations.

Competition did not preclude mutual cooperation. American and Soviet

participants in the International Geophysical Year, an international scientific project

which ran from July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958, did not let stale ideological

controversies hinder collaborative research on questions of interest to all humankind. The

9 Neal M. Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 16. 10 Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 84. 11 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 254. 12 Ibid., 75, 254.

agreement on cultural, educational, scientific, and athletic exchanges signed by William

S. B. Lacy, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for East-West Exchange, and

Georgi Nikolaevich Zarubin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, on January 27,

1958, in Washington, D.C. was another important milestone in the U.S.-Soviet

relationship.13 “Whatever its limitations,” Linda Belmonte has stressed that the Lacy-

Zarubin agreement “ushered in an era of unprecedented openness in American-Soviet relations.”14 Considering the evolving nature of superpower diplomacy, it is much more useful to think of the boundary separating the socialist East from the capitalist West in the post-Stalinist period as a Nylon Curtain, to use György Péteri’s evocative term. It was a transparent, porous barrier that “yielded to strong osmotic tendencies that were globalizing knowledge across the systemic divide about culture, goods, and services.”15

The international historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht has urged scholars to adopt a

bottom-up approach to studying America’s place in the world. “The essence of the

history of U.S. foreign relations,” she has argued, “is not primarily the state and power

but citizens and any encounter with the world outside of the territorial borders of the

United States.”16 Building on Gienow-Hecht’s bold assertion, my dissertation focuses on

13 For a concise but flawed overview of bilateral cultural relations before the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, see J. D. Parks, Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence: American-Soviet Cultural Relations, 1917-1958 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983). 14 Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 84. 15 György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10 (November 2004), 115. The inspiration for Péteri’s “Nylon Curtain” comes from a prescient 1951 essay, “The Nylon War,” by the American sociologist David Riesman. It was reprinted in Abundance for What? And Other Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 67-79. 16 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “What Bandwagon? Diplomatic History Today,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009), 1086. She penned this article as a rejoinder to Thomas Zeiler’s thinly veiled triumphalism in “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field.” Both articles were part of a lively roundtable discussion on the state of diplomatic history in the March 2009 issue of Journal of American History.

the experiences of American men and women who traveled to the Soviet Union for

leisure, work, or study during the long sixties (1958-1972). They might have been of

various ages, come from different regions, traveled to the USSR for unrelated reasons,

stayed there for varying lengths of time, and brought dissimilar levels of language

proficiency with them, but they did have at least one thing in common: they left a written

record of their experiences. Unfortunately, their words have not received the scholarly

attention they rightly deserve since historians have all but overlooked the rich

documentary record of the journeys that American Cold War travelers had made.

I make extensive use of mass-published travelogues, private correspondence,

government records, and newspaper articles to answer the question that the eminent Cold

War historian John Lewis Gaddis has posed in reflecting on the sudden and largely

peaceful end of the conflict: “So what did ordinary people during the Cold War really

think?”17 To address Gaddis’s enticing question, I present and analyze the observations

that Americans, most of them quite ordinary, made about everyday life in the Soviet

Union, the opinions they expressed about the socialist system, and the conversations they

had with ordinary Soviet citizens. I argue that that their personal experiences on the other

shore convinced Americans of the necessity of finding a peaceful modus vivendi with the

Soviet foe, given the dim chances for the long-term success of the socialist experiment in the absence of a nuclear confrontation. Their presence behind the “Iron Curtain” laid the groundwork for a popular détente. There was a shared desire on the part of American guests and Soviet hosts to place the competition for global supremacy between the

17 John Lewis Gaddis, “On Starting All Over Again: A Naïve Approach to the Study of the Cold War,” in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretation, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 36.

capitalist and socialist systems on a peaceful footing and avoid suicidal conflict at all

costs.

Détente was not simply imposed on docile and indifferent subjects from above; it

was also made at the grassroots by American men and women who traversed

geographical and ideological boundaries, whether for work, education, or leisure, and

observed how the other half lived with their own eyes. The broad consensus among

American Cold War travelers was that peaceful competition within the framework of

détente offered the surest means for the United States to emerge victorious in the global

contest between democratic capitalism and state socialism. The Soviet Union, plagued as

it was by deep-rooted structural problems, which American visitors invariably identified,

could only emerge triumphant through a nuclear confrontation. This is not to diminish or dispute the crucial role that policymaking elites in Washington and Moscow undoubtedly played in bringing détente to fruition after years of abortive attempts at reaching a mutually acceptable modus vivendi between the two superpowers. However, the underlying fact that American tourists, diplomats, students, scholars, and artists conveyed the same basic message about the structural instability of the Soviet system cannot be consigned to the dustbin of history as an insignificant curiosity from a bygone era.

Indeed, U.S. policymakers would have been well advised to take note of the conclusions drawn by American visitors, which certainly counted as invaluable human intelligence, rather than fixate on nonexistent “missile gaps.”

Travel to the Soviet Union certainly alleviated genuine concerns and gnawing fears

about the uncertain fate of mankind in the age of thermonuclear brinkmanship.18

Americans met people much like themselves; ordinary citizens curious about the world

outside their own borders and anxious for peace and mutual understanding, not goose- stepping ideologues hell bent on global domination. Yet travel also transformed the Cold

War from an abstract ideological conflict that happened “out there” into a lived reality when Americans actually made it “over there,” bringing to the fore the fundamental (and unbridgeable) differences between two diametrically opposed political systems and ways of life. On the one hand, travel made it possible for them to see and experience the ebb and flow of daily life, in all its mundane detail, behind the “Iron Curtain.” On the other

hand, they found that way of life utterly unappealing and gained a renewed appreciation

for their own “American Way of Life.” Therefore, overseas travel both expanded and

constricted the horizons of American Cold War travelers.

Historiography

The British historian David Caute has fashioned a functional definition of the Cold

War that accentuates the inherent complexity of a conflict waged by politicians,

bureaucrats, and generals behind closed doors and by artists, tourists, and exchange

scholars out in public. “The cold war between the Soviet Union and the West,” he writes,

“was simultaneously a traditional political-military confrontation between empires, between the pax americana and the pax sovietica, and at the same time an ideological and

18 Half of the participants in a Gallup poll conducted in December 1960 thought that there was much danger of war. George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971, vol. 3 (New York: Random House, 1972), 1700.

8 cultural contest on a global scale and without historical precedent.”19 Even though the imperial confrontation and the ideological contest were two sides of the same coin, Nigel

Gould-Davies, a former British diplomat and a scholar of international relations, has taken “mainstream” Cold War historians to task for privileging the former over the latter.

“At most,” he has lamented, cultural relations “are seen as little more than ‘low politics,’ inconsequential in comparison with the high politics of power and security.”20

Film historians Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood have identified “important social and cultural dimensions” to the Cold War, leading them to the conclusion that it was, for all intents and purposes, “a people’s war.”21 Yet ordinary people are seldom, if ever, treated as historical agents in their own right. Such omissions, or silences, are hardly surprising given the emphasis placed upon the words, calculations, and dealings of policymaking elites, operating within self-contained bureaucratic fiefdoms.22 “The level of analysis” in diplomatic histories of the Cold War “remains mostly on the macro level

19 David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1. 20 Nigel Gould-Davies, “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 27 (April 2003), 193. 21 Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 5. 22 See Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolutions and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Warren I. Cohen, Challenges to America’s Primacy, 1945 to the Present, Vol. 4: The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Barbara Zanchetta, The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

of high politics and of international relations between state actors.”23 Anything that might

have occurred outside the proverbial halls of power is only of scholarly interest to

“mainstream” historians insofar as it directly impinges on the formulation and/or

implementation of foreign policy decisions.

What do historians mean when they write about détente? Simply put, it means a

relaxation of political tensions. Obviously, such a broad definition leaves plenty of room

for scholarly debate over purpose (why?), function (how?), chronology (when?), and

actors (who?). The Finnish diplomatic historian Jussi Hanhimäki does not think it is

possible to define, or even periodize, détente with any precision because “it meant

different things to different people in different places.”24 Instead, he suggests that we

conceptualize it as an indeterminate era, without an “official starting point” nor a “clear-

cut end,” during which U.S. policymakers “attempted to redefine their relationship with

the Soviet Union in order to increase predictability and reduce the potential of direct

military confrontations.”25 The German historian Wilfried Loth agrees that the

periodization of détente is an exercise in futility: “There had been détente policy since

there had been a Cold War.” In other words, there had always been skeptics on both sides

who decried the tangible and intangible costs of conflict that ordinary Soviets and

Americans were asked to bear in the name of some ideological principle.26 It was only a

matter of time before their voices were heard and their concerns addressed.

23 Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy, “Introduction: The Cold War from a new perspective,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, ed. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. 24 Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013), xviii. 25 Ibid., xviii, xix. 26 Wilfried Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950-1991 (London: Palgrave, 2002), 8.

Such skepticism does not preclude Richard Stevenson, a British scholar of

international relations, from proposing a serviceable definition of détente that privileges

purpose over chronology. Stevenson has defined détente as “the process of easing of

tensions between states whose interests are so radically divergent that reconciliation is

inherently limited.” The clashing “political-ideological, strategic-military, and socio- economic interests” of the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World

War II made rapprochement impossible. However, it was possible, and perhaps even desirable, to reduce some of the tension inherent in their bilateral relationship through negotiation and compromise.27 Nevertheless, Stevenson’s definition reflects the underlying assumption in much of the secondary literature that U.S.-Soviet détente was a purely top-down process orchestrated with great care by policymaking elites in

Washington and Moscow.

By most accounts, the political process of superpower détente commenced in earnest in 1969, when Richard M. Nixon assumed the presidency, and reached its apogee three years later with the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Strategic Arms

Limitation treaties, under the glare of television lights, at the Moscow Summit.

Diplomatic historians have probed the strategic calculations, policy considerations, and political aspirations that brought President Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Ilyich

Brezhnev to the negotiating table in the twilight years of a turbulent decade. Détente did not signal the end of the Cold War. “Both sides viewed détente as managed competition,” the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok has summarized the scholarly consensus, “as a

27 Richard W. Stevenson, The Rise and Fall of Détente: Relaxations of Tension in US-Soviet Relations, 1953-84 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 11. Italics in original.

continuation of the Cold War by less dangerous means.”28 The commitment to reducing

“the risks of an incalculably devastating nuclear war,” which was, in the opinion of the

former diplomat turned historian Raymond Garthoff, “the basic motivating force and

common security interest of both sides,” facilitated negotiations. U.S. policymakers,

chiefly Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, also envisioned détente “as a

springboard for building a network of mutually advantageous relationships” with the

USSR.29 On the Soviet side, ironically, it was the “attainment of a nuclear retaliatory capability in the early 1960s and a rough strategic parity by the 1970s” that paved the way for bilateral cooperation by assuring Soviet policymakers that they would be

“dealing with the West on a basis of equality.”30

Thomas Paterson has argued that East-West détente was a tacit admission of weakness on the part of the major Cold War protagonists. Soviets and Americans

“gradually moved toward a cautious cooperation whose urgent goals were nothing less than the restoration of their economic well-being and the preservation of their diminishing global positions” in a rapidly changing and increasingly multipolar world.31

The Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad largely follows Paterson’s lead in his

influential work on the global Cold War. Superpower détente was, in his view,

simultaneously “a direct response to America’s debacle in Vietnam” by U.S.

policymakers and an explicit “recognition by the West of the Soviet Union as the other

28 Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 230. 29 Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994), 36. 30 Ibid., 41. 31 Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 192. For a detailed exposition of this argument, see Keith L. Nelson, The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

genuine superpower” for Soviet policymakers. Mutual cooperation held out the prospect

of reduced defense spending and improved global standing for both parties.32 The

revisionist historian Walter LaFeber has averred that Nixon and Brezhnev “designed a

détente policy” to address “the economic problems of both nations” and “to bring spreading military commitments under some control.”33 Finally, Wilfried Loth concurs

with his colleagues that “securing peace” and “reducing the arms burden” on their

respective economies were two of the “common goals” that brought Nixon and Brezhnev

together. But, importantly, he also adds “cooperation for mutual benefit,” including

exchanges, to the mix.34

Placing great power diplomacy in the broader social context of global unrest,

Jeremi Suri has formulated a bold reinterpretation of détente in his book, Power and

Protest. “Across North America, Europe, and Asia, détente was a profoundly

conservative response to internal disorder,” precipitated by disillusioned and outraged

young men and women, which he has called “the global disruption of 1968.”35 At its core, East-West détente was a reactionary policy—an elite counterrevolution, if you will—in Suri’s opinion because it “emphasized continuity over change and stability over reform” as well as enshrined the Cold War status quo.36 Shaken by popular resistance, the

great powers, including the United States and the Soviet Union, worked closely to bolster

elite authority “against a range of internal challengers” and reduce “the public tensions

32 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 194. 33 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006 (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 284. 34 Wilfried Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950-1991 (London: Palgrave, 2002), 9. 35 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolutions and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5. 36 Ibid., 214.

fueled by ideological conflict” between the socialist and capitalist camps.37 There was, in

other words, a direct causal link between domestic activism in the streets and foreign

policy-making behind closed doors. At the Moscow Summit, Nixon and Brezhnev

“colluded to contain their own citizens,” rather than each other’s ambitions, “for the sake

of global stability” and domestic tranquility.38

Suri’s innovative argument has gained scholarly traction as evidenced by its near- verbatim reiteration by John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Cold War historians, in his authoritative synthesis on the Cold War. The global disruption of 1968 made “the major

Cold War adversaries” acutely aware of their common interest in containing “the threat from youthful rebels within their own societies,” Gaddis has noted.39 The purpose of

détente was inherently conservative: “to freeze the Cold War in place” by laying down,

on paper, the ground rules for its future conduct, not putting an end to the conflict.40 Jussi

Hanhimäki likewise defers to Suri in his synthesis on the evolution of U.S. foreign policy

and posits détente as a cautious and calculated reaction to domestic and foreign turmoil

on the part of Nixon and Kissinger. It “was, essentially, a conservative policy aimed at

stabilizing a situation that was (particularly because of the Vietnam War, the escalation of

the nuclear arms race, and the breakdown of the domestic consensus over U.S. foreign

policy) threatening the proper functioning of American foreign policy.”41 Once again, hardheaded U.S. policymakers strove to better manage—not transcend—the Cold War in order to restore “America’s damaged prestige and diminished power” in the world.42

37 Ibid., 213; 216. 38 Ibid., 257-258. 39 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 154. 40 Ibid., 198. 41 Jussi Hanhimäki, The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013), xv. 42 Ibid., 39, 2.

Although Jeremi Suri has demonstrated—clearly and convincingly—the manner in which grassroots activism can have a profound impact on policy making, even his pioneering study, to say nothing of most diplomatic histories of the Cold War, largely retains a traditional top-down approach. Christopher Endy and Dennis Merrill, both historians of tourism, have called attention to some of the methodological blind spots that arise, perhaps inevitably, in traditional diplomatic histories. The study of post-World War

II U.S. tourism in France has convinced Endy that “traditional models of international relations that limit themselves to state policy and state-to-state interactions” overlook

“the rich and expanding web of private interactions that connect national communities” across permeable political boundaries.43 In his work on U.S. tourism in twentieth-century

Latin America, Merrill has argued that “[t]he preoccupation with national interests, state

policy, and global financial institutions tends to marginalize human subjects, be they

consumers or workers, female or male, racial minorities, subordinate classes, or the

upwardly mobile.” Singular focus on “dramatic political events,” such as great-power summits, for instance, obscures, if not discounts, informal contacts between ordinary people that generally occur at the grassroots, outside the purview of the state, and “leaves routine behaviors, carried out by ordinary people, largely unexamined.”44

As early as 1990, the distinguished diplomatic historian Akira Iriye called in the

pages of the Journal of American History for “a much-needed corrective to the usual

diplomatic history with its emphasis on government-to-government relations or on the

protection and promotion of economic interests through the apparatus and

43 Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3. 44 Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 19.

instrumentalities of the state.” It was time to make “individuals, their associations, or the

goods and ideas they produce” the subjects of historical inquiry.45 It was time, in other

words, for diplomatic historians to take the cultural turn. Iriye has pointed out that international relations are at bottom intercultural relations since all nations are essentially cultures in the sense that their “inhabitants share certain consciousness—of their land, of their history, and of who they are.”46 And they make sense and interact with the world

around them “through images, assumptions, emotions, the arts, popular entertainment as

well as through material goods such as food and fashions.”47 Accordingly, the study of

international relations is inextricably linked to the study of culture, of “relations among

peoples, their ideas, and their products.”48

Iriye has posited that a cultural approach to diplomatic history must pay “particular attention to communication within and among nations” since culture denotes “the sharing and transmission of memory, ideology, emotions, life-styles, scholarly and artistic works,

and other symbols” both within and across national boundaries.49 Moreover, he has

cautioned historians against reducing the significance of a topic to the question of its

“relevance to specific policy decisions,” as if it is the sole criteria for determining what is

worthy of scholarly attention.50 On the contrary, he has urged fellow diplomatic

historians in particular to study “cultural forces and phenomena…for their own sake, if

only because cultures define their own realities, quite separate from the realities that

45 Akira Iriye, “Culture,” Journal of American History 77 (June 1990), 103. 46 Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 242. 47 Ibid., 243. 48 Iriye, “Culture,” 104. 49 Ibid., 99-100. 50 Iriye, “Culture and International History,” 248.

confront decision-makers.”51 Iriye’s call has not gone unheeded. His words have inspired

scholars of many stripes, “unbounded by analytical straitjackets from the past,” to adopt a

“culturalist methodology as a means of understanding relations between nations” and

their citizens.52

The new Cold War history, animated by “a determination to look at the conflict

from the bottom up rather than from the top down,” has provided a much-needed

counterweight to top-down diplomatic histories that pay little heed to the psychological

warfare waged relentlessly in “the trenches of public opinion,” to use Toby Rider’s apt

term, by the two superpowers.53 This relatively recent historiographical trend is predicated upon two interrelated assumptions: (1) “multileveled interaction was taking place between different types of actors, between people, institutions, and states,” and (2)

culture fundamentally “shaped the meaning and nature of the conflict for millions of

people from beginning to end.”54 The ground rules of the cultural Cold War were very

simple: The United States and the Soviet Union vied to “out-educate, out-perform, out-

write, out-produce, out-argue, outshine” one another on the global stage.55 Yet adjusting

the analytical lens from the macro level of high politics to the micro level of cultural

intercourse has not necessarily brought the words, thoughts, and actions of ordinary

people into view.

Such is the case because much of this scholarship has focused almost exclusively

on mass cultural productions, such as national exhibitions, propaganda campaigns,

51 Ibid., 248-249. 52 Andrew J. Rotter, “The Cultural History of Foreign Relations,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 428. 53 Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 5; Toby C. Rider, Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 1. 54 Autio-Sarasmo and Miklóssy, “Introduction,” 2; Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War, 6. 55 Caute, The Dancer Defects, 4.

17 performing arts tours, and sports competitions, which both the Soviet and the U.S. governments readily used “to prove their virtue, to demonstrate their spiritual superiority, to claim the high ground of ‘progress,’ to win public support and admiration by gaining ascendancy in each and every event of what might be styled the Cultural Olympics.”56

Bilateral exchanges of artists and athletes, of delegations and exhibits were an important but hardly the only means of intercultural communication during the Cold War. Contact with tourists, scholars, and diplomats likewise made it possible for Soviets and

Americans to get to know one another on a personal level.57 It is precisely the examination of everyday, street-level encounters between American and Soviet citizens that is sorely missing in the new Cold War history.58

Unlike traditional accounts of détente, fixated on the furtive machinations of Nixon and Kissinger, the burgeoning scholarship on the cultural Cold War has pushed the timeline back to the mid- to late-1950s. Historians have shown that the nature of the ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union changed irrevocably during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, particularly in his second term. The

56 Ibid., 3. See Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998); Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Shaw and Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War; Damion L. Thomas, Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Clare Croft, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Rider, Cold War Games. 57 Rotter, “The Cultural History,” 428. 58 Two notable exceptions worth mentioning are Tomas Tolvaisas, “Cold War ‘Bridge-Building’: U.S. Exchange Exhibits and Their Reception in the Soviet Union, 1959-1967,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12 (Fall 2010), 3-31 and Dina Fainberg, “Ordinary Russians and Average Americans: Cold War International Correspondents describe ‘regular people’ on the other side of the iron curtain,” in The Soviet Union and the United States: Rivals of the Twentieth Century: Coexistence and Competition, ed. Eva-Maria Stolberg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 115-137.

dawning realization that nuclear weapons “were so powerful that they were useless”

rendered armed confrontation an untenable option for either superpower to pursue.59 As a

result, policymakers in Washington and Moscow increasingly embraced psychological

warfare for hearts and minds as an alternative battleground for global preeminence.

“Cultural products, along with missiles and microbes, became a test of what each system

could produce, in quality and content.”60 In addition to wooing uncommitted members of

the global community “through the exertion of economic and cultural influence,” rather

than sheer force, both sides also did their best to sow seeds of discontent behind enemy

lines.61 In this way, efforts to expand one’s political bloc went hand in hand with

measures to undercut the adversary’s ideological legitimacy, both at home and abroad.

But fighting a propaganda war in the age of mass media placed “every aspect of the

American way of life—from political organizations and philosophical ideals, to cultural

products and scientific achievements, to economic practices and social relationships”

under a spotlight.62 To win “the cold war of words and deeds” in such circumstances, psychological warfare experts maintained, required the mobilization of ordinary citizens as well as public officials, civic and religious leaders, labor unionists, businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians on behalf of U.S. propaganda efforts “to influence the political, economic, strategic, and psychological orientation of foreign countries,” including the USSR.63 This mass mobilization of public opinion, the diplomatic historian

Kenneth Osgood has noted, effectively “blurred any lingering distinctions between

59 Suri, Power and Protest, 3. 60 Marsha Siefert, “From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia,” in The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 185. 61 Gould-Davies, “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” 195. 62 Osgood, Total Cold War, 2. 63 Ibid., 11, 149.

‘domestic’ and ‘international’ propaganda,” transforming the American people from passive spectators into “active participants in the war of persuasion being waged abroad.”64 Therefore, people-to-people contact became an indispensable instrument of

U.S. foreign policy, owing to its potential to influence public opinion abroad and mobilize public opinion at home.

Drawing on both travelogues and government records, Victor Rosenberg’s study of

Soviet-American relations during Eisenhower’s term in office highlights the qualitative change in tone and substance that Stalin’s unexpected demise brought about. The bilateral relationship between the superpowers came to be defined by expressions of “appreciation of the achievements of the other side,” displays of “friendliness in person-to-person contacts, and the persistence of cultural exchanges in a friendly atmosphere even in times of political tension.”65 The Cold War entered a new stage after 1953 as evidenced by, for instance, the emphasis that contemporary Soviet and American travel writers placed on the theme of “mutual friendliness, hospitality, and curiosity displayed by the peoples of

the two countries.” It was as if they wanted to reassure readers back home of the other

side’s essential humanity. However peculiar it may seem, Rosenberg contends that such

assurances were neither incidental nor superfluous. “Even highly sophisticated Soviets

and Americans were often amazed to find that the others were people,” much like

themselves.66 Moreover, personal contact “could at least offer some diminution of

anxiety,” associated with living under the threat of “mutual annihilation,” for Soviets and

Americans alike, “especially during times of high political tensions” between their

64 Ibid., 5. 65 Victor Rosenberg, Soviet-American Relations, 1953-1960: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange During the Eisenhower Presidency (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 124. 66 Ibid., 144.

20 governments.67

Walter Hixson pioneered the study of “international relations as intercultural relations” in his influential work on the Eisenhower administration’s cultural infiltration of the Soviet Union, Parting the Curtain. The brutal suppression of the popular anti-

Communist uprising in Hungary in November 1956 scuttled Secretary of State John

Foster Dulles’s vaunted policy of liberation, prompting an official reassessment of U.S. propaganda efforts in Eastern Europe and the USSR. While U.S. officials remained committed to winning the Cold War by destabilizing and deposing the Communist regimes, they opted for “an evolutionary approach emphasizing straight news and information programs, cultural exhibitions, and East-West exchange program” to attain that long-term objective.68 Tapping “one of the country’s greatest foreign policy assets,” the universal appeal of American mass culture, U.S. propagandists projected powerful

“images of affluence, consumerism, middle-class status, individual freedom, and technological progress” right through the “Iron Curtain,” thanks in large part to the Lacy-

Zarubin agreement on bilateral exchanges.69 Hixson has argued that the 1959 American

National Exhibition, held for six weeks at Moscow’s Sokol’niki Park, was “a harbinger of the mounting appeal of Western culture” in the USSR.70 Not only did “the images and symbols of American life” make “a profound impression” on those in attendance, but they also revealed a “growing desire to access consumer goods, benefit from technological progress, and attain middle class status and individual freedom” on the part

67 Ibid., 133. 68 Hixson, Parting the Curtain, xiv. 69 Ibid., xi. 70 Ibid., 228. The cultural historian Susan Reid has challenged Hixson’s triumphalist interpretation of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. “Who Will Beat Whom? Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9 (Fall 2008): 855-904.

21 of Soviet visitors.71 The failure of the Soviet centrally planned command economy to satisfy these awakened desires for material comfort and social status gradually eroded the precarious popular legitimacy of the Communist Party.

Building on Hixson’s work, Laura Belmonte has argued in Selling the American

Way that U.S. propagandists crafted and disseminated a grand teleological narrative of freedom, progress, personal fulfillment, affluence, tolerance, equality, and pluralism “in hopes of persuading foreign peoples to reject communism and to adopt democratic capitalism.”72 They used the soft power of public diplomacy, including but not limited to

“international information campaigns, trade fairs, and cultural exchanges,” to spread the gospel of democratic capitalism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union “without provoking a third world war.”73 Even something as seemingly benign as “cultural intercourse” had a competitive edge, however. A cultural exchange would generate goodwill and promote mutual understanding between people, but it “could also be construed as a contest, a tournament, when the reviews were published” back home.74

According to Belmonte, the overriding objective of U.S. propaganda behind the “Iron

Curtain” was to broaden the limited worldview of ordinary Soviets, to push the boundaries of their imagination. “If Soviet citizens were able to make more informed judgments of the outside world,” U.S. policymakers reasoned, “they could be inspired to demand intellectual freedom, personal security, and more consumer goods” from their

71 Ibid., 213, 228. 72 Belmonte, Selling the American Way, 7. 73 Ibid., 50. 74 Caute, The Dancer Defects, 6.

rulers.75 Personal contact with Americans would certainly aid in the attainment of that

goal.

For all the scholarly attention accorded to Cold War cultural diplomacy, the study of international tourism in the second half of the twentieth century, and its impact domestically and globally, has been largely neglected. “In a Cold War contest that was as

much about which country took best care of their citizens as it was about the arms race,”

writes cultural historian Anne Gorsuch, access to “the pleasurable aspects of tourism”

was an important measure of economic development. As far as the Soviets were

concerned, tourism at home and abroad exemplified the state’s “technological

achievement and commitment to modern, consumptive pleasure” in the post-Stalinist

era.76 Moreover, Soviet tourists fortunate enough to receive official permission to travel

beyond the narrow confines of the Warsaw Pact were expected to act as “envoys” of their nation and do their utmost to bolster the policy of peaceful coexistence through “personal

encounter and political performance” in the capitalist West.77

On the American side, once Washington assumed the mantle of global leadership in the aftermath of World War II, “U.S. tourists constituted an ever-present force in the nation’s foreign relations,” regardless of their destination.78 Indeed, Merrill goes so far as

to claim that tourism “helped to transform the terrain on which foreign policy and

international relations took place” since American tourists “transmitted new webs of cultural significance homeward, altered social, cultural, and political life at the empire’s

75 Ibid., 70. 76 Anne E. Gorsuch, All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15. 77 Ibid., 13. 78 Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 24.

23 center, and helped millions of U.S. citizens reimagine America’s place in world affairs.”79

No small feat, to be sure. Merrill does not mince words in explaining the significance of tourism to the study of diplomatic history. “Whether the subject is world war, Cold War, decolonization, revolution, nation building, development, terms of trade, property disputes, military assistance, military bases, or any other number of topics identified with the history of U.S. foreign relations, tourism injects itself into the discussion.”80

However, with few notable exceptions, international tourism has received scant attention from historians in general and diplomatic historians in particular.81

Chapter Outline

This dissertation is organized thematically, charting and exploring the discursive continuities in writings and reflections of American Cold War travelers to the Soviet

Union. The recitation of Americans’ peculiar sentiments found in the following pages is not an exercise in historical reconstruction. Certainly, it is not my intention to take their words at face value and present their travel accounts as an accurate depiction of everyday life in the USSR at a particular moment in time.82 While these historical documents do

79 Ibid., 25, 13. 80 Ibid., 244. 81 Notable exceptions include Pells, Not Like Us; Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Patricia Goldstone, Making the World Safe for Tourism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Scott Laderman, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America. 82 For some excellent scholarship on the history of everyday life in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, see Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); William Jay Risch, The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers; Melanie Ilič, Life Stories of Soviet

24 capture something of the Soviet reality, as Americans saw and understood it, they must be read and interpreted with a generous pinch of salt since they reflect the attitudes and assumptions of men and women who, according to Pells, “seemed habitually bewildered by cultural traditions different from their own.”83 Furthermore, tourists, scholars, and diplomats, among others, who composed these accounts, were not engaged in a scholarly enterprise but merely sought to share their distinct impressions with audiences of varying sizes and types. With these caveats in mind, it is my purpose to make sense of American travelers’ varied impressions of the Soviet reality, based on a close reading of their own words, and demonstrate why they embraced détente as an effective and peaceful means of winning the Cold War.

The first chapter of my dissertation deals mainly with technical aspects of foreign travel to the Soviet Union in the post-Stalinist era, with a particular focus on two groups of American Cold War travelers: tourists and exchange students. It describes the average cost and primary means of travel to the USSR, the political aims that U.S. officials hoped to attain by fostering interpersonal contact between American and Soviet citizens, and travel advice, furnished by experts and amateurs alike, on everything from striking a conversation to packing one’s baggage from the trip. Given the political cast of Cold War travel, U.S. officials sought to make sure that their fellow citizens performed their unofficial duties as representatives of the American way of life with both tact and competence in the USSR.

Women: The Interwar Generation (London: Routledge, 2013); Steven Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 83 Pells, Not Like Us, 46.

The next three chapters outline the representational dichotomy of a friendly and

peaceful Soviet populace living in a dysfunctional society, encumbered by a sclerotic

economy and a repressive political order. The second chapter presents the positive

experiences that Americans generally had in the USSR. Soviets welcome them with open

arms, posed a myriad of questions about everyday life under capitalism, extolled the

virtues of American culture and technology, and agitated for peace and mutual

understanding between the two superpowers.

The third and fourth chapters discuss the negative features of the Soviet reality that

stood out to American travelers. They did not let the friendly persuasion and public notice

cloud their judgment. The problems and challenges confronting the Soviet polity,

economy, and society were simply too serious and too numerous to ignore or dismiss,

even for those sympathetic to the socialist experiment. From overpriced, low-quality merchandise on sale in stores to poor, sluggish service in restaurants, from communal justice dispensed in basements to outbursts of racial violence in the streets, to cite just a few examples, American men and women were none too enamored with the Soviet way of life and none too optimistic about the long-term future of the Soviet state. Socialism was faltering badly in the “window shop politics of consumer competition” with the capitalist West and continued exchanges of ideas, people, and goods would only hasten its demise.84

84 Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, “East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War,” in Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History, ed. Patrick Major and Rana Mitter (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 14.

Chapter 1: “An adventure into the unknown”

Introduction

The Cold War gave a new meaning to the old Russian adage “He who has not seen

Russia, has not seen the world.”1 The world’s first socialist state, which also happened to be the largest country in the world, forged an alternative vision of modernity which would, it was believed, render bourgeois capitalism all but obsolete in the not-too-distant

future. It was a historic achievement (and an object lesson) that Joseph Stalin’s

successors in the Kremlin wanted to share with the rest of the world, including the

capitalist West. The Cold War, after all, was fought over “competing claims of cultural,

systemic, and civilizational superiority.”2 From the mid-1950s onward, Communist leaders welcomed foreign tourists to the Soviet Union, but hedged their bets by placing them under the supervision of a state agency, Intourist. Their motives for bringing the

USSR out of self-imposed isolation were not entirely political, however. Pecuniary considerations also influenced this decision, as we will see.

The modern age of mass tourism, powered by jet propulsion and financed by consumer credit, afforded a growing number of American citizens the opportunity to judge the socialist experiment for themselves by booking a trip to the Soviet Union.

Many others traveled to the USSR under the auspices of the 1958 bilateral exchange agreement between the Cold War foes, popularly known as the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement.

It did not take U.S. officials long to grasp the subversive influence that ordinary

1 Nicholas Daniloff, “Russia Is Getting Easier For Foreigners To Visit,” Chicago Defender (April 11, 1962), 9. 2 Michael David-Fox, “The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex,” in Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 17.

Americans could potentially wield behind the “Iron Curtain.” Cultural exchange, after all,

was an effective mechanism for “illuminating, disseminating, and demonstrating

ideological principles.”3 Americans abroad were essentially walking billboards for

democratic capitalism. Their presence reinforced “the collective picture of life in the

West as more prosperous, glamorous and sophisticated in its everyday manifestations.”4

But, given the political resonance of Cold War travel, Americans had to be properly

prepared to make the most of their time in the Soviet Union. Fortunately, information for

prospective travelers on making a positive impression and establishing rapport with

ordinary Soviets was not hard to come by. In addition to travel guides for tourists and

specialized publications for exchange participants, there operated an information center

in New York City catering specifically to Americans planning a Soviet vacation. The

preponderance of travel advice reflected the significance of the journey ahead.

“Tourism with a Capitalist Flair”

The Soviet Union opened its doors to foreign tourists in the late 1950s in an effort

to accomplish two complementary goals, one ideological, the other practical: showcase

the historic achievements of Soviet socialism as well as replenish foreign currency

reserves in the state coffers. Given the tectonic shift from “a culture oriented toward a

future point in time to one in which everyone was slowly welcome to enjoy life as it

already had become in the present” in the post-Stalinist era, it was imperative for the

Soviet leadership to “demonstrate the success of history’s first government-sponsored

3 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 214-215. 4 Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 118.

experiment in social engineering” to a largely skeptical Western audience, ideologically

predisposed by the Manichean logic of the Cold War to uncover any “evidence of

socialism’s failure.”5 Soviet officials recognized tourism’s propaganda potential, or

“winning friends for the hammer and sickle,” since many foreigners carried away “a

much better impression of the U.S.S.R. than they had when they came.”6 Firsthand

experience with socialist reality could dispel some of the negative stereotypes of the

Soviet Union, deeply embedded in Americans’ minds.7

In addition to appreciating socialism’s accomplishments with their own eyes,

foreign tourists also invariably spent their money in the Soviet Union. As a U.S. embassy

officer in Moscow noted in 1965, the Soviets were “making definite efforts to

accommodate any reasonable requests of the regular tourists because of the great demand

for foreign currencies.”8 In 1966, a State Department official estimated that American

tourists spent somewhere between $2.5 and $5 million a year in the USSR, while the

American Express agent in Moscow volunteered his professional opinion that every

American left the country at least $200 poorer.9 A New York Times article with the suggestive title, “Russians Sell Tourism With a Capitalist Flair,” filed by Raymond H.

Anderson from Moscow, shed more light on the remarkable profitability of foreign tourism for the Soviet state. A Soviet economist estimated that “the average spending of

5 Shawn Connelly Salmon, “To the Land of the Future: A History of Intourist and Travel to the Soviet Union, 1929-1991” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 162, 126 6 Irving R. Levine, Travel Guide to Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 37. 7 On the time-honored American tradition of vilifying Russia, see David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 8 Walter J. Stoessel, Jr., “Letter to Richard H. Davis,” March 15, 1965, 1, RG 59, BPR, Box 18, TRV: American Visits to the USSR, 1963-1965. 9 Robert L. Barry, “American Tourists in the USSR,” April 14, 1966, RG 59, BPR, Box 18, TRV: American Visits to the USSR, 1966.

one tourist in the Soviet Union brings the country a profit equal to the export of nine tons

of coal, 15 tons of oil or two tons of top-quality wheat.”10 These economic trends, in turn,

made Intourist, the state agency in charge of foreign tourism, as concerned with making

sure that foreign tourists spent as much money as possible on goods and services as with

propagating socialist values. Consequently, “signs of the gradual integration of market

forces into Intourist’s work emerged in parallel with its efforts to shore up the ideological

importance of travel in a socialist context.”11

Gabriel Reiner, the globetrotting president of Cosmos Travel Bureau in New York

City, suggested another possible motive for Soviet hospitality in the post-Stalinist era.

After returning from the USSR in 1958, Reiner briefed State Department officers on the private meeting he had with Premier Nikita Khrushchev and First Deputy Premier

Anastas Mikoyan at the Kremlin. Both men personally assured him that “they would welcome greater number of Americans to visit the Soviet Union,” political tensions between the two superpowers notwithstanding, because “this program of cultural exchange is good for both sides.”12 Yet Reiner contended that their conciliatory words

were only a subterfuge. Rolling out the welcome mat for Western tourists was nothing

more than a “domestic political propaganda” ploy to shore up popular support. “The

Soviet population on seeing Western visitors in their country are more easily convinced

10 Raymond H. Anderson, “Russians Sell Tourism With a Capitalist Flair,” New York Times (February 25, 1968), T33. 11 Salmon, “To the Land of the Future,” 228. The transfer of administrative oversight over Intourist from the Ministry of Foreign Trade to the Council of Ministers in 1964 clearly signaled the high priority the Soviet government assigned to foreign tourism in the post-Stalinist period. 12 Gabriel Reiner, “Letter to Edward L. Freers,” September 10, 1958, 1, RG 59, BPR, Box 13, 1631(g) – Cosmos Travel Bureau.

that the political situation within the U.S.S.R. has stabilized and that Soviet life has

reached a degree of normalcy,” Reiner surmised.13

Americans, of course, did not need or ask for Khrushchev’s invitation to book a trip

to the state of Soviets; it was their prerogative to see the world. The post-World War II

economic boom “instilled a sense of entitlement to the pleasures of prosperity, including

vacationing and foreign travel,” in the minds of many Americans, including middle- and

working-class families.14 Paid vacations and rising incomes, along with new destinations served by commercial jet airliners, fueled an American wanderlust.15 Officially, the number of U.S. overseas travelers climbed steadily from 1,075,000 in 1955 to 2,623,000 in 1965 to 5,260,000 in 1970.16

For the first time in U.S. history, it was possible to speak of mass tourism as a

viable economic, social, and cultural force. “Economically, it offered a powerful engine

for growth. Socially, it provided lived proof of egalitarianism. And culturally, it allowed

Americans to broaden their horizons and develop a more cosmopolitan sensibility.”17 It

was an ideological force par excellence as well. For many Americans, the long-awaited

chance to book an overseas vacation was all the proof they needed that “American culture

uniquely afforded opportunities for individual development through leisure and

consumption.” Aside from reifying exceptionalist “narratives of prosperity and mobility”

for domestic consumption, mass tourism also showcased the United States’ economic,

13 Walter B. Smith II, “Soviet Travel Restrictions and Tourism,” October 2, 1958, 2, RG 59, BPR, Box 13, 1631(g) – Cosmos Travel Bureau. 14 Rob Kroes, “Tourism and Cold War Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 29 (June 2005), 563. 15 Richard K. Popp, The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 1. 16 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1972 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972), 211. 17 Popp, The Holiday Makers, 60.

technological, and cultural prowess to audiences abroad.18 All of a sudden, the contrast between socialism and capitalism acquired a tangible form in the shape of an American tourist.

“By land, sea, and air”

Soviet regulations dictated that all travel arrangements, whether for business or pleasure, had to “be made through a travel agency having a contract with Intourist.”19

Only U.S. travel agencies accredited by Intourist, such as American Express, Maupintour,

or Cosmos, were authorized to sell tour packages to the USSR.20 That “[a]ll travel, hotel

accommodations, meals, etc., must be arranged and paid for in advance” was one of the

distinguishing features of travel to the Soviet Union.21 An accredited travel agency was a

one-stop shop for tourists: it would not only arrange their itineraries but would also

handle their visa applications.22 Intourist offered foreign tourists two basic travel options:

they could visit the Soviet Union on their own, selecting a standard or special itinerary

for their trip, or they could join a group tour with a set itinerary and starting date. Among

the special itineraries available to those traveling on their own were business tours,

pension tours, rest tours, hunting tours, medical treatment tours, private car tours, and

camping tours.23 Tourists who purchased a standard itinerary could travel deluxe, first, or

18 Ibid., 144. 19 U.S. Embassy, Moscow, Consular Section, “Information of interest to American citizens planning to go to the USSR as tourists or to visit relatives,” RG 59, BPR, Box 18, American Visits, 1966. 20 Dean B. Mahin and Richard M. Scammon, Soviet Russia: A Guidebook for Tourists (Washington, D.C.: Governmental Affairs Institute, 1959), 5. 21 U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, Passport Office, “Travel to the Soviet Union,” March 1967, 2, MSS 10958, Box 115, Folder 2, State Historical Society of North Dakota. 22 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 15. 23 John E. Felber, The American’s Tourist Manual for the U.S.S.R. (Newark: Printing Consultants, 1965), 30.

tourist class, depending on how much money they were willing to spend, but those who

preferred a special itinerary had no choice but to travel deluxe. Group tours always

traveled first class. The price of the trip depended not only on the travel class but also on

the time of the year since it was cheaper to travel to the Soviet Union off season (October

through April).

A deluxe itinerary usually included a hotel suite with a private bathroom, an

extensive á la carte menu, three meals a day plus afternoon tea, a chauffeured car for

three hours a day, and the services of an Intourist guide-interpreter for two daily

excursions. In 1960, the deluxe rate varied from $30 per day during the season and

$25.50 in the off-season.24 It went up in 1974 to $56 per day for a single room and $39

for a double during the season and to $45 per day for a single and $30 for a double in the

off-season.25 A first class traveler stayed in a single or double room with a private

bathroom, had fewer menu options for his or her meals, and could only take one three-

hour excursion with a guide-interpreter a day on an Intourist bus. In 1960, the first class

rate ranged from $17.50 per day during the season to $13.13 per day in the off-season.26

In 1974 it went up to $33 per day for a single room and $21 for a double during the

season and to $24 per day for a single and $15 for a double in the off-season.27 Those

traveling on a tourist class itinerary enjoyed the same meal and excursion options as first

class travelers but they had to share a hotel room with as many as four people and were

not guaranteed a private bathroom.28 In 1960, the tourist rate was $12.50 per day during

24 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 20. 25 Eugene Fodor and Robert C. Fisher, eds., Fodor’s Soviet Union, 1974-75 (New York: David McKay, 1974), 48. 26 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 20. 27 Fodor’s Soviet Union, 48. 28 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 20-21.

the season and $9.40 in the off-season.29 In 1974, the rate had increased to $22 per day

for a single room and $15 for a double during the season and to $18 per day for a single

and $12 for a double in the off-season.30 Standard itineraries ranged in price from $150

for a five-day stay in Moscow to $890 for a three-week vacation on the Black Sea in

1960.31 The estimated cost of an eight-day visit to Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad in 1974 was about $250 per person for a single room and $200 per person for a double.32

The biggest expense an American traveling to the Soviet Union had to bear,

however, was the cost of actually getting there. To a large extent, this was the legacy of

Joseph Stalin’s menacing xenophobia and murderous paranoia which had rendered the

Soviet Union largely a terra incognita for foreign tourism during the early Cold War.

Although Stalin’s demise in 1953 brought self-imposed isolation to an abrupt end, his successors, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev had to start from scratch, quite literally, to plug the Soviet Union back into global transportation networks. It is perhaps not surprising, given the geographical proximity, that the Soviet Union’s Scandinavian neighbors were in the forefront of opening up the Soviet skies in the post-Stalinist period.

The joint service agreement signed by Finnair, the national airline of Finland, and

Aeroflot, the national airline of the Soviet Union, on October 19, 1955, established a direct air link between Helsinki and Moscow. This historic agreement made it possible for foreign tourists, Americans included, to fly to Moscow from a non-Communist country on board an American-made Convair 340.33 Once Scandinavian Airlines System

29 Ibid., 20. 30 Fodor’s Soviet Union, 48-49. 31 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 28-31. 32 Fodor’s Soviet Union, 49. 33 “Finnair to Set Up Moscow Service,” New York Times (November 16, 1955), 70.

(SAS) concluded its own joint service agreement with Aeroflot in early 1956, American

tourists could reach Moscow from Copenhagen and Stockholm. Sabena, KLM, and Air

France followed suit in 1958, establishing direct routes to Moscow from Brussels,

Amsterdam, and Paris respectively. British European Airways (BEA) connected London

and Moscow a year later.34

The introduction of jet propulsion technology in 1960 made it feasible for BEA,

Sabena, Air France, KLM, and SAS to offer American tourists tickets from New York

City to Moscow with scheduled layovers in their respective European hubs. Modern jet airliners, such as Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8, de Havilland Comet, and Sud Aviation

Caravelle, made transatlantic travel much faster and more affordable.35 In 1960, the

average price of a round-trip ticket from New York City to Moscow ranged from $768.50

in economy class to $1,147.70 in first class.36 The conclusion of the joint service

agreement between Aeroflot and Japan Airlines (JAL) on January 20, 1967, was an

auspicious occasion for Americans since it opened an eastern air route into the USSR.

The price of a one-way ticket from Tokyo to Moscow ranged from $538.60 in economy

to $875 in first class.37 It was only in 1968 that Americans could finally book a flight to

the Soviet Union with an American airline. The first Pan American World Airways

Boeing 707 landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on July 16, 1968, nearly two

years after American and Soviet officials concluded a civil aviation agreement for

34 David R. Jones, “The Rise and Fall of Aeroflot: Civil Aviation in the Soviet Union, 1920-91,” in Russian Aviation and Air Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robin Higham, John T. Greenwood, and Von Hardesty (Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998), 258. 35 “4 Airlines to Run Jets to Moscow,” New York Times (March 31, 1960), 65. By 1970, nearly 98 percent of U.S. overseas travelers flew to their destination. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract, 211. 36 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 23. 37 Robert Trumbull, “Soviet and Japan Sign Air Accord,” New York Times (January 21, 1967), 35.

commercial flights between New York and Moscow.38 The agreement between Pan Am

and Aeroflot had only a slight impact on the high cost of international travel, however. A

round-trip ticket on a Pan Am flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy International

Airport to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport with a stop in Copenhagen cost

between $730 in economy class and $1,109 in first class.39 Beginning in the summer of

1970, Alaska Airlines, in collaboration with Intourist, operated regular charter flights

from Anchorage to Khabarovsk. American tourists had a choice of two all-inclusive, prepaid summer vacations: an 8-day tour of Siberia for $849 or a 15-day tour of the

Soviet Union for $1,249.40

Americans could always choose a more affordable means of travel to (and from)

the Soviet Union, if they were not in a hurry. Moscow could be readily reached by rail

from Copenhagen, Helsinki (via Leningrad), Hoek van Holland, Ostend, Paris, Rome,

and Vienna in 1965. Those preferring to travel by sea had even more options at their

disposal as they were not confined to an European route. The ports of Leningrad and Riga

on the Baltic Sea, Odessa, Sochi, and Yalta on the Black Sea, Izmail on the Danube

River, Baku on the Caspian Sea, and Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan all served as

maritime gateways into the USSR.41 Finally, there were several border crossings open to more adventuresome tourists traveling by car. In 1971, foreign motorists could lawfully enter Soviet territory at Trofianovka near Vyborg in Leningrad Oblast, Brest in western

38 Raymond H. Anderson, “Russians Greet 2 Pan Am Flights,” New York Times (July 17, 1968), 28; Chalmers M. Roberts, “U.S., Russia Finally Sign Civil Air Pact,” Washington Post (November 5, 1966), A1. 39 “Moscow Air Link to Open Monday,” New York Times (July 8, 1968), 77. 40 David Gollan, “Siberian Corridor Opens to Airlines,” New York Times (March 22, 1970), 416; Robert Lindsey, “For That Next Trip, Timbuktu?” New York Times (June 10, 1970), 49. 41 Intourist. Touring the Soviet Union. Moscow: Vneshtorgizdat, 1965. IREX, RC 65, Miscellany, Library of Congress.

Byelorussia, Shegini near Lvov and Uzhgorod, Chop, and Porubnoye near Chernovtsy in

western Ukraine, and Leusheny in Moldavia.42 As long as they adhered to an Intourist-

approved itinerary and stayed on predetermined routes, motorists could travel in the

Soviet Union without a guide.

Once the tourist made a deposit on the selected itinerary to the travel agency, it

contacted the Moscow offices of Intourist to obtain official confirmation for the proposed

trip. That was a crucial step since the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., would not

issue a tourist visa to any American without first receiving confirmation from Intourist.43

Those arriving in the Soviet Union without a visa were likely to spend two to three days at a transit hotel in Sheremetyevo while Intourist and the U.S. Embassy worked to resolve the unfortunate situation. To discourage any Americans from pursuing this dubious course of action, Robert Porter, a consular officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, emphasized that the “slow process [of securing a visa] and the meager comforts of the transit hotel are trying for even the most patient of visitors.”44 And there was little reason

to travel to the Soviet Union without a visa in any case. Even as early as 1958, Cosmos

Travel Bureau could secure a tourist visa for a customer in seven days or less and Reiner

could state with confidence that “no American today would be refused a Soviet visa, no

matter how outspokenly anti-Communist he was.”45 In addition to booking a trip and

procuring a visa, it was necessary for Americans to obtain an international vaccination

42 Lesma Hossack, “Russia – a good place to camp,” Boston Globe (June 13, 1971), A27. 43 Felber, The American’s Tourist Manual, 8. 44 Robert C. Porter, “How to Get into Trouble in the Soviet Union – The Mistakes American Visitors Made in 1970,” March 29, 1971, 3, RG 59, BPR, Box 19, TRV: American Visits, 1971. 45 Smith, “Soviet Travel Restrictions,” 3.

certificate from a local health department or a private physician before traveling to the

Soviet Union.

With a confirmed itinerary and a tourist visa in hand, the tourist paid the full cost of

the trip and received vouchers for hotel accommodations, meals, and transportation in the

Soviet Union from the travel agency.46 The prospective traveler was forewarned that

“[a]ny deviation from the scheduled itinerary will draw immediate and strong reaction

from Soviet authorities.”47 Prearranged itineraries had the advantage, at least in theory, of

making the movement of foreign travelers on Soviet soil predictable and traceable since

Soviet officials knew exactly where every foreign visitor should (and, ideally, would) be

at any given time. It is important to note, however, that even travel experts found it

highly doubtful that “Soviet authorities would expend personnel and time in tapping the

rooms of every visiting tourist,” let alone track his or her every step.48 Moreover, even if

Intourist guide-interpreters were tasked with keeping tabs on their foreign clients, which

they were not, the simple fact that they only worked during the daytime would have

rendered their surveillance operations largely ineffective.49

“Free Red Tape”

American tourists who picked up the popular travel guide, Soviet Russia learned that the success of their trip rested in the fickle hands of Intourist. That was the case, according to the authors, Dean B. Mahin and Richard M. Scammon, because “the story of tourist travel in the Soviet Union” was largely “the story of Intourist, including its

46 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 15. Intourist did not refund unused vouchers. 47 Porter, “How to Get into Trouble in the Soviet Union,” 4. 48 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 38. 49 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 10.

capabilities, its limitations, its advantages, and its disadvantages.”50 Officially, Intourist

was responsible for providing foreign visitors with the goods and services they had paid

good money for, including a guide-interpreter, a chauffeur, hotel accommodations, meals,

and domestic transportation. A service bureau located in the lobby of every Intourist hotel

would also procure theater, ballet, and opera tickets, as well as arrange excursions and

interviews for guests upon request.

When everything went according to plan, Intourist could perform its duties

“tolerably well,” but when things went awry, which was a common occurrence, it could

“operate with amazing ineptitude.”51 Dr. Barbara Green, a professor of political science at Wellesley College, arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in 1960 aboard “an

SAS plane full of American tourists” in need of assistance. Much to her surprise, the

Intourist officials at the airport “took one look” at the situation and promptly “fled.” The

Russian-speaking professor had no choice but to act as an intermediary between Soviet customs officers, who did not speak English, and fellow passengers, who did not speak

Russian, for the next two hours.52 Intourist agents in Yerevan did not even bother to

report the theft of an American tourist’s pocketbook, containing $50 in cash, to the local

militia. They just shrugged their shoulders and “said it was too bad.”53 To a large extent, ineptitude was a function of Intourist’s inexorable growth, especially since 1955. It had become a large bureaucratic organization, “with layer upon layer of officialdom to wade thru before one reaches anybody with the power to make a decision,” lacking in

50 Ibid., 5. 51 Carroll H. Woods, “Dr. Max L. Brodny’s Travel Experiences in the USSR,” September 1, 1967, RG 59, BPR, Box 18, TRV: American Visits to USSR, 1967. 52 Barbara Green, “Report on Travel,” November 3, 1960, 2, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 53 Max L. Brodny, “Travel Conditions in the U.S.S.R.,” 3, RG 59, BPR, Box 18, TRV: American Visits to USSR, 1967.

flexibility, imagination, and efficiency.54 Its operation reminded George N. Crocker, a

conservative author of some renown who had visited the USSR in 1961, of “a

kindergarten teacher to whom the school superintendent has given a detailed set of rules

to apply on all occasions.”55 There was little room for improvisation or creativity.

Intourist guides were usually charming young women and men recruited from universities who spoke flawless English and performed their assigned duties with competence and aplomb. However, Americans were forewarned not to mistake their genuine friendliness for an open-mindedness. “All of them are employees of the Soviet

government and nearly all are staunch supporters of the regime,” Mahin and Scammon

pointed out to their readers, “although they may not be members of the Communist

party.”56 John McSweeney, the minister-counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, cited an example of an Intourist guide, accompanying a large group of Americans, including

Embassy personnel, on a special tour of Orthodox churches in and around Moscow in

1963, who used every opportunity to downplay religion’s role in contemporary Soviet society.57 Her conduct was hardly exceptional. After all, the “basic task” of an Intourist

guide, according to an official handbook obtained by the Associated Press in Moscow,

was “to give the foreign tourist a correct idea of the achievements of the Soviet people in

the construction of a Communist society and of the peace-loving policy of the Soviet

54 William C. Ives and Craig E. Lovitt, “Russia 10 Years After Stalin’s Death: How It Has—and Hasn’t— Changed,” Chicago Tribune (December 1, 1963), A2. The number of guides increased from 14 in 1953 to nearly 1,000 in 1963. 55 George N. Crocker, “We Said Good-By to Russia Gladly!” Chicago Tribune (April 2, 1961), B14. 56 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 10. 57 John M. McSweeney, “Church Tour by Embassy Personnel,” in “Miscellaneous Observations on Religion,” April 2, 1963, 4, RG 84, Classified General Records (hereafter CGR), 1941-1963, Box 278, 570.3 Religion 1963, National Archives.

state.”58 Accordingly, whatever the locale, an Intourist guide would showcase “the

official sights, the showpieces, the most impressive aspects of the Soviet scene,” like newly erected apartment buildings, cultural attractions, educational institutions, and historical landmarks, in order to give foreign tourists “a picture of the best of everything in the best of all possible (Soviet) worlds.”59

An American tourist had a word of caution for his fellow citizens contemplating a trip to the Soviet Union: “Once you go in, you are virtually a prisoner to your pre-

selected itinerary.”60 The surest way to arouse the ire of Intourist officials was to request

changes to one’s itinerary since any such request was sure to throw the whole Intourist

bureaucracy into complete disarray. The reluctance on the part of every Intourist official

to make “an independent decision” led to endless, time-consuming consultations about

the most trivial of matters until a “higher authority” finally intervened.61 Accordingly, the

foreign tourist brave or foolish enough to disrupt that bureaucracy would be immediately

“marked as a petty bourgeois adventurist” and shown “no mercy” by its obstinate

servants, whose two favorite words were nyet (no) and nevozmozhno (impossible).62

Intourist regulations aside, unauthorized deviation from a pre-arranged itinerary could also have serious legal repercussions for an unwary American tourist.

On July 23, 1966, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR promulgated a decree (ukaz) on “the criminal liability of foreigners and stateless persons for the

58 “Tourism in Russia—it’s by the book,” Christian Science Monitor (June 28, 1974), 5C. The 760-page “Handbook of Standard Regulations of Questions of Foreign Tourism in the U.S.S.R.” was edited by V. E. Ivanov. 59 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 20. 60 Brodny, “Travel Conditions,” 4. 61 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 11. 62 Art Buchwald, “Traveling in Russia: The Tape Is, of Course, Red,” Los Angeles Times (August 1, 1968), A5. The word “impossible” usually denoted either an unwillingness or an inability on the part of an Intourist agent to fulfill a request or solve a problem.

malicious violation of the regulations on travel on the territory of the USSR.” It defined a

“malicious violation” of travel regulations as “changing the place of residence, visiting

places not mentioned in [the] USSR entry visas[,] or deviating from the itinerary

indicated in the travel documents…without special permission.” Soviet authorities

instituted a three-strike system for dealing with violators: the first two offenses would

result in administrative fines, but the punishment for the third offense ranged in severity

from “imprisonment of up to one year, or corrective labor of the same duration” to “a fine

of up to 50 rubles.”63 Frank Pollack from Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, had inadvertently violated the law in 1967. He was traveling to a restaurant on the outskirts of Vilnius with his Lithuanian relatives when a militiaman stopped their vehicle. Once he inspected

Pollack’s documents and learned of his travel plans, the militiaman directed the party to the nearest militia station where Pollack learned that he did not have permission to travel beyond the city limits. After he paid the ten-ruble fine, Pollack was “warned that a second offense would result in a fifty rouble fine and his immediate expulsion from the

Soviet Union.”64

Inez Robb, a nationally syndicated columnist, speculated that the free-wheeling attitude of American tourists would invariably bring them into conflict with the Intourist bureaucracy owing to the different cultural lenses through which Soviets and Americans viewed the world.65 Debbie Sherwood learned firsthand that Intourist officials were not

above using subterfuge to discourage “individual exploring” of places “outside the

63 “Decree of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium,” July 23, 1966, RG 59, BPR, Box 1, 1150 – Laws and Decrees 1956-1966. 64 David Segal, “American Tourist Fined in Lithuania for Violating Soviet Travel Regulations,” August 1967, RG 59, BPR, Box 18, TRV: American Visits to USSR, 1967. 65 Inez Robb, “So Why Be Afraid To Pay Russia a Visit?” Austin Statesman (July 11, 1959), 4.

planned itineraries.”66 She asked the young women at the Intourist service bureau at the

National Hotel to arrange excursions to the Mosfilm studios, the Bolshoi ballet school,

the circus school, MGU (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, or Moscow State

University), the House of Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries (Dom druzhby

narodov), a cosmetics factory, a Young Pioneers’ Palace (Dvorets pionerov), and a

wedding palace (Dvorets brakosochetaniia) for her.67 “You are very unlucky. Everything

is closed,” came the official reply. The May Day (May 1) and Victory Day (May 9)

holidays offered a convenient pretext for rebuffing her request. When Sherwood raised

the possibility of visiting the aforementioned places after the holidays, Ana, one of the

Intourist agents, inquired about the duration of her stay in Moscow. As soon as Sherwood gave her date of departure, Ana broke the bad news: “Oh, you are unlucky. The places you want to see open up the day after you leave.”68 Many Americans, who had dealt with

Intourist, would not have been surprised by Stanley Karnow’s claim that there were

actually “two dictatorships” operating in the USSR: “the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat for the Russians [sic], and the dictatorship of the Intourist agency for foreign visitors.”69

Scholars and Diplomats

Responsibility for academic exchanges with the Soviet Union rested in the able hands of the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants (IUCTG) from February 1956

66 Murray Seeger, “Seeing Soviet Union Through Eyes of Intourist: Puzzling Game of ‘Ivan Says,’” Los Angeles Times (July 9, 1972), H10. 67 Debbie Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1969), 76-77. 68 Ibid., 80. 69 Stanley Karnow, “Russia on a Nervous Breakdown a Day,” Los Angeles Times (November 8, 1970), H1.

to July 1968 and its successor organization, the International Research and Exchanges

Board (IREX) from July 1968 to the present. Before William S. B. Lacy, Special

Assistant to the Secretary of State for East-West Exchange, and Georgi Nikolaevich

Zarubin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, signed the U.S.-Soviet exchange

agreement on January 27, 1958, IUCTG’s sole function was disbursing travel grants with

the funding it received from the Carnegie Foundation. At that time, American scholars

could only travel to the USSR on a thirty-day tourist visa and had to rely on their own

resources to obtain access to archival collections and meet Soviet academics.70

Nonetheless, 137 Americans took advantage of IUCTG grants to visit the USSR between

1956 and 1958.71

Once Lacy and Zarubin affixed their signatures to the executive agreement on

exchanges in the cultural, technical, and educational fields, “the Department of State

asked the Committee to become the administrative agent” for the academic exchanges on

the American side.72 IUCTG worked directly with the Soviet Ministry of Higher

Education on three major programs: (1) “the Graduate Student/Young Faculty Exchange,

which in a typical year exchanged some forty to fifty Americans and an equal number of

Soviets for one or two semesters of research,” (2) “the Senior Research Scholar program

exchanged ten or more [postdoctorates] on each side for two to five months of research,”

and (3) “[a] Summer Language Teacher program exchanged thirty (later thirty-five)

American teachers of Russian and an equal number of Soviet teachers of English for nine

70 David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87. 71 Robert F. Byrnes, Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958-1975 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 40. 72 Ibid., 43.

weeks each summer.”73 Funding for IUCTG came from its member institutions, the Ford

Foundation, and the State Department’s Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs.74

Over the course of fifteen years (1958-1973), 483 Americans took part in the Graduate

Student/Young Faculty exchange, IUCTG’s flagship program.75

Recruitment of prospective exchangees denoted the fundamental distinction between a liberal and an instrumentalist approach to education. “[We] are seeking information in a senese [sic] for its own sake, in furtherance of knwoeldge [sic], without regard to a master plan,” Stephen Viederman, deputy chairman of IUCTG, declared in a speech, “whereas the Soviets have their plan for exchanges as they have apln [sic] for everything else, and are seeking to further their national economy.”76 In keeping with the

meritocratic traditions in U.S. higher education, IUCTG solicited applications from

interested individuals and selected candidates based on objective and subjective criteria,

such as language proficiency, academic performance, and emotional maturity.77 The

recruitment process worked quite differently in the USSR. An “interagency governmental

committee” handpicked candidates, usually “the best talent” from leading universities

and research institutes, for the express purpose of addressing the perceived needs, or

weaknesses, of the socialist system, primarily in the field of science and technology.78

73 Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchanges and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 23. The Soviet Ministry of Higher Education was renamed the Ministry of Higher Education and Specialized Secondary Education in 1959. 74 Robert F. Byrnes, “Soviet-American Academic Exchange: The Inter-University Committee Experience,” International Educational and Cultural Exchange (Summer 1966), 40. 75 The total number of American exchangees is based on the data in “Summary of Graduate Student-Young Faculty Exchange According to Fields of Study from 1958-1970 (American)” and “Graduate Student/Young Faculty – Americans” in IREX, RC 54, IREX Stat Book 1958-75, GSEA. 76 Stephen Viederman, untitled speech, delivered in March 1964, IUCTG, Box 1, Folder 9: Meetings & Conferences 1960-65, Columbia University Archives. 77 For a full list of requirements, see Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, “Study and Research in the Soviet Union,” 1961, MC 468, Box 228, Folder 9, Memos, ca. 1958-1962, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections. 78 Richmond, Cultural Exchanges and the Cold War, 25.

The disparate methods of selection resulted in a striking discrepancy in age and

academic specialization between American and Soviet participants in the graduate

student exchange program. Most Americans “were in their mid-twenties and doing research for their doctorates in the humanities and social sciences, mainly in Russian history, language, and literature.”79 Soviets, on the other hand, “were mostly in their

thirties, already had their candidate degrees, and were predominantly in various fields of

science and technology.”80 The number of American and Soviet participants in academic

exchanges in any given year could not exceed the annual quotas spelled out in the

agreement and had to be identical for both sides since the agreement operated on the

basis of numerical reciprocity.81 Each party reserved the right to reject nominees. Soviets

interested in high-technology fields “related to defense” and Americans studying

“contemporary (i.e., post-1917) topics” in Soviet history, political science, or economics

were unlikely to make the cut.82 Of the 460 Americans nominated by IUCTG for the

Graduate Student/Young Faculty exchange between 1958 and 1970, the Soviets rejected

66, or about 13 percent. They rejected 25 out of 166 nominees in history (about 15 percent), 8 out of 46 in political science (about 17 percent), and 8 out of 15 in economics

(about 53 percent).83

Even though academic exchanges were “privately administered” by IUCTG, they were “part of an official exchange program” negotiated by the U.S. Department of State.

“You are, therefore, not only a representative of your university but also of the United

79 Ibid., 24-25. 80 Ibid., 25. 81 Ibid., 24. 82 Ibid., 25. 83 “Summary of Graduate Student-Young Faculty Exchange According to Fields of Study from 1958-1970 (American),” IREX, RC 54, IREX Stat Book, 1958-75, GSEA.

States,” William B. Edgerton, chairman of IUCTG, counseled participants in the

Graduate Student/Young Scholar exchange in 1963. Under such circumstances, any

“indiscretion,” however minor, on their part could adversely affect the entire exchange

program and even bilateral relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.84 A

confidential briefing memorandum, drafted by IUCTG staff, implored exchangees to

“remain conscious at all times” of the exceptional sociopolitical “context” in which they

would be “operating and living” in the USSR.85 The slightest hint of complacency

opened the door to possible provocations, orchestrated by the Soviet state security organs

to ensnare and exploit unsuspecting foreigners, particularly Americans, for propaganda or

intelligence purposes. Since they could not “unerringly differentiate between the honest

request of an honest Soviet citizen and the planted request of an agent,” IUCTG

instructed participants to treat every overture from a Soviet citizen with a healthy dose of

suspicion.86

Unsurprisingly, as official representatives of the United States government on

Soviet soil, diplomats received greater scrutiny than exchange students. UPDK

(Upravleniye po obsluzhivaniyu diplomaticheskogo korpusa, or the Administration for

Serving the Diplomatic Corps), a special branch of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, handled all domestic travel by diplomatic personnel, including Americans,

posted to Moscow. Once American diplomats received official clearance from the

ministry for a proposed trip, UPDK made the necessary arrangements for transportation,

84 William B. Edgerton, “Introduction,” in Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, “Memorandum: To All American Participants in the Exchange of Graduate Students and Young Instructors Between Soviet and American Institutions of Higher Learning for 1963-1964,” July 1963, IUCTG 1958-1966, Box 1, Folder 14, Materials for Participants 1962-63. 85 Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, “Memorandum: To All American Participants,” 2. 86 Ibid., 4.

hotel accommodations, excursions, and meetings with local officials. Whenever they

ventured outside the Soviet capital on official business, American diplomats generally

followed an unwritten rule by traveling in pairs. Besides curiosity about the ebb and flow

of everyday life in the USSR, they traveled about the country for numerous reasons,

including but not limited to procuring Soviet publications, handling consular affairs,

escorting delegations and dignitaries, supporting official exhibitions, and collecting

intelligence. Unlike tourists and exchange scholars, whose encounters with the Soviet

state security organs were few and far between, diplomats (and their families) remained

under close surveillance by the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or

Committee for State Security), especially on away trips. The attention they invariably received was not without its humorous side, however. KGB agents tailing U.S. Embassy officers on a publications procurement trip to Tbilisi in 1966 “put on a show worthy of the Marx Brothers,” complete “with clothes changes, wide use of taxicabs, and ominous lurkings” in the shadows.87

Beyond Containment

The Cold War contravened “the parameters of traditional diplomacy” and affected

“the boundless activities of the human race,” including travel.88 After a decade-long stalemate, U.S. policymakers came to the realization that “American travel abroad represented an economic and cultural tool that could help win the Cold War.”89 The

87 Joseph P. Hayes and Frederick Z. Brown, “Publications Procurement Trip to Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan, December 12-18, 1966,” January 23, 1967, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, Int 6. 88 Toby C. Rider, Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 141. 89 Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2.

National Security Council Report 5607, drafted in 1956, made it abundantly clear that the

United States should use the proposed East-West exchanges as “a positive instrument of

U.S. foreign policy” to promote “a desire for greater individual freedom, well-being[,]

and security within the Soviet Union.” The best way of doing that, the report’s authors

surmised, would be to dispatch friendly American men and women to the Soviet Union,

where they would embody the many blessings of democratic capitalism.

These unofficial ambassadors, it was believed, would “increase the knowledge of

the Soviet…people as to the outer world,” “encourage freedom of thought,” “stimulate

the demand of Soviet…citizens for greater personal security,” and “stimulate their desire

for more consumer’s goods.” In other words, the physical presence of Americans behind

the “Iron Curtain” could actually inspire ordinary Soviet citizens to make demands that

the Communist Party would be hard pressed to meet without losing its hold on power.

However, U.S. officials did not necessarily intend to incite—nor did they anticipate—a

popular uprising against the Soviet regime. They envisioned a gradual political change; an “evolution toward a regime which will abandon predatory policies, which will seek to promote aspirations of the Russian people rather than the global ambitions of

International Communism, and which will increasingly rest upon the consent of the governed rather than upon despotic police power.”90 East-West exchanges were an important step toward that long-range objective.

A 1960 policy review of East-West contacts reaffirmed that the United States government had “embarked on a program of exchanges of persons and ideas with the

90 “NSC 5607: Statement of Policy on East-West Exchanges,” June 29, 1956, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957, Volume XXIV: Soviet Union, Eastern Mediterranean, Document 104. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v24/d104

Soviet Union” in 1958 to “influence future developments of the Soviet Union, the other

main world power center, along lines compatible with U.S. interests.”91 Those mutually

reinforcing interests, according to State Department officials, were to stem Soviet

expansionism in the developing world and to ensure that Soviet foreign policy did not

transgress internationally established norms. There was no doubt in their minds that the

attainment of these key objectives would require the “Free-World countries” to stand up

to the Soviets, demonstrating that they possess “the will and capacity to resist Soviet and

Communist encroachments” anywhere on the globe.92 This was, in a nutshell, the policy

of containment.

Containing the perceived Communist threat could not be accomplished by force

alone, however; it also required cultural intercourse. State Department officials held that

acquainting Soviets—ordinary citizens and apparatchiks alike—with “the realities of the

non-Communist world” through interpersonal contact was doubly advantageous for U.S.

foreign policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The bilateral exchange of people and ideas

encouraged Soviets to consider “alternative paths of evolution for Soviet society” and

made them cognizant of the fact that overseas adventurism did not promote Soviet

national interests but was actually inimical to them.93 With the threat of thermonuclear

annihilation hanging menacingly over the world, the U.S. government sought to

undermine the Soviet regime from within by using its own citizens to spread the gospel

of individual freedom and economic prosperity, or, alternatively, to breed popular

discontent, behind enemy lines.

91 “Communist Bloc Contacts: A Review of U.S. Policy,” July 19, 1960, 2, MC 468, Box 228, Folder 14, Miscellaneous, ca. 1959-76. 92 Ibid., 4. 93 Ibid., 4-5.

As far as the U.S. government was concerned, American citizens enlisted in the

Cold War struggle for hearts and minds whenever they set foot on foreign soil. The

friendliness they showed, the fashionable clothes they wore, the technological gadgets

they used, and the cultural knowledge they carried all personified the American way of

life to curious foreign audiences. The ability to travel abroad at will, itself one of the

many blessings of democratic capitalism, transformed Americans from disinterested

tourists on holiday into unofficial ambassadors with an important contribution to make to

U.S. foreign policy. “In the total public relations contest for world opinion,” U.S. cold warriors believed that “every American had a part to play.”94

Putting the Best Foot Forward

“You are about to have one of the most rewarding experiences of your life—firsthand contact with the Soviet people,” a 1960 United States Information Agency (USIA)

pamphlet on “Communicating with the Soviet People” notified American travelers. It

prodded them to make the trip to the Soviet Union all “the more rewarding,” from a

public diplomacy perspective, by focusing on two interrelated goals: communicating “a

realistic picture of America” to the Soviet public and contributing, “as far as one private

individual can, to a lasting peace between our two countries.”95 On the one hand, the

USIA encouraged American Cold War travelers to put aside their parochial concerns and interests for the sake of a greater good—the service of their nation. But, on the other hand, it placed an inordinate amount of responsibility in the hands of ordinary men and

94 Osgood, Total Cold War, 216. 95 “Communicating with the Soviet People: Suggestions for American Tourists and Students,” i, RG 306, Special Reports, 1953-1997, Box 16, S-23-60, National Archives.

women traveling to a decidedly unfamiliar place in precarious circumstances. If

Americans were “to create a better understanding between the citizens of both countries,”

they had to be adequately prepared to carry out such a momentous task with tact and

competence.96 Fortunately, official and unofficial advice abounded on what they should

and should not say, how they should and should not behave, and what they should and

should not bring to make a lasting impression in the Soviet Union. Putting one’s best foot

forward was as simple as following the instructions.

Representing the American way of life in the socialist East could not be left to chance, especially in the wake of the controversy sparked by the 1958 best-selling

political novel, The Ugly American. William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, the book’s

authors, lambasted the haughty U.S. diplomats stationed on the frontlines of the Cold

War—in the fictional Southeast Asian nation of Sarkhan—for breeding resentment and

alienation among the local population. In one of the book’s most striking passages,

Lederer and Burdick used a fictional character to great effect to drive home the crucial

point that overseas travel was an overtly political act in the context of the Cold War. U

Maung Swe, purportedly “the best known journalist in Burma, if not in all Southeast

Asia,” lamented the “mysterious change” that seemed to come over Americans upon

arrival in his country. “They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re

loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they’re frightened and defensive; or maybe they’re not

properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance.” Soviets, on the other hand, made

“an excellent impression” in Burma. “One does not notice them on the street too often.

They have been taught our local sensitivities, and usually manage to avoid abusing them.

96 “To help the American visitor to the Soviet Union put his best foot forward, the Government Affairs Institutes Re-opens Information Center,” ASTA Travel News 29 (July-Sept. 1960), 48.

And they all speak and read our language and have no need for Burmese interpreters,

translators, and servants; so no Burman sees their feet of clay.”97 In the global contest for

hearts and minds, American Cold War travelers could ill afford to “make mistakes out of

ignorance.”

“Have no apprehensions about your reception,” Mahin and Scammon assured

prospective American travelers, “it will be warm no matter how cold official Soviet

policy may be.”98 Irving Levine described the Russians as “a friendly people who are

delighted to welcome foreigners to their long-isolated land.”99 Peter N. Gillingham,

director of the Information Center for American Travelers to the Soviet Union, conveyed

the same basic message to tourists who dropped by his center in New York City.100 The

“friendly curiosity,” which characterized “almost all contacts between American and

private Soviet citizens,” transcended linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries.101

Once they singled out American visitors by their clothes and shoes, Gillingham

explained, Soviets would wait expectantly for them to make “the slightest gesture of

friendliness” before approaching them “on the street, in parks and stores,” or any other public venue. “Your conversation will then begin with two or three people, but if you are in a public place you will find that within a matter of minutes you are holding a ‘sidewalk seminar’ with ten, twenty, even fifty or more interested listeners and questioners.”102

97 William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 145. 98 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 65. 99 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 11. 100 Located in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Building in Manhattan’s United Nations Plaza and funded by foundations, corporations, and individual donors, the Information Center’s overriding purpose was to impart “a clearer picture of life behind the Iron Curtain” to American tourists so they could “get more pleasure from their trips.” “To help the American visitor,” ASTA Travel News, 48. 101 Peter N. Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 7, RG 306, Records Relating to the Soviet Union (hereafter RRSU), Box 2, East-West Exchanges. 102 Ibid., 7.

Soviets might have expected Americans, whom they considered “sincere, friendly,

outgoing people” by nature, to break the proverbial ice and “make the first gesture of

friendship,” but any such gesture was sure to be “reciprocated with warmth” and

excitement.103

The foremost piece of advice for Americans engaging in conversation with Soviets

was to stay away from politics. Most Soviets would purposely steer clear of “all political

subjects” on meeting Americans for the first time since they did not wish to spoil “the

opportunity to get onto a basis of simple human friendship with an American.”104 The tensions and anxieties associated with the Cold War made political discussions unavoidable and perhaps even necessary, but it was prudent to let Soviets take the lead and initiate any such discussion, if and when they felt comfortable doing so. “He may

begin with a hot political question, and once you get to know him you can fire them back

as well,” Gillingham cautioned Americans, “but such an opening from you can only

offend his sensitivity.”105 It was, therefore, “worse than useless” in his professional

opinion to instigate political arguments for the sole purpose of “wringing…admissions of

the superiority of the American system.”106 There were much better ways of spending

one’s time in the USSR.

Experts offered American travelers advice on making the most of interpersonal

contact given the likelihood that “friendships with private citizens and what you learn

from them in conversations…will make up the richest experiences of your time in the

103 Ibid., 11. Two young Muscovites told a U.S. Embassy officer that “they liked Americans” because they were “friendly” and “easy to talk to.” John D. Scanlon, “Two Soviet Youths of the Privileged Classes,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, November 14, 1958, 6, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs 1958. 104 “Communicating with the Soviet People,” 1. 105 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 10. 106 Ibid., 3.

Soviet Union.”107 Casting aspersions on the Soviet system was likely to alienate Soviets,

who resented “criticism of their country by foreigners,” whether such criticism was

justified or not. “They already know a good deal about their own country, and, rightly or

wrongly, they don’t think you do.”108 The best policy was to ask questions about the

Soviet Union, demonstrating a sincere desire to engage in friendly conversation, rather

than express unsolicited and hostile opinions.109 Taking an active interest in the everyday

lives of Soviet citizens, “in their work or children or way of life,” was guaranteed to pay

immediate dividends for Americans. They would delight Soviets by their curiosity, learn

something new and interesting about the USSR, and help build “mutual confidence”

between the two people, and perhaps even their nations.110 It was also helpful to learn

“how the Soviet citizen feels in his own atmosphere to avoid condescension.”111 Given

the geographical vastness and ethnic diversity of the USSR, Americans had to be aware

of where they were and who they were speaking with at all times and in all places. The

surest way to “gravely” offend “a Ukrainian in Kiev or a Georgian in Tbilisi” was to

“refer to him as a ‘Russian’ or to his land as ‘Russia.’”112 Finally, Americans had to remember that an honest exchange of ideas required them to keep an open mind. They had to accept what Soviets had to say about themselves and their country at face value if they wished Soviets to do the same.113

While they were “quick to resent criticism of their own country by foreigners,”

Soviets did “have a good deal of tolerance for good things said about America by

107 Ibid., 8. 108 “Communicating with the Soviet People,” 2. 109 Ibid., 3. 110 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 11. 111 Robert A. Karlowich, “End of Year 1961-1962,” 5, IREX, RC 53, GSE, End-of-Year Reports, 61-2. 112 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 11. 113 “Communicating with the Soviet People,” 4.

Americans” as well as “an insatiable curiosity about certain aspects of the American

scene.”114 They generally operated on the assumption that every American they

approached would be able and willing to answer their inexhaustible supply of questions

about the United States at a moment’s notice. What interested ordinary Soviets the most,

according to seasoned American travelers, were “very practical, down-to-earth, bread-

and-butter facts of life” about such prosaic matters as “family, daily living, housing,

schooling, work, pay, travel, [and] entertainment.”115 Political and social questions were

of secondary concern. Given the Soviets’ fascination with what Mahin and Scammon

termed “the American standard of living,” American travelers were well advised to come

to the USSR prepared to discuss the aforementioned topics using both personal examples

and statistical data.116 “[T]ry to bone up a little on your own special interests and

profession (if you are, for instance, a pharmacist: how many pharmacists there are in the

U.S., how they are trained, where they work, how much they earn, etc.) and certainly take

along some handly [sic] factual compendium like the World Almanac.”117

Americans were not expected to hide or downplay their “genuine pride in what

America is and what it stands for” while visiting the Soviet Union.118 But, at the same

time, they had to bear in mind that bragging about America’s incontestable superiority

was “the surest way to nip in the bud what might be the beginning of a revealing and

valuable friendship” with Soviet people.119 “A calm, factual, non-boastful description of

American freedom, political participation, and high living standards” would convey the

114 Ibid., 17. 115 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 55; Margaret Drucker, “Mid-Year Report,” 2, IREX, RC 200, GSE 62-3: Mid-year, final, and travel reports. 116 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 55. 117 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 13. 118 “Communicating with the Soviet People,” 6. 119 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 10.

right message without unnecessarily alienating anyone.120 The USIA also advised

American travelers to voice at least “some honest criticism of America” in order to

demonstrate their sincerity to Soviets and to use the ambiguous phrase “Americans

believe” in conversations since it left unsaid whether those beliefs were right or wrong,

true or false.121

Even as they were experiencing the Soviet way of life firsthand and reflecting on

the American way of life back home, American travelers had to resist the temptation to

make comparisons of any kind between the two countries in the presence of Soviets. That

was the case, Gillingham maintained, owing to “the existence, in the attitudes of most

Russians, of a full-blown inferiority complex regarding economic comparisons between

the Soviet Union and the West but most particularly between the social systems or

between themselves and the average Westerner, particularly the American.”122

Unfavorable comparisons would only compel Soviets to face up to the fact that living conditions in the West were “so much better” than in the USSR and make their lot in life

“considerably harder” to bear, day in and day out.123 It was best to spare them such a fate.

An American diplomat counseled his compatriots to practice discretion and

fairmindedness to “disarm the Soviet citizen’s psychological defenses and permit

penetration of his own thoughts concerning his society.”124 Americans also had to curtail

their natural proclivity for “throwing ideas and comments back and forth” since an

120 “Communicating with the Soviet People,” 17. 121 Ibid., 5, 13. 122 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 10. 123 Charles A. Moser, “Final Report,” June 5, 1959, 5, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 124 Robert J. Martens, “Some Observations on Popular Soviet Attitudes,” in “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion,” ed. David E. Mark and Edward L. Killham, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959.

unguarded remark or a seemingly innocent joke could “cause real hurt to the highly

sensitive” Soviets.125

American travelers had to be mindful of the discrepancy between official

pronouncements and actual practice with regard to tipping in the USSR. On the one hand,

Soviet officials denounced tipping as a “vestige of capitalist degeneracy” and even

legally proscribed the practice of giving and receiving tips as bribery, a criminal

offense.126 On the other hand, “fail to tip your cab driver, or give him too little,” a Boston

Globe correspondent noted, “and you’re likely to hear about it from him in salty

terms.”127 Taxi drivers were not the only ones who expected a gratuity from foreign

guests for their services. Charlotte Saikowski, the Moscow bureau chief for the Christian

Science Monitor, actually devised some tipping suggestions for itinerant Americans. “Ten

percent in a restaurant, 10 to 20 kopeks for a cloakroom attendant, and 30 kopeks per

suitcase for a porter” was more than “adequate” in her opinion.128 Tipping in the USSR

required discretion, above all else. Gratuity was “happily received” by most service

personnel as long as it was offered circumspectly—when “there’s nobody else

looking.”129 It was never advisable to insist on a tip, especially with Intourist guides. As

government employees, they were unlikely to accept a tip from a foreign tourist but

would certainly appreciate “a small personal gift.”130

125 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 54. 126 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 60. 127 William Ryan, “Tourism in Russia: Some wonder why it is a one-way street,” Boston Globe (July 12, 1970), 69. 128 Charlotte Saikowski, “Is it Soviet—or simply Russian?” Christian Science Monitor (August 22, 1972), 12. 129 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 60; Ryan, “Tourism in Russia,” 69. 130 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 13.

Advice on personal conduct in the Soviet Union focused on making sure that

Americans got the most out of the experience while staying out of trouble. Since only 150

Soviet cities were open to tourists as late as 1974, meaning that much of the USSR

remained off limits, Americans needed to take full advantage of the freedom of

movement they did enjoy in the cities they were permitted to visit.131 “To learn the most

and have the most fun” required Americans to leave their hotel rooms, explore their

surroundings, and make contact with Soviet citizens.132 Saikowski enjoined her

compatriots to “take to the streets on foot” on their own and to allow themselves to “be

carried along with the tide of pedestrians.”133 The language barrier proved to be less of an

obstacle to interpersonal communication than might have been expected. “It seemed

easier,” at least to a Chicago Tribune correspondent, “to converse with a Russian than,

say, his counterpart in Paris or Barcelona.”134 Even those tourists who did not speak a

word of Russian, Peter Gillingham was happy to report, “traveled freely about many of

the larger cities, using all forms of public transportation and meeting people under every

circumstance imaginable” without any difficulty whatsoever.135 Anthony J. Spatafora and

his wife certainly did not let their unfamiliarity with the Russian language get in the way

of a good time. They spent “a very enjoyable night” in the company of a Soviet couple,

“who spoke very little English,” with the help of a dictionary and sign language.136

131 Lyle Kenyon Engel, A Simon & Schuster Travel Guide: Russia (New York: Cornerstone Library, 1974), 17. 132 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 3. 133 Saikowski, “Is it Soviet—or simply Russian?” 12. 134 Charles E. Frankel, “Tourist Finds Russ Eager to Be Friends,” Chicago Tribune (April 19, 1959), E18. 135 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 6. 136 Anthony J. Spatafora, “Hartford Travel Agent Tells Of Visit To Russia,” Hartford Courant (July 26, 1959), 28A.

George Feifer seconded such sentiments. The Columbia University law student,

who had spent the 1962-63 academic year at MGU, urged future participants in the

academic exchange program “to get out of their [dorm] rooms, to get out of official

channels, and to look around.”137 Venturing outside the university walls was not only a

chance for American exchange students to expand their horizons and hone their Russian,

but, more importantly, it was an opportunity to make an explicit political statement. It

was an overt act of defiance against the Soviet authorities for whom “the ideal American

exchange participant” was someone who spent “all his days in the library or archive and

all his evenings at the Bolshoi theater, meeting virtually no one and not interesting

himself too energetically in things which are ‘none of his business.’”138

An invitation to visit a Soviet home had to be cordially accepted since it was an

honor and a privilege extended to few foreigners. The two factors that Gillingham cited

for the reluctance of most Soviets to make such invitations, “poor and cramped” living

conditions and “the prevalence of private spying,” revealed the physical discomfort and

widespread paranoia which Soviet citizens had to contend with, even in the post-Stalinist

era.139 They would exhibit the same reluctance to visit Americans owing to their fear of

attracting unwanted police attention. Jonathan Harris, a graduate exchange student at

MGU, noted that Soviets felt “less at ease in a foreigner’s apartment in the dormitory

than in any other place in Moscow” due to a lingering suspicion that it might be

“bugged.”140

137 George Feifer, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” February 2, 1963, 3, IREX, RC 200, GSE 62-3: Mid- year, final, and travel reports. 138 Terry L. Emmons, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” July 15, 1964, 1, IREX, RC 200, GSE 62-3: Mid- year, final, and travel reports. 139 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 11. 140 Jonathan Harris, “Final Report,” 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA End of YR Reports 64/65.

Out of consideration for the welfare of Soviet friends, “who must stay when you

leave,” Americans were enjoined to observe some rudimentary precautions while visiting

a “police state” to minimize the likelihood that those friends would receive an

unwelcome visit from the KGB. IUCTG spelled out the gravity of the situation to

prospective participants in the Graduate Student/Young Faculty exchange program:

“Indiscretion on your part could seriously endanger the future life of a Soviet who

befriended you, and should be kept in mind at all times.”141 Given the “definite

possibility” that hotel rooms and dormitories could be wiretapped and/or searched, it was

best not to mention any names, even in passing, out loud, invite Soviet guests over, leave

any sensitive information in unattended luggage, and make calls through the hotel or

university switchboard.142 IUCTG also recommended that American exchangees operate

on the assumption that every letter sent and received via the postal service would be

opened and read, even though it was “physically impossible” for Soviet authorities to

screen every single piece of mail.143

The best places to have a serious and honest conversation with a Soviet citizen

were shared public spaces, particularly parks, restaurants, and public transportation.

Trains in particular were a favorable venue for making contact with Soviets. Discretion

was the better part of valor when it came to personal contact, however. Americans were

cautioned against “mixing” Soviet friends who did not know one another and mentioning

“the names or activities of anyone” other than those participating in any given

141 Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants, “Handbook for Participants in the 1968-1969 Graduate Student-Young Faculty Exchange with the Soviet Union,” May 1968, 10, MC 468, Box 230, Folder 16, EDX 26: US/Soviet students, 1969. 142 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 15; IUCTG, “Memorandum: To All American Participants,” 8-9. 143 IUCTG, “Memorandum: To All American Participants,” 8.

conversation.144 Whatever precautions they took to keep their Soviet friends and acquaintances out of trouble, the fact of the matter was that Americans could not evade prying eyes at all times and in all places. The Party Bureau of the History Faculty at the

MGU “berated” a second-year student for publicly associating with an American diplomat after another student reported seeing them together at a restaurant.145

All the ominous suggestions led at least one American to the conclusion that it was

“best to err on the side of safety” in the USSR. Walter Clemens, a graduate student in

political science from Columbia University who had spent nine months at MGU, urged

fellow Americans to act as if they were “always subject to surveillance,” their words and

belongings were “always open to scrutiny,” every discontented Soviet was “a plant,” and

“very few people,” compatriots included, could be trusted to keep their mouths shut.146

Visiting a “police state” was not to be taken lightly. Others, however, did not consider

such drastic measures necessary at all. Ominous warnings to the effect that “the Soviets

can snare you any time they wish to, so let’s all be ultra-ultra-careful” were absolutely worthless in the opinion of Gerard Ervin, who participated in the summer exchange program of language teachers in 1967. They served no purpose but “to inspire a lot of quizzical looking about the room for microphones.”147

144 Jack L. Tech, “Final Report,” 27, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Reports 65/66; Thomas W. Hoya, “Letter to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants,” May 23, 1967, 3, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports. 145 John A. Baker, Jr., “First Year of Class Attendance of the History Faculty of the Moscow State University,” in “Observations in Various Universities in the Soviet Union,” May 14, 1958, 4, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 146 Walter C. Clemens, Jr., “Letter to David C. Munford,” June 19, 1959, 2, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 147 Gerard L. Ervin, “Participant’s Evaluation,” September 11, 1967, 2, IREX, RC 200, Final Reports SLT – 1967.

When Debbie Sherwood’s search for “bugs” in her room at the National Hotel

yielded nothing but dirt, which had been unceremoniously swept under the rug and the

bed, she contemplated the absurdity of her actions. “I mean, did I really care if someone

heard me snore in my sleep? And if I did care, what could I do about it anyway? With

one last suspicious glance around the room, I slipped into my coat and dashed out to have

my first look at the Kremlin in the moonlight.”148 It made much more sense to use one’s

limited time in the USSR to familiarize oneself, as best as one could, with the ins and

outs of Soviet society. After all, the better Americans got to know Soviet society, the

more likely they were to find “the necessary sane balance between extreme suspicion” of

everyone and everything around them on the one hand and “extreme freedom of action or

expression” on the other.149 An important bit of information that Dennis Whelan, a

graduate student in Slavic languages at the University of Chicago, gleaned from a fellow

Soviet student at MGU, who happened to be the daughter of a high-ranking KGB officer,

might have rendered Clemens’s precautions redundant in any case. Americans, she had

learned from her father, were “no longer particular objects of suspicion” in the eyes of the

state security apparatus, making it relatively safe for Soviet citizens to associate with

them in public.150

Staying out of trouble in the Soviet Union meant staying away from the black

market. It was a question of when, not if, speculators would “accost” an American on the

street and inquire politely—in English—about purchasing “clothing, personal belongings,

and particularly dollars” on highly favorable terms. No matter how enticing the offer

148 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 30. 149 Tech, “Final Report,” 27. 150 Dennis Whelan, “Letter to Willard Brooks,” July 17, 1967, 1, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports.

might be, or how flattering the speculator might get, Americans were advised to keep in

mind that all such informal transactions were “technically against the law” and it was not

unknown for Soviet militia officers to pose as speculators to ensnare unsuspecting

foreigners in criminal activity. So, unless they wanted to see their faces plastered “in

newspapers from the Middle East to South America over stories telling of vicious,

lawless Americans who abuse the hospitality of the Soviet people by breaking their

laws,” the best (and only) course of action when approached by a speculator was “a brief

but very firm refusal.”151 Joseph Manson, a Harvard University student, urged

prospective exchange students to steer clear of young Soviet men and women, “generally

of low moral character,” who sought “to attach themselves to foreigners” for the express

purpose of obtaining either “western clothes, books, records” and/or “western spouses.”

His rule of thumb was “not to associate with people you wouldn’t have as friends at

home.”152 To prevent enterprising Americans, among others, from making a tidy profit by selling dollars on the Soviet black market, the Soviet law forbade foreign visitors to leave the country with more foreign currency than they had brought in.153 It was also

against the law to bring rubles into or take them out of the USSR.

Sex was “one of the classic forms of provocation” used by the KGB.154 Travelers

of both sexes had to keep in mind that “even the purest relationship” with a Soviet partner

could, “under adverse conditions, become a cause celebre or a tool for blackmail, with

terrible consequences for the future life and work of both the American and the Soviet

151 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 16. 152 Joseph P. Manson, “Letter to Patricia Lambrecht,” June 28, 1967, 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports. 153 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 17. 154 IUCTG, “Memorandum: To All American Participants,” 2.

citizen involved.”155 It was in the best interest of all involved to steer clear of romantic

entanglements. Americans also had to mind their consumption of alcohol in public as

well as private settings since intoxication could easily lead to compromising situations.156

Personal requests to smuggle a letter or package out of the USSR or to sneak a disenchanted Soviet citizen into the U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow had to be rebuffed under any and all circumstances, unless one wished to get into serious legal trouble.157 If an American citizen did find him- or herself in militia custody, for whatever

reason, the only course of action was to demand to speak with a U.S. consular officer at

once and refuse to sign any documents.158

Careless disregard for Soviet customs regulations was “[t]he most common error”

that American travelers made time after time, according to a knowledgeable U.S.

consular officer. The failure to declare “cash, watches, rings, and other jewelry” upon

entry would result in the confiscation of all such undeclared items as “contraband” under

Soviet law. Failing to present a Customs Declaration upon departure, whatever the

reason, would produce the same unfortunate outcome.159 Customs regulations had to be

followed to a tee in the USSR, just like the rules governing photography. “Think before

taking photographs” was the simple yet crucial piece of advice the State Department gave

American travelers.160 Cold War concerns about Western spies roaming the country at

will and collecting intelligence in the guise of ordinary tourists made photography a

highly sensitive matter for Soviet authorities. The extensive list of objects not to be

155 Ibid., 3. 156 Ibid., 2. 157 Ibid., 5-6. 158 Ibid., 6. 159 Porter, “How to Get into Trouble in the Soviet Union,” 1. 160 State Department, “Travel to the Soviet Union,” 1.

photographed under any circumstances included: “all types of military equipment and

objects of military character as well as sea ports, large hydrotechnical installations,

railway junctions, tunnels, railway and highway bridges, industrial plants, research

institutes, designing bureaus, laboratories, power stations, radio beacons, broadcasting,

telephone and telegraph stations,” and anything “within 25 kilometers of the border.”

Aerial photography and panoramic snapshots of industrial towns were also strictly

prohibited.161

The State Department explicitly warned Americans against photographing

“potentially embarrassing subjects” for the Soviet regime, like slums, even though it was legally permissible to do so, given the likelihood that such an action would attract public attention and provoke an unpleasant confrontation with law enforcement.162 Several indignant residents of Sochi “berated” a West German tourist “for photographing some dilapidated shacks” while on tour of the city.163 A Soviet militiaman escorted a visiting

American exchange student to the KGB offices in Tashkent after “an overzealous Soviet

citizen” noticed him “taking pictures of a half-destroyed building” in the aftermath of the

1966 earthquake.164 As soon as a tourist couple from California took “what they thought

was an innocent snapshot” of an arrest at a Moscow bazaar, a Soviet detective accosted

them on the street, grabbing hold of their camera and exposing the film.165 It was also ill-

advised to take pictures of people, including children, without asking for permission first.

Frank Christopher could have avoided a visit to a Moscow militia station if he had simply

161 Intourist, Touring the Soviet Union. 162 State Department, “Travel to the Soviet Union,” 3. 163 James A. Ramsey, Joseph T. Kendrick, and Samuel G. Wise, Jr., “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” May 15, 1959, 9, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1). 164 Daniel Brower, “Report on End-of-Year Trip,” June 9, 1966, 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Reports 65/66. 165 Seeger, “Seeing Soviet Union Through Eyes of Intourist,” H1.

asked the militiaman standing in front of a railroad station for permission before taking

his picture. The American businessman’s penchant for snapping photos “in huge quantity

and without much discrimination” also elicited complaints from Soviets “whose pictures

he took without asking.”166

Given the low standards of “efficiency, courtesy, and straightforwardness”

obtaining in the Soviet Union, which made the “satisfaction of even simple wants often

rather time-consuming,” the most important thing that an American could bring was an

inexhaustible supply of patience and humor.167 A week in Moscow convinced Inez Robb,

a nationally syndicated columnist, that American tourists would do well to abide by

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s motto, “Patience and Fortitude,” for the duration of their

stay in the USSR. They would invariably “need plenty of both.”168 “The best medicine”

for dealing with the inherent “irrationality” of the Soviet way of life, according to an

American professor, was a keen “sense of humor and the ability to ‘laugh it off.’”169 The

inescapable and immutable reality was that Americans had to adapt to the Soviet system

as best as they could. The “unaccustomed inconveniences” of everyday life in the USSR

were many and varied, James C. McClelland, a graduate exchange student at MGU,

readily acknowledged, but their “irritating aspects” could be minimized, if not necessarily

eliminated, with “the proper attitude.” The key, in his opinion, was to approach the one- of-a-kind experience of visiting the USSR with “a healthy curiosity about all aspects of

Soviet life” since such an attitude would inspire an American traveler to “take the

166 U.S. Department of State. “Report of Mr. Frank Christopher on Soviet Trip,” August 17, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 245, 030 A-F 1961. 167 Kermit McKenzie, “End-Of-Year Report,” 6, IREX, RC 200, Summary of Americans, GSE, 1963-64; Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 11. 168 Inez Robb, “In Moscow, You’re Out of This World,” Austin Statesman (May 27, 1959), 4. 169 Rolf H.W. Theen, “Final Report,” October 7, 1968, 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Final Reports 1967-1968.

inconveniences in stride and learn from them” rather than whine and moan ad

nauseum.170

In addition to bringing the right attitude, there were tangible items that Americans

needed to take along to make their stay in the Soviet Union, irrespective of the purpose or

duration, more congenial and productive. A drain stopper was perhaps the most important

item that an American traveler could bring since Soviet hotels and dormitories did not

provide stoppers of any kind for bathtubs or sinks and it was impossible to obtain them in

state stores. Paper goods worth packing for the trip included facial tissues, which simply

did not exist in the USSR, and rolls of toilet paper, which was scarcer than typing paper

and coarser in texture.171 American travelers had no choice but to bring their own

toiletries owing to the substandard quality and unavailability of Soviet-made substitutes.

The abrasive, non-lathering, and “sweetly disinfectant-scented soap manufactured in

Soviet Government factories” was not likely to appeal to American sensibilities, while roll-on deodorant was not sold in the USSR.172 Female travelers had to make sure to

bring their own supply of feminine hygiene products as well. Not only were Soviet-made sanitary napkins hard to find but their small size, only about a third of the American ones, rendered them “practically useless” in any case. Tampons were not available at all.173 For

male travelers, disposable razor blades were an absolute necessity since Soviet steel was

“great for ballistics but hard on beards.”174 Photographic film and flash bulbs, and instant coffee were other consumer goods which Americans were urged to bring with them due

170 James C. McClelland, “Final Report to Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants,” July 10, 1966, 4, IREX, Rc 200, GSEA Reports 65/66. 171 Tech, “Final Report,” 23-24; Kermit Holt, “Not For Everybody: The Frustrating, Enlightening Experience of Traveling in the U.S.S.R.” Chicago Tribune (August 16, 1970), H11. 172 Holt, “Not For Everybody,” H11; Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 40, 41. 173 Josephine Hopkins, “Terminal Report,” 19, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Reports 65/66. 174 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 43.

to the questionable quality of Soviet substitutes.175 Every extra item that an American

traveler had to pack for the trip revealed the glaring inefficiencies of the Soviet centrally

planned command economy.

“The first and finest thing” that Americans could take with them to the USSR was a

“thick stack” of color photographs depicting “the concrete aspects of American life which are legendary and almost unbelievable to most Russians.”176 These personal snapshots of

family and community life, home and work, city and neighborhood, leisure and

recreation would give the Soviet citizen “precisely what he is most curious about—a

concrete picture of how you and your family live.” They were also “extremely helpful in

opening and developing conversations” and would make great gifts for Soviet friends and

acquaintances.177 Other items that would facilitate personal contact with Soviets included

“a Polaroid camera, transistor radio, ‘Slinky’ spring children’s toy, and transparent plastic case full of American magazines.”178 A Polaroid instant camera, in particular, “would

certainly be worth the investment” since its “magical properties” were “yet little known

on the Russian scene.” Its popularity was so “startling” that Daniel Matuszewski, a

graduate exchange student at MGU, jokingly warned his compatriots that taking instant

pictures in Central Asia “may get you elected as emir of one of the local khanates.”179 An executive vice president of Polaroid Corporation presented his friend, Irene Kampen with a gift for her forthcoming trip to the USSR—the Polaroid Colorpack IV camera. “The

Russians love to have their photographs taken,” he assured Kampen when she expressed

175 Ibid., 40, 42. 176 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 13. 177 McKenzie, “End-Of-Year Report,” 6. 178 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 14. 179 Daniel C. Matuszewski, “Final Report,” June 14, 1967, 6, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports.

misgivings about taking another piece of luggage with her. He added an important detail:

“They’re like children when it comes to the Polaroid camera.”180 American technological

innovation, in other words, would infantilize Soviet men and women.

“[Y]ou will be examined as a representative of the U.S. standard of living, whether

you like it or not, and should dress accordingly,” Donald Lesh, a graduate exchange

student at MGU, prodded prospective travelers to mind their appearance.181 “In a society

as class-conscious, status-conscious and clothes-conscious as the Soviet (moreover, a

society whose members are trying to improve their appearance by imitating Western

clothes, etc.),” Americans could not escape public scrutiny.182 The clothes American men

and women packed for the trip had to be “attractive, [of] good quality, and flattering.”

They did not have to flaunt the latest fashions from the House of Dior on the streets of

Moscow or Kiev to make a lasting impression on Soviets, however. Josephine Hopkins, a

graduate exchange student at LGU (Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, or

Leningrad State University), reported that “even 8-year old suits are admired as high fashion in the USSR.”183 Lesh also recommended bringing “wash-and-wear” clothes, made of synthetic fibers, since washing and ironing clothing was a labor-intensive and time-consuming task in the USSR, which it was best to avoid as much as possible.184 Of

course, sporting “wash-and-wear” garments offered a handy opportunity for Americans

to showcase the latest technological advancements in the manufacture of clothing to

curious Soviets.

180 Irene Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold or Living Relatives? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 16. 181 Donald R. Lesh, “Final Report,” May 19, 1961, 11, IREX, RC 53, Reports 60/61. 182 Ivo J. Lederer, “Report of a Visit to the Soviet Union, January 29 – February 18, 1962,” March 1962, 19, IUCTG, Box 1, Folder 5, Reports 1960-9/63. 183 Hopkins, “Terminal Report,” 19. 184 Lesh, “Final Report,” 10.

Soviet citizens from all walks of life were extremely sensitive to any and all

manifestations of nekul’turnost’ (unculturedness) on the part of foreign guests in their

country.185 Most often, an accusation of nekul’turnost’ denoted “coarse” and “uncouth”

behavior. Of course, the public obsession with upholding bourgeois values, “not least

‘correct’ and ‘respectable’ comportment in public,” in the self-proclaimed state of

workers and peasants was not without irony.186 Soviets seemed especially attentive to,

and judgmental of, Americans’ attire. Mahin and Scammon were of the opinion that

Americans should dress “neatly and conservatively” at all times while staying in the

Soviet Union. In particular, they instructed women to refrain from wearing shorts, pants,

and low-cut dresses and men from sporting “brightly patterned” shirts and ties.187

Hopkins concurred that it was not “a good idea” for American women to parade around

town in slacks.188 Some of “the more unfavorable stereotypes” that Gillingham cautioned

Americans against perpetuating, however unwittingly, were “cigar-smoking men in

garish sports shirts, shrill gum-chewing women in slacks,” and “youth in dirty blue

jeans.”189

The headwaiter at the Europe Hotel in Leningrad barred an American couple from

entering the dining room because he found their dinner attire inappropriate. H. P. Koenig,

a travel writer from New York, was wearing a turtleneck sweater, while his wife had on a

185 On kul’turnost’, see Catriona Kelly, “Kul’turnost’ in the Soviet Union: Ideal and Reality” in Reinterpreting Russia, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service (London: Arnold, 1999), 198-213, and Vadim Volkov, “The concept of kul’turnost’: notes on the Stalinist civilizing process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 210-230. 186 David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 187 Mahin and Scammon, Soviet Russia, 7. 188 Hopkins, “Terminal Report,” 6. 189 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 9.

pair of pants.190 Sherwood learned the hard way that Soviets “harbor a fierce prejudice

against overcoats.”191 The waiting staff at the National Hotel greeted her with a “chorus

of frantic ‘nyets’” whenever she attempted to enter one of the hotel’s dining rooms for

breakfast.192 Confused and demoralized, Sherwood beat a hasty retreat to the Intourist

Service Bureau to obtain an official explanation for the inexplicable hostility she had encountered. The Intourist agent, “an older woman with a kind face,” informed the uncultured American that guests were not permitted to enter dining rooms in coats, just like the one she was wearing.193 Once she left her coat at the hotel cloakroom, Sherwood was finally able to enjoy breakfast in one of the dining rooms. The “prejudice against overcoats” extended to “theaters, museums, art galleries—virtually every public place in the Soviet Union.”194

Advice abounded on the specific items Americans should bring with them to the

Soviet Union and distribute as “gifts to close adult friends, to acquaintances, to children

and as tips.”195 Gifts were another opportunity to expand the circumscribed worldview of ordinary Soviets and it was an opportunity not to be missed or taken lightly. The list of suggested gifts could be divided into four broad categories: literature, art, music, and

miscellaneous. In addition to the classic works of Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Franz

Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Evelyn Waugh, Americans were

advised to bring Isaac Babel’s The Lonely Years, 1925-1939, the Paperbacks in Print reference catalogue (“a must to have”), and any postwar American and/or British novels,

190 H. P. Koenig, “Russian Visit: Adventure Tied with Red Tape,” Chicago Tribune (March 29, 1970), H9. 191 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 45. 192 Ibid., 43. 193 Ibid., 44-45. 194 Ibid., 45. 195 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 14.

mysteries, and thrillers they could get their hands on.196 Art books with quality color

reproductions of Expressionist, Impressionist, Surrealist, and Pop Art paintings were

highly prized by Soviets. Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee,

Joan Miró, and Georges Rouault were some of the avant-garde artists whose work would

be of great interest to art aficionados.197 It was also worthwhile to bring Camilla Gray’s

The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922 to underscore the creative legacy of pre-

revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russian painters.198 Phonograph records were

undoubtedly the most coveted gift of all, especially among Soviet youth. There was a

popular demand for contemporary jazz and rock and roll (“the wilder the better”),

American folk music, Jewish and Israeli folk music, experimental music, works by

Russian émigré composers, such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky, and

liturgy, especially Russian Orthodox services.199 Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Harry

Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Eydie Gormé, Bill Haley, Tom Lehrer,

Johnny Mathis, Glenn Miller, and Elvis Presley (“very definitely”) were among the favorites of Soviet listeners.200

The miscellaneous category of gifts included mass-circulation newspapers and

journals, published in the United States and Great Britain, which would expose Soviets to

new points of view, and mass-produced consumer goods, which would highlight the

196 Jane Harris, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” December 30, 1964, 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 64-5: Interim Reports; R. A. Gregg, “Report on Year in Russia,” 1, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports; Alton S. Donnelly and Patrick L. Alston, “Letter to David C. Munford,” June 4, 1959, 2. IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 197 Rochelle Goldberg, “Final Report,” 7, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports; Donnelly and Alston, “Letter to David C. Munford,” 2. 198 Harris, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” 2. 199 Goldberg, “Final Report,” 7. 200 Donnelly and Alston, “Letter to David C. Munford,” 2; Willis Konick, “Report on USA-USSR Student Exchange, 1958-1959,” 3, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports.

efficiency, productivity, and ingenuity of the U.S. market economy. Copies of Time, Life,

House and Garden, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Down Beat, ARTnews,

The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Encounter,

Commentary, Amerika, and all fashion magazines were highly coveted by Soviet

readers.201 Life in particular was “the perfect magazine to leave around for Soviets to

look at to learn about American life.”202 Soviet children would treasure American coins

(“particularly shiny new pennies”), stamps, colorful postcards, Life Savers hard candy,

and, most of all, chewing gum. Adults would appreciate “quality costume jewelry

(particularly the interlocking plastic beads which pop together to form strings), cosmetics

(particularly those in capsules, pressure containers, or plastic bottles), looseleaf

notebooks and diaries, serviceable ballpoint pens and lighters, fingernail clippers and

pocket knives, and all sorts of good synthetic-fiber clothing articles (Dacron neckties,

nylon stretch hose or stretch gloves, inexpensive scarves of good design, etc.)” as well as

“packaged ‘instant’ foodstuffs like coffee, mashed potatoes, cake mixes, etc.”203 The

general rule of thumb was that anything American, even something as unremarkable as

Scotch tape or felt-tip markers, could serve as a gift simply by virtue of being

American.204

However, Peter Gillingham cautioned American travelers, in no uncertain terms,

against haphazardly dumping their assorted wares on unsuspecting Soviets, as if they

were some kind of a charity case in dire need of capitalist beneficence. Reciprocity, not

201 Jane Harris, “Final Report,” 6, IREX, RC 200, GSEA End of YR Reports 64/65. 202 George P. Majeska, “Letter to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants,” May 12, 1965, 4, IREX, RC 200, GSEA End of YR Reports 64/65. 203 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 14. 204 Thomas Riha, “Exchange 1958-59,” 1, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports; Tech, “Final Report,” 23.

74 charity, was the bedrock of gift giving in the Soviet Union, where it was customary to exchange “presents or mementos even on relatively brief acquaintance.”205 Accordingly, it was impossible to give Soviets, regardless of their age or nationality, anything without receiving something in return. Even children made sure to give “a pin or coin” in exchange for a stick of chewing gum.206 Given the importance of such reciprocal exchanges, Gillingham felt obliged to remind Americans to act with sincerity and tact when presenting a gift to a Soviet friend, acquaintance, or even a complete stranger.

“[T]he psychological attitude with which you give a gift is critically important, for it must represent a true desire on your part to symbolize your friendly contact with the

Russian recipient or it will rightly be resented as ‘trade goods to the natives.’”207

Soviet regulations left no doubt as to what foreign tourists were not allowed to bring into the USSR. Besides illicit narcotics, firearms, rubles, and pornographic materials, Soviet customs officers were always on the lookout for anything subversive in nature when inspecting incoming tourists’ belongings. Intourist included “printed matter, cliches, negatives, shot films, photos, gramophone records, recorder tape, motion picture films, manuscripts, designs and drawings and the line [sic] harmful to the USSR politically or economically” on the list of prohibited items.208 Americans could avoid needless aggravation and lighten the workload of customs officers, who exercised broad discretion in ensuring that nothing even remotely detrimental to the Soviet state made it into the country, by leaving White émigré publications, any religious tracts, including

205 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 13. 206 Spatafora, “Hartford Travel Agent Tells Of Visit To Russia,” 28A. 207 Gillingham, “Summary of 1959 Orientation Briefing,” 13. 208 Intourist, Touring the Soviet Union.

bibles, and propaganda pamphlets at home.209 “Anything in quantity” immediately raised

a flag red at customs, whether it was “six copies of Doctor Zhivago, 1000 Christmas

cards or 12,000 small bottles of perfume,” so it was best to go for variety when packing

for the trip.210 Americans had to keep in mind that it was in their personal interest—as

well as the national interest of the United States—to observe Soviet customs regulations,

no matter how absurd they might have seemed. To carry out one’s ambassadorial duties,

after all, an American actually needed to make it through customs rather than face

expulsion, if not imprisonment, for breaking the law before ever setting foot on Soviet

soil and meeting Soviet people.

The preconceptions that Americans brought with them determined whether they found the Soviet way of life better than they had hoped or worse than they had feared. “If they were prepared to see people starving in the streets, they obviously are pleasantly surprised to find such conditions do not exist, but if they were ready to measure the culture by the number of its filling stations and supermarkets, their reaction will be negative, indeed.” Unfortunately, “Cold War tensions, antagonistic social and economic systems, bad reporting, and emotionalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain” left ordinary citizens, Soviet and American alike, in the dark about the realities of everyday life on the other shore.211 As a result, there were too many Americans “who had imagined the Soviet

Union as a sort of armed prison camp, filled with wild-looking long-haired types ready to

launch atomic war and fearful citizens furtively waiting about for the next Voice of

America broadcast.” There were zealous anti-Communists who were “determined to see

209 Porter, “How to Get into Trouble in the Soviet Union,” 2. 210 Levine, Travel Guide to Russia, 36. 211 Bruce Winters, “U.S. Advice To Travelers In U.S.S.R. Irks Russians,” Baltimore Sun (October 15, 1967), 13.

evil in everything” as well as equally zealous fellow travelers who were as determined to

justify every evil they saw.212 Given the prevalence of such misconceptions, a visit to the

Soviet Union was, above all else, an opportunity to correct “one’s vision in closer and

more intimate involvement in the actual life of the Russian people.”213

“Na pokaz”

“You will constantly be na pokaz,” Edward “Ned” Keenan, a graduate history

student from Harvard University who had spent the 1960-61 academic year at LGU, advised future American participants in the academic exchange program with the USSR.

The Russian phrase na pokaz meant that American students should be prepared to be “on display” at all times and in all places in the Soviet Union, regardless of their own feelings on the matter. The opportunity to personify America for curious Soviets had its inherent difficulties since every American visitor was expected to “live up to” preexisting “notions about American friendliness, simplicity, and frankness,” thus privileging collective identity over individual expression. But it also made it possible for them to “disabuse”

Soviets “of an often large stock of misconceptions, based, in the optimum situation, upon translations of American literature which is out of date, or out of step, with American life in 1960, but more often upon the trash” printed in newspapers.214 Another man of

Harvard, Dr. Irwin Weil of Brandeis University, who had spent the 1962-63 academic

year at MGU, argued that the unwillingness of Americans to “adjust to a tyrannical

society” did not denote some sort of cultural “narrowness,” but actually reflected

212 Fred Warner Neal, “U.S. Tourists In Soviet Union,” Los Angeles Times (October 2, 1958), B5. 213 Charles C. Adler, Jr., “Report on Travel to the Soviet Union in 1960,” November 11, 1960, 4, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 214 Edward L. Keenan, “Letter to David Munford,” May 7, 1960, 4, IREX, RC 53, Reports 60/61.

“something admirable in the American character,” making them well-suited for the role

of unofficial ambassadors. Unlike the abject Soviet masses, there were certain practices

that freeborn Americans were simply not willing to tolerate, “among them petty bullying

and such things as false denunciations of fellow students and teachers, false accusations

in newspapers, etc.”215

There was no need to prod Robert Westbrook to play his part in the struggle for

hearts and minds when he visited the Soviet Union in 1960. Since he believed that Soviet

citizens knew “next to nothing” about the American way of life and “would most likely

be meeting Americans for the first and perhaps the last time,” the gravity of the mission

he was about to undertake behind “the Iron Curtain” was self-evident to him. The fifteen-

year-old sophomore at the private Putney School in Vermont was determined to do his

utmost as an unofficial ambassador, as were his companions.216 Reflecting back on his journey, Westbrook felt that he had succeeded in his mission. At the very least, he was certain that the young Soviets, with whom he had lived in close quarters for three weeks at a summer camp near Kiev, would “never again think of the American people as the imperialistic, money-loving swine that the Russian newspapers make us out to be” after spending time with and getting to know real Americans.217 Although he acknowledged

“with regret” his failure to teach Soviets “to love truth or to be good boys in international

politics,” Robert Lefkowitz, a graduate exchange student at MGU, did not think that his

stay in the USSR was a fool’s errand. “But isn’t it an awful lot to have exposed even a

215 Irwin Weil, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” July 5, 1963, 4, IREX, RC 200, GSE 62-3: Mid-year, final, and travel reports. 216 Robert Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), 9. 217 Ibid., 155.

few to just a little more of a world that, in spite of all its faults, lies far beyond their poor

imagination?” he meditated.218

Nila Magidoff made sure that her travel companion, the acclaimed satirical writer

Irene Kampen, represented the United States with appropriate panache in the Soviet

Union. “Russians think that all American tourists are rich,” Magidoff, a Soviet émigré who gained national prominence as a public speaker, informed her friend as they inched closer to Moscow on board a Finnair jet. It was therefore imperative for Kampen to conduct herself—at all times and in all places—in keeping with their exaggerated expectations. “The more rich you behave the happier Russian people will be,” Magidoff reiterated her directive. In particular, she cautioned Kampen against wearing pants or a scarf over her head (babushka) since these fashion choices would make her look like a peasant woman and offend the Soviets.219

When they stopped at a gas station on the way to Oryol, Magidoff noticed that

something was amiss. “You don’t look as rich as you looked when we were in Moscow,”

she grumbled in frustration at the entrance to the gas station office. It went without saying

that Kampen had to make the proper impression on the old Soviet woman in charge when

she stepped into her office. Magidoff sought to remedy the situation by telling Kampen to

put on her blue sunglasses, even though it was raining outside. Kampen’s objection that

the old woman would surely take her for a lunatic if she was to walk into the office

sporting blue sunglasses elicited enthusiastic approval from Magidoff. “Rich and crazy,”

218 Robert Lefkowitz, “Final Report on the Academic Exchange: The Soviet Union, 1967-68,” August 28, 1968, 9, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Final Reports 1967-1968. 219 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 23.

she corrected Kampen, which was a “[m]arvelous combination” in her humble opinion.

There was nothing left for Kampen to do but put her sunglasses on.220

Despite—or perhaps because of—her émigré status, Magidoff fully embraced her role as an unofficial ambassador and proved quite unyielding and uncompromising in her defense of the United States—her adopted homeland since 1941—against criticisms leveled by Americans and Soviets alike. Kampen and Magidoff were elated to see five chairs at the dining room table decorated with a miniature American flag at the Intourist hotel restaurant in Sochi, which meant they would be joined by other American guests for lunch. “Oh, it’s going to be so wonderful to talk to an American again!” Kampen could not hold back her excitement after more than a month in the USSR.221 Before they took

their seats, however, they formally recited the Pledge of Allegiance, at Magidoff’s

insistence, drawing the attention of everyone at the restaurant.222

Three members of the Mucks family from New York City joined Kampen and

Magidoff at the designated American table. The lunchtime conversation hit a snag,

however, when Dr. Houseman Mucks, a professor of philosophy at the New School,

lamented the fact that he would be returning stateside in a week’s time. Magidoff thought

he should be “ashamed” of speaking so dismissively about the “greatest country in the

world.” The haughty Dr. Mucks responded to her indignation with a rhetorical question,

“My dear lady, surely you cannot be blind to the decadence, the violence, the general

moral turpitude that pervades our American democracy today?” If American society was

decadent, violent, and morally corrupt, Magidoff asked him, then was the Soviet Union,

220 Ibid., 37. 221 Ibid., 118-119. 222 Ibid., 119.

in his opinion, “absolute one hundred per cent marvelous?” When Dr. Mucks pointed out

that it was common knowledge (“we all know”) that stifling “the voices of dissent” was

“occasionally necessary” in nascent socialist societies, Magidoff, who had spent a year

and a half in exile in Siberia, wanted to know if stifling dissent was merely a euphemism

for political repression. “You mean lock up in prison and ship off to Siberia? This is what

you mean by ‘stifle’? Ha!”223 She responded to his accusation of “jingoistic flag waving”

by springing up from her chair, grabbing the miniature American flag off the table, and

raising it “triumphantly” over her head for all to see. “It’s greatest flag in the world and

I’m not ashamed to wave it!” Magidoff exclaimed while glaring at Dr. Mucks.224

Magidoff had a heated discussion about the relative merits of the Soviet political system with a young member of the Communist Party at the Kursk camp. Magidoff nudged Kampen to speak with the young Communist, who had “little enamel pictures of

Lenin pinned to both his lapels and a hammer-and-sickle badge on the breast pocket of his jacket,” as soon as she spotted him at the campground. “Talk to him—should be interesting.”225 Kampen did not have to move a muscle since the young man approached the two women as soon as he saw Kampen’s Polaroid camera to make sure that they knew that it was a Soviet invention. “Here in the Soviet Union we have exact identical camera. Russian scientist invented it,” he said with an air of confidence.226

Having come face-to-face with actual Americans, the young Communist could not

let an opportunity to engage in ideological combat—and prove his mettle—pass by. He

immediately launched an offensive by accusing American newspapers for publicizing

223 Ibid., 121. 224 Ibid., 122. 225 Ibid., 53. 226 Ibid., 54.

blatant “lies,” such as “Soviet Union is not free country.”227 Magidoff’s rejoinder that

free countries had free elections did not faze the young man, who insisted wholeheartedly

that the USSR had free elections and even described, in very broad terms, the electoral process to the American visitors. “Election day. Soviet citizen gets up, eats breakfast, goes to polling place, votes.” Unsatisfied with such a vague generalization, Magidoff

demanded an explanation of the actual voting procedure in the ostensibly free elections

which took place in the USSR. The young man elaborated that a Soviet citizen “gets

ballot with candidate’s name printed on it, he takes pencil and makes mark next to name,

he drops ballot into ballot box.” But what if, Magidoff inquired, a Soviet citizen did not

want to vote for the candidate listed on the ballot? “Then person stays home and doesn’t

vote” came the solemn response. “Very simple procedure.” Magidoff offered her usual

response, “Ha!” which betrayed an odd mixture of sarcasm and scorn at what she had just

heard from the young member of the Community Party.228

Debbie Sherwood—a young, single woman about town—noticed that she had “a

decidedly curious effect” on the Soviet populace, “particularly the male element.” Upon

reflection, she concluded that Soviet men of all ages admired her “with the kind of awe

usually reserved for tractors and hydroelectric stations” because of the attractive

consumer goods, readily available at any department store in the United States, that she

had expertly used to enhance her physical appearance to maximum effect. Sherwood was

quite certain that she conjured “a picture the likes of which those poor citizens of mini-

less Mother Russia had never hoped to see” in her “lovely titian wig,” “double-thick false

eyelashes,” “white patterned stockings,” and “I’m-ashamed-to-say-how-many-inches-

227 Ibid. 228 Ibid., 55.

above-the-knee dresses.”229 Since there is no such thing as bad publicity, it is beyond any

doubt that Sherwood made a good emissary for the United States, given the attention she

attracted, whether positive or negative, in the Soviet Union. She literally showcased the

material bounty of the American way of life, which was guaranteed to boost female allure

and heighten male interest, on her body to a materially deprived and morally stunted

Soviet audience.

James Ramsey, a foreign service officer, made sure to let a Soviet official know

that Americans would not be pushed around in Berlin, or elsewhere in the world. While

sailing along the Soviet Black Sea coast aboard the Greek cruise ship TS Adriatiki in

April 1959, Ramsey engaged in “a long and at times very loud discussion” with a

representative of Inflot, the state agency in charge of servicing foreign vessels, at the

ship’s bar.230 The Soviet official, “a sinister type with a chip on his shoulder,” according to Ramsey, intentionally steered the conversation from “the advantages of peaceful coexistence,” a relatively harmless subject, to the uncertain future of Berlin, a politically

charged topic, in order to score a propaganda victory for the Soviet Union in front of an

interested crowd of foreign passengers gathered at the bar.231 However, he found himself

on the defensive from the very start. Ramsey, who had been learning Russian at the U.S.

Army Language School at Oberammergau in Bavaria, informed him that West Germans

were united in their opposition to the proposed Soviet treaty on Berlin, which they

considered “a second capitulation,” and warned him in no uncertain terms that the Soviet

Union “ought not to follow a policy which would provoke further disasters,” considering

229 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 33. 230 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 16. 231 Ibid., 16-17.

the recent history of Russo-German relations. Ramsey’s sobering words had the desired

effect on the Soviet official, who grew “very agitated” and pled the cause of U.S.-Soviet

cooperation for the sake of “preserving the peace.” With his opponent on the ropes, so to

speak, Ramsey delivered the knockout blow that brought this ideological tussle to a

decisive conclusion. First, he told the Soviet man that past experience had taught

Americans that “Soviet words” did not amount to much. Then Ramsey poked him in the

chest with his finger while delivering another ominous warning, “About Berlin, be very,

very careful.” The Soviet official was so “unnerved” by Ramsey’s assertiveness that “he

stopped talking” at once and stood silently at the doorway of the bar for “several

minutes” before taking his leave. There was a discernible change in the Soviet’s

demeanor for the remainder of the cruise; he “treated all passengers courteously and refrained from raising political subjects” in conversation.232

Donald Rosenthal and Judith Martin, the young members of the New York Pro

Musica Ensemble on tour in the USSR in 1964, deliberately flouted rigid social

conventions regarding premarital sex. When the ensemble stopped in Baku, the capital of

Soviet Azerbaijan, Rosenthal caused the austere employees of a local hotel considerable

consternation by spending the night in Martin’s room, “as was his custom whenever she

had a room to herself.” He was in Martin’s room for half an hour before a female hotel

employee knocked on the door and informed them that “he had been in the room long

enough” and needed to leave at once. After this initial attempt at moral suasion failed to

produce the desired result, the woman called Martin’s room and sternly repeated her

message over the telephone but to no avail. Early the next morning, a male hotel

232 Ibid., 17.

employee “forced his way into the room” assigned to Rosenthal and his roommate,

Donald Plesnicar, and checked to see if Rosenthal was there.233 The free-wheeling behavior of the young couple not only unsettled the hotel employees but also proved that traditional sexual mores were no match for the exuberance of American youth.

George N. Crocker, the conservative author of Roosevelt’s Road to Russia, was having dinner with his wife at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad when an Intourist official approached their table and casually informed them that they would have to vacate their room. “There is a Chinese delegation arriving tonight,” he explained. “We will need your suite.” Lest the American guests think that he was an “unreasonable” man, the official, wearing a benevolent smile on his face, permitted the Crockers to finish their meal before

they would be shipped off to the Europa Hotel. Crocker decided to stand his ground and

show Intourist that he and his wife, as proud American citizens, would not be pushed

around at will. “We do not wish to move” came the brief yet firm response. Crocker’s

obstinacy clearly caught the Soviet bureaucrat off guard since he made a serious blunder

in disclosing that the impending arrival of the Chinese delegation was a surprise for the

whole Intourist operation. If that was the case, Crocker correctly deduced that not a single

member of the delegation had a reservation at the hotel and immediately launched a

devastating counteroffensive. “We come from a country in which the official counts for

no more than any citizen,” he pontificated on the virtues of American egalitarianism.

“We were here first, and so we have a right to stay.” The Intourist official could only

stare “incredulously” at Crocker.234

233 Scott C. Lyon, “Soviet Surveillance of Pro Musica Ensemble, With Special Attention to Donald Rosenthal,” January 29, 1965, 2, RG 59, BPR, American Visits to the USSR, 1963-70, Box 18, SY 8: Violations, 1947-1973. 234 Crocker, “We Said Good-By to Russia Gladly!” B14.

Once he regained his wits, the official tried a different tack by assuring the

American couple that the Europa Hotel boasted the same comforts and amenities as the

Astoria. “Then I am sure that the Chinese gentlemen will be very comfortable there,”

Crocker shot back. He sensed that it was time to bring the standoff with Intourist to a

head. “If you are going to put us out of this hotel tonight, you will have to do it by force,”

he said calmly. “Excuse me now, I am going to finish my dinner, and then go to bed—

here.” Given his unfavorable impression of the cumbersome operation of Soviet

bureaucracy, Crocker felt that the Soviet official would be wary of making “a decision

which may turn out to be beyond his circumscribed authority.” The American guests

proceeded to finish their meal without further interruptions and then retired to their

room—admittedly not without “some trepidation.” An hour later came the much-

anticipated call from Intourist; they would be allowed to stay at the Astoria.235

Conclusion

For most Americans, the visit to the Soviet Union was an unforgettable experience

that would undoubtedly be recounted to family, friends, and acquaintances for years to

come. “Because of the intense American curiosity about the cold war enemy and

Communism,” J. Edward Murray advised prospective travelers, “you’ll get to show your

slides and talk about your trip until you are tired of it.”236 It was, however, far from an

ordinary, laid-back vacation. Cold War travel “was a politically fraught undertaking for

Americans, who were inevitably viewed as representatives, even spokespersons for their

235 Ibid. 236 J. Edward Murray, “How about Russia?” Los Angeles Times (March 13, 1960), B24.

nation.”237 Policymakers on both sides hoped to use the physical presence of American

men and women on Soviet soil to their own advantage in the unfolding Cold War

struggle for hearts and minds. If Soviet officials relished the prospect of impressing upon

American holidaymakers socialism’s achievements while funneling their precious dollars

into the state coffers, then U.S. officials cherished the thought of their fellow citizens

fanning the flames of popular discontent behind enemy lines. Face-to-face encounters

were the perfect occasion to whet the appetites and raise the expectations of impatient

Soviet consumers by flaunting the tangible and intangible benefits of democratic

capitalism before their very eyes.

American travelers could not escape the Cold War’s long shadow since the “travel

boom became a testing ground to judge whether middle-class citizens, enjoying the fruits

of postwar consumerism, could serve their nation” in the struggle against global

Communism.238 They thus grappled with the same “ideological contradiction” while visiting the USSR as did American military families stationed in West Germany and

Japan in the post-WWII era. On the one hand, “they were asked to demonstrate appreciation of non-American cultures and customs,” but, on the other hand, they were

expected to “advance U.S. Cold War goals” by showcasing “the presumed superiority of

the American way of life.”239 It was a hard-balancing act requiring preparation.

Fortunately for American visitors, both short- and long-term, official and unofficial advice on proper conduct in the USSR was not hard to find. Such literature covered all

237 David Seed, “American Ambassadors: Travellers in the Cold War,” in American Travel and Empire, ed. Susan Castillo and David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 234. 238 Endy, Cold War Holidays, 137. 239 Donna Alvah, Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946- 1965 (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 9.

87 the bases to make sure that one’s stay behind the “Iron Curtain” was both personally fulfilling and politically resonant. Given the friendly disposition of Soviets, their curiosity about the United States, and their enchantment with American culture and technology, however, Americans had little reason to worry about the kind of reception they would get in the USSR.

Chapter 2: “Smiling faces”

Introduction

“The fact that you are an American makes it very easy to meet charming and

interesting people,” Alton Donnelly and Patrick Alston, graduate students from the

University of California, Berkeley, were happy to report after spending the 1958-59

academic year at LGU (Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, or Leningrad State

University). “People talk to you on the street, in the bus, in the theater, in the baths,

everywhere you go.”1 There was nothing unusual about the warm and friendly reception

that Americans, whether they were tourists, scholars, artists, or even diplomats, received

in the Soviet Union. Two years of service at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow (1956-1958) had convinced Robert Martens that “one could find more popular hostility toward

Americans and the United States in many countries of Western Europe than in the Soviet

Union.” Identification as an American in the Soviet Union was not likely to elicit a negative or hostile reaction since most Soviet citizens paid no heed to the official “hate propaganda” directed against the United States. “The Soviet people are not angry with anybody, least of all Americans,” the diplomat reported to his superiors.2 What

Americans did find in the Soviet Union was an intense interest in the United States, an

unbridled enthusiasm for American culture and technology, and a genuine goodwill from

ordinary Soviets who yearned for peace. The warm and hearty welcome that Americans

1 Alton S. Donnelly and Patrick L. Alston, “Report to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants,” June 4, 1959, 4, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports, Library of Congress. 2 Robert J. Martens, “Some Observations on Popular Soviet Attitudes,” in “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion,” ed. David E. Mark and Edward L. Killham, 5, RG 84, Classified General Records (hereafter CGR), 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959, National Archives.

invariably received behind the “Iron Curtain,” at the height of the Cold War no less,

revealed a groundswell of grassroots support for détente between the two superpowers.

“Sheer wonder and delight”

The overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens—men and women of all ages,

nationalities, religions, and occupations—seem to have reacted to the physical presence

of living and breathing Americans in their midst in much the same way as students at the

Kiev Conservatory did. On the second leg of its 1962 tour of the Soviet Union, the

Eastman Philharmonia, an all-student orchestra from Rochester, New York, performed in

Kiev, the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The young American musicians paid a visit to the

local conservatory where they met with their Soviet counterparts. Joseph Norbury, a U.S.

Embassy officer who escorted the orchestra on the second leg of its tour, sensed that

“meeting live young Americans” evoked “the kind of sheer wonder and delight” among

Soviet students that had “to be seen to be appreciated.”3 The evocative phrase “sheer

wonder and delight” nicely encapsulates the typical response that Americans elicited wherever they traveled in the USSR, despite the fear-mongering and saber-rattling Cold

War propaganda.

“If there is one single attitude of mind which seems to impress most visitors to the

USSR,” the authors of a popular travel guide divulged, “it is the extreme curiosity

virtually all Russians have about the United States.”4 That was the “sheer wonder” that

Norbury observed on the faces of young musicians at the Kiev Conservatory. Charles S.

3 Joseph B. Norbury, “Soviet Tour of Eastman Philharmonia: Part II (February 10-21, 1962),” March 2, 1962, 2, RG 84, General Records, 1941-1963, Box 67, 221 Cit A ⁕ Z 1962. 4 Dean B. Mahin and Richard M. Scammon, Soviet Russia: A Guidebook for Tourists (Washington, D.C.: Governmental Affairs Institute, 1959), 54.

Rhyne, president of the American Bar Association, visited the Soviet Union in 1958.

“The hunger among Russians for knowledge of the outside world,” he wrote, especially

about the United States, verged on “an overwhelming obsession” that had to be fulfilled.5

Alton Donnelly collected a large crowd of about two hundred Soviets while enjoying

some “rare sunshine” on a park bench in Leningrad. After he satiated their boundless

curiosity by dutifully answering countless questions about the United States, mainly

concerning the prices of consumer goods, a young Soviet man presented Donnelly with a

candy bar as a modest token of his gratitude “for the chance to talk to an American.”6

The American diplomats on a Black Sea cruise in 1959 reported that “the insatiable

curiosity of the [Soviet] people for knowledge of the outside world” was so compelling

that large crowds, “one as large as four hundred people,” surrounded them “to ask

questions about the United States” as soon as they set foot on Soviet soil.7

On a visit to the Siberian city of Irkutsk in 1961, Boris Klosson, counselor for

political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, attended a performance of Siberian

Lights, a musical comedy about the construction of the Irkutsk power station, at a local

theater.8 The presence of a foreign guest did not go unnoticed by local youth. When

Klosson made his way to the foyer at the first intermission, he immediately spotted a

group of young Soviets who were silently and intently watching his every move at a

distance. The moment he approached them, “a crowd of some 40 persons immediately

5 Charles S. Rhyne, “The Law, Lawyers, and Courts of Russia,” August 25, 1958, 10, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 232, 363 USSR Laws 1959. 6 Alton Donnelly, “Letter to Charles Jelavich,” November 1, 1958, 1, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 7 James A. Ramsey, Joseph T. Kendrick, and Samuel G. Wise, Jr., “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” May 15, 1959, 1-3, RG 306, Records Relating to the Soviet Union (hereafter RRSU), Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1), National Archives. 8 Boris H. Klosson, “Visit to Irkutsk, Bratsk, and the Lake Baikal area,” December 21, 1961, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

surrounded him and those in the first three ranks began firing questions in a warm and

friendly manner.” They wanted to know where he was from, how he liked the local

weather and food, where he learned to speak Russian, how many children he had, and

what was the weather in Moscow like. Klosson’s disclosure that he was an American

elicited the striking response “Ah, a wonderful country” from a young man in the crowd.

The marked absence of political questions or comments led Klosson to the conclusion

that the friendly exchange reflected “an avid curiosity about foreigners and an intense

eagerness to communicate with them” on the part of Soviet youth. The young Soviets

made sure to locate their newfound American acquaintance at the second intermission of the musical so that they could continue the impromptu conversation. A young Soviet woman put the significance of the occasion into perspective for Klosson with a simple yet touching comment, “You bring us great happiness.”9

What stood out the most in the conversations the American diplomats had with

Soviet students at a hotel restaurant in Tashkent over the course of two evenings in 1961

was “their consuming interest in cultural and other nonpolitical phenomena, and their

inordinate curiosity to know more about the West and America in particular.”10 Gerrit

Gantvoort, an exchange graduate student at LGU, did his best to “answer the tremendous

curiosity and desire to know” about the United States he had encountered in Leningrad in

1967.11 The members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) delegation were deeply impressed with “the intense curiosity about things American” they had

9 Ibid., 6. 10 Joseph B. Norbury and Leo J. Moser, “Trip to Central Asia,” December 18, 1961, 6, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 11 J. Gerrit Gantvoort, “Letter to E. Willis Brooks,” June 15, 1968, 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Final Reports 1967-1968.

encountered in the Soviet Union in 1969.12 Dr. Arthur Roe of the National Science

Foundation accompanied the “Education USA” exhibit to Novosibirsk in 1970. He felt that most Soviets who visited the exhibit did so in the hope of gratifying their “insatiable appetite for knowledge” about the United States.13

Curiosity was a completely understandable reaction on the part of people unable to interact freely with the outside world due to official restrictions on overseas travel and the free flow of information.14 Yet, the nouns (desire, obsession, appetite) and adjectives

(tremendous, intense, consuming, insatiable) that Americans used suggest that making contact with foreign visitors was not a conscious choice but some primal impulse that

Soviets could not necessarily control. Such terminology transformed them from equal participants in an intercultural encounter into gawking spectators in complete awe of their

American guests.

Even two KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or Committee for State

Security) agents, who had inadvertently found themselves sharing a taxi in Moscow with the U.S. Embassy officers they were assigned to follow, did not let their professional duties get in the way of satisfying their “keen personal curiosity about the United States.”

Both men desperately wanted to visit America but conceded that it was nearly impossible for ordinary Soviet citizens, much less state security agents, to obtain official permission to do so. “A request for a passport to visit America results only in suspicious interrogation about motives and purposes.” The suggestion that they simply state that

12 Edward W. Burgess, “ASNE Delegation – Debriefing,” September 29, 1969, 1-2, MC 468, Box 230, Folder 39, General USSR 1970, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections. 13 Arthur Roe, “Trip to Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, May 1970,” June 22, 1970, 3, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 29, EDU-8: Exhibits, 1970. 14 Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 172.

they wanted to travel to the United States to see the famed skyscrapers of New York City

evoked “derisive laughter” from one of the KGB officers, who insisted that the likely

official response would be to tell the applicant “to stay home and look at the big buildings

in Moscow” instead. After they settled a friendly argument about the number of floors in

the Empire State Building—the answer produced “expressions of admiration”—for the

Soviets, the American diplomats indulged their companions’ curiosity by answering

“eager questions about the physical appearance of New York by comparison with

Moscow.”15

The “sheer delight” that Norbury observed on the faces of young musicians at the

Kiev Conservatory reflected the cheerful and heartfelt welcome that American visitors

received from the Soviets. Sister Arline Keown, a Russian-language instructor from

Mundelein College who had participated the summer exchange of language teachers in

1967, was struck by “the wide difference between the radio, newspapers, posters and

sometimes official treatment of Americans and the ordinary friendliness of the average

Soviet citizen.”16 This divergence between the public pronouncements and the private

attitudes accounted for “[t]he unanimity with which Soviets both like things American on

principle, yet believe that our foreign policy is in the hands of nasty mean men in the pay

of wall street [sic].”17 Dr. Charles Adler of Hamilton College savored “the daily and

hourly contact with Russians in shops, restaurants, subways, in the streets and hotels, in

museums and libraries” during his month-long research sojourn to the USSR in 1960

15 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Miscellaneous Notes From Conversations with Soviet Citizens,” January 22, 1959, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 16 Arline Keown, “Report,” August 28, 1967, 2, IREX, RC 200, Final Reports SLT – 1967. 17 Peter Henry Juviler, “Report on the US-Soviet Student Exchange, 1958-1959,” June 1, 1959, 15, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports.

because the “genuine friendliness” of ordinary people “came through unmistakably at

every turning, especially outside of Moscow.”18 Some 161,000 Soviets visited the

“Transportation: USA” exhibit during its month-long stay in Kharkov in December 1961

and many of them did not conduct themselves as detached and critical observers.19

William Watts, a U.S. Embassy officer who accompanied the exhibit, recounted “[t]he

eagerness with which so many spectators burst into the exhibit hall, their undisguised

desire to learn even a little about America at first hand, their attentiveness to every word

and action of the American speaking to them.”20 These remarkable “mental pictures” of

Soviet curiosity in action made an indelible impression on Watts, lingering in his mind

long after the exhibit closed its doors.21

Robert Westbrook was taking a leisurely evening stroll in Moscow’s Red Square

when an inebriated Soviet youth intercepted him. Without further ado, the young Soviet

professed an abiding affection for Americans while literally standing on the doorstep of

the Kremlin, the imposing citadel of Soviet power. By his own admission, he was

especially fond of American women since they were not “all fat” like Soviet women.22

To get his point across in a way that anyone could understand, the young man exclaimed

“American girls—Oooh, la la!” and “threw a kiss into the air with his fingers.” Once the

discussion turned to Cold War politics, he declared that Nikita Khrushchev could “go to

Hell!” and informed the astonished Westbrook that he liked the anti-Communist crusader

18 Charles C. Adler, Jr., “Report on Travel to the Soviet Union in 1960,” November 11, 1960, 4, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 19 William Watts, “‘Transportation USA’ in Kharkov,” January 18, 1962, 1, MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX 39: Jan-June 1962. 20 Ibid., 6-7. 21 Ibid., 7. 22 Robert Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), 54.

Richard Nixon.23 Upon learning of Westbrook’s fondness for President John F. Kennedy,

the young man responded in a playful tone: “I like Kennedy, if you like Kennedy.” The

lively encounter came to an abrupt and unsettling end, however, when two shadowy men

escorted the young man away.24

“Smiling faces greet you everywhere in Siberia,” Kermit Holt, travel editor of the

Chicago Tribune, reported in the summer of 1970. A Soviet woman welcomed him with open arms to Khabarovsk, an old man in Bratsk gripped his hand and implored him to come back in the winter so they could go bear hunting together, and exuberant teenagers in Irkutsk stopped him “in the parks and on the streets” to practice their English and “to exchange Lenin pins for chewing gum or American coins.”25 In Tallinn, an excited

“crowd of autograph-seekers” invaded the court after the U.S. Olympic Development

Basketball Team defeated the Soviet Youth All-Star team in an exhibition game in 1970.

In the ensuing commotion, Lieutenant Arthur Wilmore of the U.S. Army, “the team’s

playmaking guard,” spotted a young man in the crowd who had been calling his name.

The Soviet fan gave Wilmore thumbs up and exclaimed, “Long live the U.S. Army!”26

One of the Soviet workers sitting across from Ruth Daniloff, the English wife of an

American journalist, at a Moscow café “flirtingly suggested that he might teach [her]

Russian.” Daniloff’s facetious response that her husband would beat her if she accepted the man’s offer did not amuse the Soviet man or his friend one bit; on the contrary, it left

them both visibly disturbed. Recognizing that she had made a faux pas, Daniloff

23 Ibid., 55. 24 Ibid., 56. 25 Kermit Holt, “This is Siberia? Da!” Chicago Tribune (August 23, 1970), 8. 26 Sherwood H. Demitz, “Visit of U.S. Olympic Development Basketball Team to USSR,” September 2, 1970, 2, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 32, EDU-15: Amusements, Sports, 1970.

attempted to lighten the mood with another playful remark: “He’s an American, you

know.” This time the two men responded with indignation. “How can you say such a

stupid thing?” they demanded to know. “The Americans are wonderful people.” Even

though her attempts at humor fell flat, Daniloff left the café “feeling very encouraged

with the immunity of at least two Soviet citizens to the official [anti-American]

propaganda.”27

The Intourist official who drove Robert Owen and Kempton Jenkins to the

Kishinev airport, the Aeroflot ticket agent who gave them their boarding passes for the

flight to Lvov, and even the airport porter who handled their luggage were all “very

interested” in the family photographs the American diplomats produced from their

wallets. The enthralled Soviets made “warm comments” about the happy families they

saw in the photos and inquired about the age, and educational and living arrangements of

the diplomats’ children in Moscow.28 Richard Davies, Herbert Okun, and Kermit

Midthun mingled freely among the thousands of Soviet Jews, who packed the Moscow

Synagogue, and the streets around it, for the services to mark the beginning of Yom

Kippur (the Day of Atonement) on the evening of October 7, 1962. Those in attendance

did not let the solemnity of the occasion affect the friendly welcome they extended to the

three American diplomats in attendance. One man in particular was so delighted to see

them that he “thrust his shy wife forward to ‘meet the foreigners’—apparently the first

ones she had seen in the flesh.”29

27 Ruth Daniloff, “Americans in Moscow,” Christian Science Monitor (December 12, 1962), 16. 28 Robert I. Owen and Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip Memoranda – Kishinev, April 4-5, 1961,” in “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov, April 3-7, 1961,” April 25, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Records 1961. 29 Richard T. Davies, Herbert S. Okun, and Kermit S. Midthun, “Jewish New Year Observances in Moscow,” October 12, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 570.3 Religion 1962.

Attending lectures at the history department at MGU (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi

universitet, or Moscow State University) during the 1957-1958 academic year made John

Baker, a U.S. Embassy officer, cognizant of “a large reservoir of curiosity, good-will, and

natural friendliness for American students on the part of Moscow university students.” If

he, “a student bearing the taint of US Embassy association,” received such a warm

welcome, then there was no doubt in his mind that “full-time American students would

get an even warmer welcome” from their Soviet counterparts.30 The early arrival of her

fifth child in April 1963 obliged Rebecca Matlock, the wife of a U.S. Embassy officer, to

make use of Soviet medical facilities for childbirth. After giving birth to a healthy baby

boy, she spent ten days at the Scientific-Research Institute for Obstetrics and Gynecology of the RSFSR Ministry of Health in Moscow for observation and recuperation, as was customary for all new mothers in the Soviet Union. Over the course of nearly two weeks, she found everyone at the hospital “quite willing and anxious to be helpful and friendly.”

The Soviet nurses, as well as her Bulgarian and North Vietnamese roommates, “enjoyed very much asking and answering personal questions relating to families and everyday affairs,” paying no heed to her American nationality “as far as conversation was concerned.” Not once during her hospital stay did anyone broach any political subject.31

Debbie Sherwood, a vivacious twenty-nine-year-old magazine writer from New

York City, experienced uninhibited Russian hospitality when she attended a civil wedding ceremony at a Leningrad marriage palace (Dvorets brakosochetaniia) with her

30 John A. Baker, Jr., “First Year of Class Attendance of the History Faculty of the Moscow State University,” in “Observations in Various Universities in the Soviet Union,” May 14, 1958, 6, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 31 Rebecca Matlock, “Ten Days in A Soviet Maternity Hospital,” May 28, 1963, 14, RG 59, Bilateral Political Relations (hereafter BPR), Box 3, 1241(c) – Hospitals 1943-1963.

Intourist guide, Natasha. The instant the bride (“a plump, sweet-faced brunette”) and the

groom (“very handsome”) officially sealed the bonds of matrimony with a tender kiss,

friends surrounded the happy couple to offer them their heartfelt congratulations.32 “Men kissed men. Women kissed women. Men kissed women—and vice versa.” Sherwood found the tumultuous scene that unfolded before her eyes reminiscent of a movie poster she had once seen. The title of the movie, she noted, was Orgy at Lil’s Place.

Before she knew what was happening, Sherwood received “a wet kiss” from “[a] strong, heavy-set man” too wound up by the occasion to notice that she was not a member of the wedding party. The unexpected kiss fixed everyone’s attention firmly on

Sherwood, who looked in bewilderment at the unfamiliar but smiling Soviet faces all around her. The general state of confusion did not last long, however, since one of the men sent everyone, including Natasha, into a laughing frenzy with his boisterous proclamation, “Rizhaya! The redhead! Pavel kissed the redhead!” When the convulsions of laughter finally subsided, it was decided unanimously by members of the wedding party that every man present should give Sherwood and Natasha a kiss, and so “one by

one, the male members of the group brushed our cheeks with their lips” in “a mock

performance” of the ritual.33 The celebration came to an end when an official escorted the

rambunctious wedding party, with Sherwood and Natasha in tow, to “a small, candle-lit

room,” furnished with “elegant crystal wine glasses and bottles of champagne in buckets

of ice,” where toasts to the newlyweds were made.34

32 Debbie Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1969), 152. 33 Ibid., 154. 34 Ibid., 156.

The marriage palace in Kharkov was conducting brisk business when Americans

dropped by for a visit in 1967. William Dyess, assistant administrative officer at the U.S.

Embassy in Moscow, was informed that “one nuptial knot” was tied there every 15

minutes. Considering the swift and impersonal pace of operations at the palace, it is not

surprising that Dyess found the civil marriage ceremony “as cold and businesslike as any

conducted by a Las Vegas marriage mill,” notably using the United States as a point of

reference. Even though he was not too impressed with what he saw at the Kharkov

marriage palace that day, namely, the utilitarian transformation of a marriage ceremony

into something akin to a business transaction between two parties, the American diplomat

was quite taken by the commonplace friendliness of the Soviet people he had met there.

The fact that Dyess and his travel companion, John Jacobs, chief editor of Amerika, were

“complete strangers” from a distant shore did not preclude one of the wedding parties

from insisting that the two Americans join in the celebration and even pose for pictures

with the newlyweds.35

Perhaps no group of Soviet citizens displayed a friendlier attitude toward the

United States and a more abiding interest in American culture than the jovial members of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra. Gabriel Reiner, the president of Cosmos Travel

Bureau, met them on board a Prague-bound train in 1958. Sharing a train car with a

Russian-speaking American for ten hours gave the excited crowd of Soviet musicians plenty of time to satiate their thirst for knowledge about the United States, even though

he found them “very well informed about all American musicians.” Besides showering

Reiner with questions, every passenger carefully perused an issue of Amerika, a Russian-

35 William J. Dyess, “Trip Report – Kharkov, Yalta, and North Caucasus,” September 26, 1967, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 16, PPB-7 1967.

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language current affairs magazine published by the United States Information Agency

(USIA), cover to cover before handing it over to the next anxiously awaiting reader.

When the musicians asked Reiner to show them an American newspaper, “especially one

with a lot of advertising,” he distributed several copies of the Paris edition of the New

York Herald Tribune around and watched their faces light up with unbridled joy at the

sight of lavish advertisements. He had the impression that his Soviet travel companions

greeted every advertisement “as though it were a piece of great literature.” Recounting

his entertaining train ride in a letter to a State Department official, the globetrotting travel

agent offered the telling observation that he had “never met with a friendlier crowd of

foreigners who were so interested in life in the United States and who were so

sympathetic to the United States.” When an American reported that a group of Soviets

were of the opinion that “the United States is just great!” there was clearly a glitch in the

oppositional logic of the Cold War. 36

“Warm feelings”

A simple request for directions incited “a medium-sized riot” in Kharkov.37 As

soon as Nila Magidoff inquired as to the whereabouts of the local campground, half a

dozen taxi drivers surrounded the rented Volga that Irene Kampen was driving. There

was clearly a vigorous disagreement over the optimal route since the taxi drivers were

“shouting and brandishing their fists and jumping up and down and shoving each other”

right in the middle of the street. “We are in Ukraine now. In Ukraine this is normal means

36 Gabriel Reiner, Letter to Edward L. Freers, November 1, 1958, 2, RG 59, BPR, Am Visits to the Soviet Union, Box 13, 1631(g) – Cosmos Travel Bureau. 37 Irene Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold or Living Relatives? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 57.

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of discussing the situation,” Magidoff calmly informed Kampen.38 A “burly Ukrainian”

fellow put an end to the commotion by jumping in the back seat of Kampen’s Volga,

slamming the door shut, and ordering her to drive.

Once Kampen took off, the newfound companion properly introduced himself to

the American tourists in English: “My name is Feodor Ignatich. I speak wonderful

marvelous English. I met American soldiers during the war. Americans are wonderful.

Don’t believe what you hear on the radio that Russian people don’t like Americans.

Russians love Americans. I love Americans. I will take you to my home and show you

my wife and my son. We will drink a glass of wine together.”39 Marital strife precluded

Kampen and Magidoff from meeting Feodor’s wife. “Unfortunately my wife and I are not

on speaking terms at present time,” Feodor informed his guests. The divorced Kampen

assured him that such a state of affairs was all too common in the United States as well.

They did have a toast with his seven-year-old son, Andrei, who, according to Feodor, would remember the day he first met Americans for the rest of his life, and another toast with his friend, Gavril, who, according to Feodor, also loved Americans because they had liberated him from German captivity during the Second World War.40

The wartime experiences of Feodor and Gavril demonstrate how the living memory of the Soviet-U.S. alliance against Nazi Germany during WWII remained a powerful antidote to anti-American propaganda in the USSR. A Soviet teacher, whom Edward

Hurwitz met on a flight from Moscow to Kiev in 1958, evoked the generous assistance

the United States had provided to its Soviet ally during the war as an explanation for his

38 Ibid., 56. 39 Ibid., 57. 40 Ibid., 58.

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“thoroughly anti-regime and pro-American” views. He admonished the American

diplomat not to confuse the pronouncements made by Soviet leaders with the opinions

held by ordinary Soviet citizens, especially concerning the U.S. and its people. American

“efforts during the war, particularly Land-Lease aid which was visible to every Soviet

soldier, had built up a tremendous feeling of good-will towards the USA.”41 The teacher,

who had served on the front lines, pointed out that the jeeps Soviet soldiers drove, the

clothes they wore, and the rations they ate were all American-made. “You may not have liked them,” he told the skeptical Hurwitz about the C-rations, “but to us they were

delicacies.”42 The teacher’s views perfectly exemplified the observation made by Robert

Martens, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that “Soviet citizens who express warm feelings for the United States often recall the years of wartime cooperation with specific references to American equipment and, especially, food supplies.”43 Try as

it might, the Communist Party could not efface this enduring legacy of wartime

cooperation, the Soviet teacher assured Hurwitz. The only thing it could try to do was

confine heartfelt expressions of good will toward the United States and its people to the

private sphere of interpersonal relations.44

The wartime experience also colored the worldview of ordinary Soviet citizens whom U.S. Embassy officers had the good fortune to meet in the western Ukrainian city

of Lvov. Lewis Bowden and Ralph Jones were enjoying an after-dinner cup of coffee in the dining room of Lvov’s Intourist hotel in 1959, when one of the guests approached

41 Edward Hurwitz, “Conversation with Soviet Teacher,” September 24, 1958, 2, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 42 Ibid., 3, 43 Martens, “Some Observations,” 5. 44 Hurwitz, “Conversation with Soviet Teacher,” 2.

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their table and invited them to join a birthday party for his co-worker.45 The slightly

inebriated birthday boy turned out to be a WWII veteran. He reminisced with great

fondness about meeting American soldiers at the Elbe River in Germany in 1945,

insisting that they were “all good guys (khloptsy) whom he would very much like to meet

again.” The American diplomats were struck by the intensity and candor with which the

Soviet veteran expressed his affection for Americans, his impaired condition

notwithstanding. “He repeated at least 50 times during the course of the evening what

fine people the Americans are and how happy he was to be spending his 33rd birthday in

the company of two representatives of the American people.”46 It would seem that the

stiff Soviet champagne and the unexpected arrival of American guests at his table

awakened the dormant, but not forgotten, emotions associated with a joyous and hopeful

occasion of Soviet-U.S. cooperation against a common foe. Another veteran, a Red Army

captain, struck up a conversation with Culver Gleysteen at the Lvov airport cafeteria in

1961. He assured the American diplomat that “ordinary Russians of his generation have

not forgotten American aid to the USSR during World War II” and insisted that it was

“essential” for the two superpowers to repair their strained bilateral relations at once.47

The train ride from Moscow to Kiev in 1959, gave Morris Rothenberg, second

secretary at the U.S. Embassy, plenty of time to get acquainted with his traveling

companion, an elderly Soviet engineer en route to western Ukraine. As luck would have

it, the engineer was a WWII veteran who “recalled with great pleasure and admiration his

45 Ralph A. Jones, “Kiev, Lvov, Uzhgorod, April 1959,” May 8, 1959, 5, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 46 Ibid., 6. 47 Culver Gleysteen, “Observations of Political Interest on Trip to Western Ukraine,” November 30, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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contacts with the US Army on the Elbe.” Soviet troops, he told Rothenberg, were

immensely impressed by the “endless stream” of American aid flowing to the Soviet

Union during the war, all the more so since “the US was engaged in a war effort of its

own” in the Pacific.48 The fact that a Soviet citizen felt comfortable enough to express his

“great admiration” for President Dwight D. Eisenhower to an American diplomat in the

midst of the Cold War demonstrates the subversive potential that the living memory of

wartime camaraderie could have among Soviet citizens.49

The taxi driver assigned by the Intourist office in Irkutsk to drive Wayne Smith and

Joseph Sherman to the Hydrology Institute and Museum on Lake Baikal in 1967

happened to be a veteran of the Soviet Armored Forces.50 As his “rather tired Volga

taxicab bounded gamely from rut to rut,” the gregarious driver expressed his heartfelt

appreciation for “the military aid and equipment the US and the UK supplied during the

Great Patriotic War.” He had fought the Germans in British-made Churchill and

American-made Sherman tanks and had nothing but high praise for both machines, which

were supplied under the Lend-Lease program to the Soviet Union by the Allies.51 The open and friendly demeanor of this member of the Communist Party with U.S. Embassy officers demonstrated, once again, how past experiences of wartime cooperation informed present attitudes.

“Great pleasure”

48 Morris Rothenberg, “Trip to Kiev,” June 2, 1959, 1, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1). 49 Ibid., 2. 50 Joseph Sherman and Wayne Smith, “Air Trip to Maritime Province and Siberia Shows Another Face of the USSR,” October 24, 1967, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, Int 6. 51 Ibid., 4.

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American popular culture bridged the ideological divide between the two

superpowers, bringing Soviets, especially the youth, into contact with the latest trends in

music, dance, theater, cinema, and literature.52 Popular fascination with American cultural productions helped to defuse Cold War tensions and transformed potential foes and critics into eager consumers and devoted fans.

As Americans discovered wherever they traveled in the USSR, ordinary people were infatuated with American popular music. More often than not, MGU students played tape recordings of Voice of America’s popular program, “Music USA,” at the small dances they organized, with official permission, in the dormitories.53 At a party at

Leningrad’s House of Culture (Dom kul’tury), a Soviet worker implored Robert

Westbrook to demonstrate “American rock ‘n roll” to the assembled members of the

proletariat. Although “the rhythm was all wrong” because the orchestra played “painfully

slow, unfamiliar fox-trot music,” Westbrook and his partner, Mary Ellen Fisher,

“managed to give the Russians an idea of what the American dance looked like.”54 At a dance at a summer camp in Ukraine, Westbrook and Fisher once again demonstrated rock

‘n’ roll—this time, however, to the tune of a jazz record—while Soviet campers

“gathered around and clapped almost in rhythm to the beat.”55 When they concluded the

demonstration, they were surrounded by “a half-dozen Russians…begging to learn the

American dance.”56 Before Irene Kampen and Nila Magidoff boarded the Soviet

52 For an excellent overview of America’s cultural presence in the Soviet Union, see Marsha Siefert, “From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia,” in The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 185-217. 53 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Miscellaneous Notes From Conversations with Soviet Citizens,” January 22, 1959, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 54 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 92. 55 Ibid., 132-133. 56 Ibid., 133.

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steamship Litva (Lithuania) to begin their journey across the Black Sea from Sochi to

Odessa, a female Intourist guide, who had escorted them to the pier, asked Kampen if she

was personally acquainted with Elvis Presley. Kampen was not, but it turned out that

Magidoff had met him on a lecture tour in California. “Very nice boy but chews too

much gum” was the impression of the American icon that she shared with the star-struck

Intourist guide.57

Soviets’ interest in and affection for American music was not confined solely to

rock ‘n’ roll, however. Strolling down the busy streets of Moscow on Youth Day, June

30, 1958, an American tourist unexpectedly stumbled upon an incredible scene of

American acculturation in Gorky Park. Exuberant Soviet youngsters were “instructing

bystanders in jitterbug” to the unmistakable riffs of jazz performed by “a small combo”

of Soviet pedigree.58 On the train ride from Tskhaltubo in western Georgia to the resort city of Sochi, Kampen and Magidoff, shared a compartment with two young Soviet women, Nadia and Katerina. After learning that neither Kampen nor Magidoff had ever attended the Newport Jazz Festival, Nadia informed them that she and Katerina “love

American jazz—all American music, for that matter.”59

During their visit to Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, in 1960, U.S. Embassy

officers had the pleasure of attending a concert by the Baku Symphony Orchestra and

greatly enjoyed the performance of works by the eminent American composers, Edward

MacDowell and George Gershwin. They learned that MacDowell’s compositions were

performed in Baku for the first time, while Gershwin’s had not been performed there

57 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 126. 58 Ralph A. Jones, “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” August 12, 1958, 13, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 59 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 110.

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since the late 1930s.60 The “quite a few concerts” of American folk songs that Dr. Irwin

Weil, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University, gave with his guitar “at

pioneer campfires, at schools, and in a few cafes” were “always received very warmly”

by Soviet audiences, especially children.61 Debbie Sherwood accepted a dinner invitation

from Alexis, an inquisitive Soviet youth she had met on the streets of Moscow, only to

discover that he intended to marry her. Even though she did not prove too amenable to

his marriage proposal, Alexis still tried to convince her to come over to his place to enjoy

some “moosika” and mentioned the names of American artists—Frank Sinatra, Nat King

Cole, and Jim Reeves—whose records he owned.62

U.S. diplomats visiting Moldavia and the Soviet Far East, two far-flung corners of the USSR, in 1961 chronicled an interesting musical coincidence, which attested to the widespread popularity and influence of American popular culture. In April, Robert Owen and Kempton Jenkins were dining at a Kishinev hotel when they heard the house band perform “a ‘hot rendition’ of the Chatanooga [sic] Choo-choo.”63 A month later, William

Morrell and William Horbaly heard the same Glenn Miller tune blaring out from a Soviet

youth club located right next to their Intourist hotel in Khabarovsk.64 How did the same

piece of music surface simultaneously at such disparate locales? Owen and Jenkins

learned the answer to that compelling question when they approached the members of the

hotel band during a brief intermission to express “their great pleasure at finding

60 Julian F. MacDonald, “Observations Based on Trip to Tbilisi, Baku and Ashkhabad (November 27- December 4),” January 3, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 61 Irwin Weil, “Letter to Steve Viederman,” July 5, 1963, 5, IREX, RC 200, GSE 62-3: Mid-year, final, and travel reports. 62 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 109. 63 Robert I. Owen and Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov, April 3-7, 1961,” April 25, 1961, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Records 1961. 64 William N. Morrell, Jr. and William Horbaly, “Miscellaneous Observations: Irkutsk and Khabarovsk,” May 30, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Records 1961.

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American popular music in the capital of the Moldavian Soviet Republic.” The 1941

Hollywood film Sun Valley Serenade, featuring the Glenn Miller Orchestra, had been playing in Kishinev recently and the band incorporated some of popular musical numbers from it, including the “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” into their repertoire.65 Therefore,

American cultural productions not only reached the Soviet periphery, but they also

facilitated cultural diffusion.

While Soviets were undoubtedly enamored with American popular music, they also

unabashedly expressed their admiration for American literature, theater, and cinema. As

they shared a nightcap at the Oryol tourist camp in central Russia, Dimitri, the camp’s

director, informed Kampen that “Mock [sic] Twain is your greatest American writer,”

then added after a pause, “Also Ernest Hemingway and Jack London.”66 After disclosing that he also liked Hollywood movies, Dimitri named Mario Lanza as his favorite movie star, only to learn from Kampen the devastating news that Lanza had passed away.67

Nadia confirmed the enduring popularity of Hemingway, London, and Twain with Soviet

university students on the train ride with Kampen and Magidoff. Prompted by her friend,

Katerina, she added J. D. Salinger’s name to the list of venerated American authors.

Describing Salinger as a “marvelous writer,” Nadia assured the surprised Kampen that he

was “very very popular here in the Soviet Union.”68 Before getting off the train in

Sukhumi, however, Nadia remembered that she forgot to tell her erstwhile companions

the “name of most popular American author at University of Kiev, Mr. Theodore

65 Owen and Jenkins, “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov,” 7. On the transnational class appeal of the Glenn Miller classic hit, see Marek Korczynski, “Music for the Labour(ed) Movements: Why the Chattanooga Choo-Choo rather than The International Became the Song to Unite the Human Race,” Labour History Review 68 (April 2003): 129-138. 66 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 46. 67 Ibid., 47. 68 Ibid., 109.

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Dreiser.”69 The Yakub Kolas Belorussian Drama Theater in Vitebsk did not confine its artistic repertoire to traditional productions, its provincial location notwithstanding.

When Serge Taube and Edward Hurwitz, political officers at the U.S. Embassy in

Moscow, visited the theater in 1970, they found the local company in the midst of hurried

preparations for the premiere of a Belorussian-language production of Jerome Robbins’ hit musical, West Side Story.70

On June 2, 1966, Glenn Schweitzer, science attaché at the U.S. Embassy, attended

a two-hour screening of documentary science films at MGU for the delegates to the

Second International Oceanographic Congress. The three American films shown that

evening, Waves Across the Pacific, History—Layer by Layer, and The Earth Beneath the

Sea, were well received by some 800 oceanographers in attendance, 750 of whom were

Soviets. The audience made “audible, favorable noises” during the films and applauded

loudly at their conclusion. “The most significant aspect of the evening,” according to

Schweitzer, “was the glaring contrast between the excellent quality and scientific content

of the American films and the rather pathetic cinematographic efforts of the Soviets,” a

contrast which he thought was obvious to all those present.71 In 1969, John Reuther, an

American exchange student at MGU, arranged a public showing of the Russian-language

version of the United States Information Agency’s propaganda film Apollo 11, with

69 Ibid., 111. Since the overriding purpose of the Soviet foreign literature translation program was “to supplement the propaganda line on the decadence or depravity of capitalist society,” only the works of American “protest writers,” whose art had “an important social and political aspect,” were widely available in the USSR. USIA, Office of Research and Assessment, “Exploitation of American Protest Writers in USSR Book Translation Program,” November 2, 1973, ii and 5, RG 306, Research Reports, 1960-1999, Box 41, R-26-73. 70 Serge Taube and Edward Hurwitz, “Trip Report – Vitebsk (September 26, 1970),” October 7, 1970, 3, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 8, EDX-7: Visits, 1970. 71 Glenn E. Schweitzer, “Flipping Flip Flips ‘Em: USIA Films, Exhibits and Photographs at Oceanographic Congress,” June 7, 1966, 1, RG 84, Unclassified Central Subject Files, P 633, Box 1, MP-9 Motion Pictures 1966.

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technical assistance from the agency itself. Due to the unexpected turnout by Soviet

students and faculty, estimated at 900, Reuther had to screen the film five times to

overflow audiences over the course of the evening but, after each showing, the audience

response was always the same—loud cheers and “stormy applause.”72

Glossy, colorful magazines were another object of fascination in the Soviet Union.

On a publication procurement trip to Tallinn, the capital of Soviet Estonia, in 1961, U.S.

Embassy officers, Frederick Brown and Joseph Hayes stumbled upon a used bookstore

tucked out of view in a back street in the old city. They were not surprised to see “the

usual supply of Marxist-Leninist classics” for sale at the store—indeed, they had

expected it. What they did find quite amazing was the sight of “[a]n eager crowd of

browsers and buyers” gathered around “a full counter of used American and Western

European magazines such as Vogue, House Beautiful, Stern.” Neither the relatively high

price (two rubles and up) nor the used condition of the magazines seemed to dampen

consumer interest.73

Soviet nurses in a Moscow hospital where Rebecca Matlock, the wife of a U.S.

Embassy officer, recuperated after giving birth did not even try to conceal their

fascination with the American magazines she had brought with her to pass the time. She

was happy to report that the copies of The New Yorker were particularly in demand.

While some nurses glanced furtively through the magazines during the day, keeping a

wary eye on the glass door of Matlock’s room, others borrowed them at night when they

had ample time (and privacy) to carefully examine each and every page. Seeing the

72 “Apollo-11 Film at Moscow State University,” October 29, 1969, 2, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 7, EDX 22: Special Projects, 1970. 73 Frederick Z. Brown and Joseph P. Hayes, “Observations on Trip to Riga and Tallinn, February 8-11, 1967,” 2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, Int 6. Stern was a West German weekly news magazine.

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nurses “draw in their breaths at some of the display-advertisements, particularly of room interiors,” belied their frequent assurances to Matlock that “they were interested only in the fashions.”74

“They’re better than ours”

Much like popular culture, American technology captivated Soviet citizens of all

ages, occupations, and nationalities. However, their earnest fascination with the latest

American gadgets, both large and small, offered a tacit, and at times explicit, admission

of the comparative backwardness of the Soviet Union in technological innovation,

particularly the production and design of durable consumer goods. The iconic Polaroid

instant camera made an immediate and profound impression whenever and wherever

Americans used it in public. When a Soviet militiaman pulled Irene Kampen over for

running over a Soviet chicken on the way to Oryol, Nila Magidoff, instructed her to “take

Polaroid of him” to present as a “souvenir from America.”75 In Yerevan, the capital of

Soviet Armenia, Magidoff once again instructed Kampen to “take Polaroid of

Militiaman” at a local park. A small crowd that gathered to watch Kampen snap a picture

of the militiaman, who eagerly struck a pose, “breathed in admiration” when she

presented the finished photograph to him.76 Kampen then snapped a picture of a local

mustachioed cameraman with “an ancient Leica hanging around his neck,” who, gushing

that “never before in his life has he seen anything so wonderful as this photograph,”

74 Rebecca Matlock, “Ten Days in A Soviet Maternity Hospital,” May 28, 1963, 13, RG 59, BPR, Subject Files, Box 3, 1241(c) – Hospitals 1943-1963. 75 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 35. 76 Ibid., 89.

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proposed to buy the Polaroid camera.77 The day after showcasing American technological

prowess to an enchanted audience in one of Yerevan’s public parks, “a pleasant-faced

woman” approached Kampen and Magidoff at their hotel and asked if they would take a

picture of her son, home on leave from the army.78 Kampen snapped a picture of the

happy family—father, mother, and son—while Magidoff told the grateful father that the

photograph was a complimentary souvenir from America.79

Morris Rothenberg and Hans Tuch did not make the decision to bring a Polaroid

camera with them to Minsk and Riga in 1959 on a whim. It was just the kind of

“gimmick” they needed to make a lasting impression. “Everywhere we went in Minsk

and Riga and on our train trip,” the American diplomats reported, the Polaroid camera

attracted “immediate attention when we used it and provided us with the opening for

some very pleasant and interesting contacts.” Rothenberg and Tuch photographed each

other on a busy street corner in Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belorussia, for the express

purpose of eliciting a reaction from passersby. It did not take long for an excited crowd of

25 to 30 people, eager to see the instant camera in action and talk with foreign visitors in

person, to surround them. The unexpected commotion attracted the attention of a local

militiaman who chided the American diplomats for obstructing pedestrian traffic and told

them to move on.80 However, the whole scene repeated itself as soon as Rothenberg and

Tuch stopped a few hundred feet away to take a picture of a Soviet man. This time, the

militiaman directed the amateur photographers to a nearby square where, he assured

77 Ibid., 89-91. 78 Ibid., 93. 79 Ibid., 94. 80 Morris Rothenberg and Hans N. Tuch, “Trip Report: Minsk, Riga,” May 19, 1959, 8, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological.

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them, they “would have plenty of room to take pictures.” Rothenberg and Tuch

photographed “several friendly bystanders in front of a large statue of Stalin,” which

dominated the square, and handed the pictures, inscribed with greetings from America on

the back, to the delighted Soviets.81

The Polaroid camera proved even more popular than Nikita Khrushchev, at least on

the train from Minsk to Riga. Rothenberg and Tuch were taking pictures and enjoying a

“friendly conversation” with a small group of Soviet passengers and train personnel when

all of a sudden Khrushchev’s unmistakable voice boomed over the train’s loudspeakers.

One of the Soviet passengers “immediately announced that everyone should go into the

compartment to listen to Nikita Sergeyevich.” Given the Americans’ gnawing suspicion

that the man was a KGB agent assigned to keep tabs on them, it was not at all surprising

that he sought to set an example for his fellow citizens and headed to his compartment

without further ado. Not one person followed the man’s lead, however. Everyone was

much more interested in seeing “what the next Polaroid photo would look like when it

was produced from the camera” than listening to another of Khrushchev’s speeches.82

In Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia, the Polaroid camera brought to light not only instant photographs but also otherwise hidden tensions between Latvians and Russians.

Rothenberg and Tuch honored the request of a Latvian butcher and photographed him standing behind a counter at the local meat market. In the minute it took to develop the picture, the American diplomats found themselves “surrounded by a large group of friendly butchers, all of whom clamored to have their picture taken.” The Latvian

81 Ibid., 9. 82 Ibid.

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butchers, who gave the unexpected visitors a warm and hearty welcome, insisted that

Rothenberg and Tuch sign every photograph they took on the back for them.

Unfortunately, the discordant sound of a militiaman’s whistle disrupted the lively

affair. The “somewhat inebriated” militia lieutenant, who arrived on the scene, was

“obviously a Russian” intent on asserting his authority. Rothenberg and Tuch thought he

purposely “took a heavy-handed attitude toward the Latvian butchers” since “[h]e kept

waving his arms, blowing his whistle, and speaking very rudely” to them. The Latvian

butchers did not take kindly to the Russian’s belligerent behavior and resisted his order to

disperse. One of them advised him to mind his language since “we are simple workers

and not politicians,” while another rebuked him for making a bad impression on the

American guests: “We don’t see Americans very often here and we want them to feel at

home among us.” A few of the butchers extricated Rothenberg and Tuch from the

unpleasant squabble and took them to another part of the market where they could resume

the impromptu photoshoot. The American diplomats finally left the market when they ran

out of film.83

Tuch, who served as the press and cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy, and

William Peterson, a USIA officer, followed the same routine with the Polaroid camera

few weeks later in Baku and Tbilisi and obtained the same results. They made a point to

take a picture with the camera at the restaurant of the Intourist hotel in Baku and were

immediately besieged with requests and admonitions from fellow diners, who were

“fascinated by the camera,” for photographs.84 The fascination with the camera was only

83 Ibid. 84 Hans N. Tuch, “Trip Report: Baku and Tbilisi, April 30 to May 5, 1959,” May 29, 1959, 1, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological.

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part of the story, however. The Soviet diners were not interested in the camera in and of

itself but used its fortuitous appearance at the restaurant as a convenient pretext to invite

the American visitors “to sit down and share drinks and conversation” with them.85 Tuch

and Peterson were happy to report that the Polaroid camera “produced the expected

reaction throughout the railroad car” as they headed to Tbilisi. The usual requests for

snapshots came from passengers and railroad personnel alike. The American diplomats

followed the advice of their fellow passengers and took pictures of local bystanders

during the train’s three-minute layovers in small villages along the railroad. The locals

reacted with “utter astonishment” when Tuch and Peterson handed them “finished photos

just as the train was pulling away” from the station.86

American cars evoked the same passionate response as did the Polaroid camera, especially from Soviet men and boys. The most popular items on display at both the

“Transportation USA” exhibit in Kharkov in 1961 and the “Industrial Design USA” exhibit in Kiev in 1967, according to American diplomats, were one and the same. A travel trailer and “a Ford Fairlane on loan from the Embassy” were “the hits of the show” in Kharkov, while a camper and a Buick were regarded as “wonders from another world” by the audience in Kiev.87 William Watts, a U.S. Embassy officer who accompanied the

“Transportation USA” exhibit, did not think it was an accident that an automobile and a portable trailer attained such prominence. These mass-produced consumer goods, he contended, offered the Soviet visitors a “graphic illustration of the opportunities for an

85 Ibid., 2. 86 Ibid., 4. 87 William Watts, “‘Transportation USA’ in Kharkov,” January 18, 1962, 2. MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX 39: Jan-Jun 1962; Lyman Wilkison, “A Review of Audience Interest and Reaction at the ‘Industrial Design: USA’ Exhibit, Kiev (April 15-May 14, 1967),” May 30, 1967, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 19, TP-8 Industrial Design 1967 #2.

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American to move freely and at will,” opportunities which only few of them could enjoy at the moment.88

Richard Funkhouser, the counselor for economic affairs at the U.S. Embassy,

inadvertently disrupted the Permanent Exhibition of Achievements of the National

Economy (Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva, or VDNKh) in Moscow on

February 9, 1962. His American-made car, which he drove to the exhibit, attracted much

more attention from Soviet visitors than “the jet planes parked on the grounds or the

powerful trucks outside the machine building pavilion.”89 The fact that an American

automobile upstaged the nominal symbols of Soviet technological progress at the official

showcase devoted to the economic accomplishments of the USSR, of all places, was no

trifling matter. It affirmed, once more, the overriding importance of consumer goods in

the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds. While it is doubtful that few if any Soviets

actually aspired to own a fighter jet or a dump truck, many did hope to obtain a private

automobile at some point in their lives, which made them all the more interested in

Funkhouser’s foreign car.

Theodore Eliot, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, offered a couple

of perceptive observations about the popularity of American-made cars in the USSR.

“Soviet citizens, especially young boys, hang around in front of the Intourist hotels in

Moscow to photograph foreign cars,” he reported in 1958.90 A year later, Lewis Bowden spotted four Soviet youths, who appeared to him to be in their early twenties, admiring a

88 Watts, “‘Transportation USA’ in Kharkov,” 2. 89 Richard Funkhouser, “Visit to the Permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR,” February 12, 1962, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 90 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Automobiles,” May 22, 1958, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs 1958.

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new Cadillac Coupe de Ville parked right in front of a Moscow hotel. The exclamation

“What a fine car!” by one of them perfectly encapsulated their sentiments.91 Eliot also noted that “[e]mbassy cars outside of Moscow, and sometimes in the city, continue to be surrounded by large crowds” of Soviet admirers.92 David Mark was quite certain that his

Willys Jeep Station Wagon made a lasting impression in the USSR, an impression that went beyond mere fascination with an unusual foreign item. The phrase “an almost child- like interest…and inquisitiveness” which he used to describe the typical reaction to his station wagon suggested that American technology transformed Soviets into spellbound children unable to restrain themselves at the sight of this unusual automobile.93

On a sunny summer day, Carroll Woods overheard one of the Soviet boys gathered

around his 1961 Chevrolet station wagon inform his friend with an air of authority: “It’s a

foreign car—they’re better than ours.”94 U.S. Embassy officers reported that their 1964

Plymouth sedan was “the object of intense interest” throughout the week-long automobile

tour of the North Caucasus and Ukraine in 1967. However, “groups of ordinary Soviet

citizens,” who would gather around the Plymouth wherever the Americans stopped on

their journey, did not settle for a superficial examination. They peered inside, requested

that the hood be raised, and showered the Americans with detailed questions about the

car, such as its horsepower, top speed, and engine’s cubic capacity.95

91 Lewis W. Bowden, “Educational Effect of the U.S. Exhibition,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, October 6, 1959, 28, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 92 Eliot, “Automobiles,” 3. 93 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Miscellaneous Observations on the Soviet Scene,” April 8, 1958, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs 1958. 94 Carroll H. Woods, “Miscellaneous Economic Notes,” May 18, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 95 William Andreas Brown, William T. Shinn, and David Schoonover, “Trip Report – Mineralniye Vody- Pyatigorsk-Rostov-Zaporozhye (via Kharkov)-Yalta-Novaya Kakhovka-Kharkov (April 22-28, 1967),” June 16, 1967, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 9, POL 2-5 Info Tel 1967.

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The ability to compare Soviet- and American-made products firsthand left at least

two Soviet citizens convinced of the superiority of American technology. A friendly

barber struck up a conversation with Mary Owen, the wife of a U.S. Embassy officer,

when she brought her three children to a Moscow barbershop in 1959. At one point

during their talk, while her two sons were getting their hair cut, the barber retrieved a pair

of scissors from his table and showed it to Owen, directing her attention to the inscribed

trademark. “It was American, made in Wisconsin,” she noted. When she asked him if he

also had a Soviet-made pair, he replied that he did but it was not nearly as good as the

American one.96 The film director Anatoli Slesarenko had an urgent request for David

Mark, first secretary of the U.S. Embassy, when the two men met at Moscow’s Ukraine

Hotel in 1958. He was in desperate need of “another supply of Gillette double-edged razor blades” after using up all the blades he had received from another U.S. Embassy officer a while back. Slesarenko grumbled that he simply “could not readjust himself to even the best Soviet blades which now merely scraped along his skin” after experiencing

“so marvelous a shave” as he did with the American-made razor blades for the first time in his life.97

“How well do Americans really live?”

In addition to expressing their admiration for the people, culture, and technology of the United States, Soviets also seized the opportunity when meeting Americans face-to-

face to ask the burning questions about everyday life in the United States which they

96 Mrs. Robert I. Owen, “A Visit to the Barber’s,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, February 9, 1959, 17, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 97 David E. Mark, “Meeting with Ukrainian Film Director,” December 12, 1958, 4, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological.

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carried in the back of their minds. The questions that they invariably posed were sincere

attempts to get first-hand information, especially quantitative data, concerning the

relative quality of life in the United States in order to make informed comparisons with

their own lives in the USSR without state interference.

Most of the conversations that Robert Westbrook had in the Soviet Union began

with the same three questions: “[W]hat my father did, how much he earned, and what

kind of a house I lived in.”98 The two questions that American guides traveling in the

USSR with the “Plastics: USA” and “Transportation: USA” exhibits in 1961 had to

answer most frequently concerned the wages of American workers, both blue- and white-

collar, and “[t]he prices of all kinds of goods and services,” including “food, clothing,

housing, automobiles and other durables.”99 More often than not, the answers quite

literally shocked the Soviets. They visited American exhibits “prepared to concede that

most Americans enjoy[ed] a higher standard of living than most Soviet citizens,” but few

expected “the gap to be as wide as it [was].”100

On a crowded Moscow bus, Alex, an Armenian medical student, asked Westbrook

a straightforward question: “Why don’t American workers come to visit the Soviet

Union?” Westbrook’s answer that the American worker was not interested in traveling abroad because “he would rather spend his money on a boat, or a new car, or even a new house” did not persuade Alex. “Why isn’t the worker interested in traveling, when the rich American is? Is this because the rich man receives a better education than the

98 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 129. 99 Alexander G. Park, “The Soviet People View America,” January 9, 1962, 5-6, RG 306, Research Reports, 1960-1999, Box 2, R-1-62. 100 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev, September 11-17, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” September 23, 1969, 11, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs and Expositions, 1970.

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children of the worker?”101 Sonya, an LGU student, wanted to know if Westbrook lived

in a house and how many rooms did the house have and if he had a color television and

an automobile.102 Her bewilderment at the “fantastic” news that most Americans owned a

color television set and a car told American readers as much about the Soviet Union as it

did about the United States.103 Westbrook’s political joke about Dwight Eisenhower,

which he told “to show that Americans are able to laugh at their own system,” left his

Soviet friends bewildered and prompted one of them to inquire: “Do you mean that

people actually told this joke while Eisenhower was in office?”104 Once again,

Westbrook’s point was not hard to grasp for readers back home.

While Debbie Sherwood was enjoying a nice dinner of caviar on black bread with

red wine, Alexis, her Soviet companion for the evening, finally summoned the courage to

ask her about life in the United States. He was interested in the specifics: the number of

rooms in her apartment and the amount of money she made a week. Sherwood’s weekly

earnings proved so astounding that he wrote the number down on the tablecloth, “just to

make sure he’d heard in right.”105 James Robinson, a sixty-one-year-old electrical engineer from Los Angeles, shared a train compartment with Tanya, a high school

English teacher from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, on board the Vladivostok-

Moscow Express in 1962. After he identified as a Republican in answer to Tanya’s question about his party affiliation, she wanted to know why Robinson was a Republican

(“I used to be a Democrat, but disliked Truman”) and not a Communist (“We don’t have

101 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 58. 102 Ibid., 83. 103 Ibid., 85. 104 Ibid., 135, 136. The joke Westbrook told was “Have you heard of the new Eisenhower doll? You wind it up and it does nothing for eight years.” 105 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 109.

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any identifiable Communists”) and whether the Republican Party occupied the right or

the left side of the political spectrum in the United States.106

Even though Irene Kampen and Nila Magidoff visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1969, they still had to field questions about the assassination of John F.

Kennedy. The chief doctor of a mine workers’ sanatorium in Tskhaltubo in western

Georgia had one final question for his American “patients” before bidding them farewell.

“The question is,” Magidoff translated, “how come we Americans allowed President

Kennedy to be killed.” This very question, according to the chief doctor, had troubled mine workers (and their wives) staying at the sanatorium but they were simply too polite to ask it.107 After inquiring about the price of Kampen’s cotton dress, the “two most

important questions” that Nadia and Katerina wanted Kampen and Magidoff to answer on

the train to Sochi were “why you Americans allowed President Kennedy to be shot?” and

“why you Americans allowed Jackie Kennedy to marry that fat old Greek man?”108

“Let’s make like the Beatles”

American travelers related personal accounts of constructive encounters with

Soviets to demonstrate to their compatriots that the ideological chasm between the two

political systems could at times be bridged through human contact. If ordinary Soviets

and Americans could put their political differences aside and enjoy each other’s

company, even if only for a brief period of time, then there was at least a glimmer of

hope that Soviet and American leaders would follow suit and find a peaceful modus

106 James M. Robinson, Americanski Journalist: Ten Thousand Miles of Russia Through the Eyes of an American Observer (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1969), 97-98. 107 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 106. 108 Ibid., 109.

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vivendi for the sake of all humankind. The ample examples of friendly contacts between

Soviets and Americans belie the common depiction of the Cold War as a tense

geopolitical struggle for global supremacy conducted behind closed doors by hard-nosed

political elites in Moscow and Washington. Focusing solely on high politics impoverishes

the rich social history made at the grassroots.

Robert Westbrook spent his first day at the summer camp digging the foundation

for a new boathouse alongside two American and five Soviet teenagers. He found the

experience edifying. “The hard, physical labor” brought them all closer together since

“there was no time to remember political difference” as they “sweated and grunted” to

complete a shared task.109 When the young members of the Eastman Philharmonia

performed in Odessa in 1962, they had the opportunity to attend a rehearsal of the Odessa

Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra’s guest conductor, Abram L’vovich Stasevich

treated the American conservatory students in the audience to an unexpected yet pleasant

surprise by inviting them to join the seasoned Soviet musicians in rehearsing a short piece

by the prominent Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. Heyward Isham, the State

Department officer who escorted the Eastman Philharmonia on the first leg of its Soviet

tour, did not let the symbolic importance of the occasion he witnessed detract from the

proficiency and virtuosity of the musicians. He noted that “musicians of the two nations

played together harmoniously in what is considered by experts to be an extremely rare

form of collaboration.”110

109 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 128. 110 Heyward Isham, “Eastman Philharmonia’s Tour of U.S.S.R.” February 26, 1962, 4, MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX 39: Jan-June 1962.

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On May Day night, Debbie Sherwood found herself in the company of exuberant

Soviet teenagers singing and dancing to the strumming of guitars in Moscow’s Red

Square. After agreeing to sing an English-language song with one of the groups, she was astonished to hear the incredible words “Let’s make like the Beatles” reverberate through

Red Square. “As multi-colored May Day fireworks exploded over the Kremlin,”

Sherwood “stood in the middle of Red Square singing Beatle songs with a group of energetic Soviet teen-agers.”111 The universal language of music also helped bridge the

cultural chasm between American and Soviet students traveling on the Berlin-Moscow

Express. Upon re-boarding the express at the border town of Brest in western Belorussia,

a group of American students from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, on their way

to the Soviet capital, found themselves sharing a train car with Soviet university students

returning from a trip to the German Democratic Republic. It did not take long for the

young passengers to get acquainted and fill the whole car with the mellifluous sounds of

music. After all, song provided “a more relaxing means of communication” for the

students than “pointing at phrases in a Russian-English grammar book.” The Soviets

showed their appreciation for the “lively songs” performed by the Americans by clapping

heartily to the rhythm. “Their own songs were on the theme of work and brotherhood,”

Lucia Mouat, one of the American students, reported. As was the custom in the USSR,

the Soviet students presented “lapel pins of sputniks and Lenin” as gifts to their

newfound American friends.112

The leisurely pace at which the paddlewheel riverboat, Khirurg Vishnevskii

(Surgeon Vishnevsky), sailed up the Don River gave James Robinson plenty of time to

111 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 52. 112 Lucia Mouat, “Journey Via Berlin—Moscow Express,” Christian Science Monitor (May 17, 1960), 17.

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hold informal Russian-language classes on the foredeck, with help from Soviet

passengers. He would sit down with the Berlitz Phrase Book in hand and wait expectantly

for someone to try and strike a conversation with him in Russian. That would be the sign

for Robinson to retrieve a Russian-English dictionary from his cabin and give it to his

interlocutor. As more passengers joined the group, he would hand out a second Russian-

English dictionary and finally an English-Russian one to facilitate communication.113

Irwin Weil had a friendly and mundane chat with a Soviet mother while holding her three-year-old child on his shoulders for two hours during the 1963 May Day parade in

Moscow.114

Sherwood was strolling in Moscow’s Gorky Park when she heard “joyful shouting

mingled with what sounded like wails of dismay” coming from “a funny little wooden

house.” She paid the five-kopeck admission charge and found herself in a house of

mirrors, a place of “endless fascination” where “children and adults alike stood gazing

delightedly at their distorted reflections.”115 Sherwood felt compelled to capture the

exuberance and abandon she experienced inside the house of mirrors on film, so she

approached a Soviet woman and asked for permission to photograph her two lively

children, who were “preening gleefully in front of a ‘fat’ mirror.” The mother, taken

momentarily aback by the unexpected request, instructed Sherwood to wait while she

gave her kids “a speedy grooming” for the occasion—fixing loose braids, pulling up

saggy socks, and wiping smudges off cheeks. Once she spruced them up to her

satisfaction, the mother stepped back and Sherwood snapped a picture of the giggling

113 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 226. 114 Weil, “Letter to Steve Viederman,” 5-6. 115 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 92.

125 children with her camera. They were unsure, however, what to make of the sticks of chewing gum that Sherwood placed in their “chubby little hands” as a token of her gratitude.116

One of the two “hefty” sailors standing in front of a “thin” mirror called out in

English to Sherwood, who was making her way to the other end of the hall, that his friend wanted to have his picture taken. The other sailor registered his objection at once by turning scarlet red and smacking his friend, whose name was Anton, on the arm.117 When

Sherwood asked the flustered sailor, whom she retrospectively nicknamed “Scarlet Face,” to make up his mind, Anton assured her that his friend, who did not speak English, wanted her to take his picture so she would have something “to remember him by” in

America.118 Sherwood decided to play along with Anton, who was obviously good- naturedly teasing his friend. The sailor was surprised to see Sherwood point her camera at his reflection in the distorted mirror and promptly asked Anton to inquire why she was photographing him through the mirror. “Tell him,” Sherwood replied, “that I want to remember him as being thin.” Anton’s translation of her lighthearted response brought

“an appreciative chuckle” from everyone present in the room. Fortunately, the “worldly sailors knew exactly what to do” with the sticks of chewing gum Sherwood handed them after taking the picture, though they did register one pertinent complaint about her

“tokens of appreciation.” As Sherwood was making her way out of the house of mirrors, she heard Anton exclaim in surprise: “Hey! How come we can’t blow bubbles?”119

116 Ibid., 93. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 93-94. 119 Ibid., 94.

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Four American exchange students from MGU (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi

universitet, or Moscow State University), jumped at the opportunity to join “a small party

of Soviet workers and students” on “an overnight hike” on the outskirts of Moscow.

“While gathering firewood and cooking supper” at their secluded campsite, one of the

Americans fondly recalled, “we discussed everything from student life to the Formosa

crisis with our Soviet companions” without animosity or bitterness.120 Ralph Jones,

second secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, did not think twice about joining “a

mushroom gathering expedition” since it was his life’s ambition “to go mushroom

hunting and to learn how to tell the edible from the poisonous.” The bilateral expedition,

consisting of Jones and his two sons and four Russian friends, including a film studio

official and his geologist wife, an attorney, and a driver, traveled to the damp woods

outside Mikhnevo, a sleepy village some 80 miles south of Moscow.121 Not even the

muddy country roads and the gray cold weather could dampen Jones’s high spirits that

day. He found the whole experience “exhilarating,” not the least because everyone filled

their baskets to overflowing with mushrooms.122

The Russians, for their part, found the uninhibited and mischievous behavior of the

American boys exhilarating. They watched, with undisguised glee, the young rascals

“nimbly” climb the limber birch trees and then swing “gracefully” down to the ground from their tops. The attorney was so enthralled by the kids’ antics that he felt compelled to give their game a try himself, especially after Jones demonstrated to him that “even a clumsy grown man can perform the feat if he selects a tree of the right proportions.”

120 David McKenzie, “Travel in the USSR,” 2-3, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 121 Ralph A. Jones, “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” October 6, 1959, 19, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 122 Ibid., 20.

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Things did not go as planned, however. After climbing to the top of a birch tree, the

attorney was paralyzed with fear and “could neither screw up enough courage to swing or

climb back down.” Running out of patience and ideas, he chose the worst possible option

and slid roughly down the tree, with his eyes shut, “amidst snapping branches.” It was

truly a miracle that he emerged unscathed from the ordeal.123

“Mir i druzhba”

Food and drink often acted as social lubricants in breaking down ideological barriers and facilitating interpersonal communication between Soviet hosts and American guests. Bound for the Georgian port city of Sukhumi on board the steamship Krym

(Crimea), James Robinson joined a dozen of his fellow passengers for a watermelon party in the ship’s hold. Surrounded by friendly and jovial Soviet faces, urging him to

“eat one more slice of the delicious ripe round melon,” Robinson reflected that

“[t]emporarily we were all one big happy family” impervious to the Cold War outside.124

The genuine friendliness and unassuming generosity of students at the University of

Samarkand put any doubts that Frank Jankunis, a graduate exchange student from the

University of California, Los Angeles, might have had about his reception at the Uzbek

university to rest. Even though he ate with fellow students from his wing of the dormitory

every night since arriving at the university in 1967, they did not allow Jankunis to

contribute any food to their communal dinners for the first two weeks of his stay.125

123 Ibid. 124 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 197. 125 Frank Jankunis, “Letter to E. Willis Brooks,” January 30, 1968, 1, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Final Reports 1967-1968.

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Two U.S. officers, attending an opera at Leningrad’s Kirov Theater, observed a

Soviet naval officer, who occupied the seats directly in front of them with his wife, dash

for the lobby at every intermission to buy vodka and candy. Several intermissions later,

he was in such high spirits that he offered the two officers some candy. However, when

he learned that they were not East Germans, as he had assumed, but Americans, the naval

officer was so taken aback that he spent the next act of the opera in complete silence,

contemplating his next move. He decided not to let political controversies outside the

theater walls deter him for extending the hand of friendship to Americans inside them. At

the next intermission, he made his usual foray to the lobby and brought back two candy

bars, “with an anchor on the wrappers,” which he presented to the two American officers

“with the ‘compliments of the Soviet Navy.’”126

Vladimir Toumanoff, political officer at the U.S. Embassy, rode his bicycle to a

peasant village on the outskirts of Moscow on a late summer night in 1959. Three young

Soviets, “who were sitting under a fence singing to the accompaniment of an accordion,”

flagged him down. One of them approached him and asked for a ride to a nearby beer

stand. Toumanoff felt obliged to disclose that he was an American diplomat before telling

the young man that he would be happy to give him a ride, “if he thought it would not lead

to any difficulty for him.” A moment’s hesitation at the thought of hitching a ride with an

American diplomat gave way to “complete incredulity” at the idea of encountering an

American on a bicycle at this time and place. With his mind made up, the young man

gave Toumanoff a friendly slap on the back, as if to say “nice joke, comrade!” climbed

onto the back of the bicycle, and told him: “Let’s go.” Toumanoff tried his best to

126 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Miscellaneous Observations on the Soviet Scene,” April 8, 1958, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958.

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convince his companion that he was indeed an American diplomat, even taking out and

showing him a “Soviet-issued diplomatic identification card,” but it was no use. The

young man put the matter of Toumanoff’s identity to rest with a simple caveat: “I don’t

know who you are, American diplomat or Chekist provocation agent, but there are only

two of us on this bicycle, nobody can hear what you say or what I say, and no matter

what you claim later, I will say we talked about beer.”127 With those words, the two men

rode to the beer stand.

Hans Tuch and William Peterson had the good fortune to experience genuine

Georgian hospitality on board “a slow-moving, dinerless train” bound for Tbilisi. Upon entering their train compartment late at night in Baku, the American diplomats were greeted at once by “the strongest possible combination of odors of garlic and perfume” and noticed “a fat, shabbily dressed, unshaven” man, who happened to be Georgian, stashing away his luggage, “consisting mostly of baskets of food, bottles of wine and newspaper packages saturated with grease.” The next morning, following the customary round of introductions, the Georgian invited his compartment companions—the two

Americans and a Soviet fellow—to share in the gastronomical bounty he had brought along for the journey, insisting that “he would not take ‘no’ for an answer.” No one raised any objections once the Georgian unpacked “huge quantities of roast chicken, dripping goat’s cheese, boiled meat, endless sausages, hard-boiled eggs, bread” as well as “two bottles of vodka and numerous bottles of sweet Georgian wine.” Upon reflection, Tuch

127 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Bicycle Banter – Some Comments on Khrushchev and Communism,” August 31, 1959, 8, in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, October 6, 1959, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. Cheka (Chrezvychaynaya komissiya, or Emergency Committee) was the first state security agency organized by the Bolsheviks following their successful seizure of power in 1917.

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thought the experience of breaking bread with the Soviet passengers and drinking

innumerable toasts to peace and friendship (mir i druzhba) proved the veracity of the old saying that “friendship travel through the stomach” since they all became “fast buddies” on that train ride.128

Irene Kampen shared a lively evening of music and camaraderie—under the strong

influence of vodka—with Dimitri, the director of the Oryol tourist camp. After Dimitri

sang a Young Pioneer song “in a deep baritone,” Kampen performed an eclectic

repertoire of American classics, including “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” “The Battle

Hymn of the Republic,” “The Volga Boatmen,” “On, Wisconsin!” and “Yankee Doodle,”

with Nila Magidoff’s help.129 Then, French motorcyclists, who were also staying at the

camp, joined the party and everybody sang “The Marseillaise,” “Mademoiselle from

Armentieres,” and “Aupres de Ma Blonde” deep into the night.130 Kampen and Magidoff

found themselves in similar straits in Georgia. What began as a friendly exchange of

toasts at a farewell dinner for their Intourist guide, Basil, at a Tbilisi restaurant quickly

turned into an all-night celebration of Soviet-American friendship, thanks in large

measure to strong Georgian wine. After five men from an adjoining table joined in the

celebration, more toasts to everything from friendship and peace to cosmonauts and

astronauts to Polaroid and Ernest Hemingway promptly followed.131

The Soviet hosts decided to stage an impromptu roadside picnic for the nine

members of the U.S. highway delegation, which visited the Soviet Union in 1961 to

128 Hans N. Tuch, “Trip Report: Baku and Tbilisi, April 30 to May 5, 1959,” May 29, 1959, 4, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 129 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 47-48. 130 Ibid., 48. 131 Ibid., 71.

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assess the state of the Soviet highway system. One of the Soviet drivers was tasked with

the procurement of victuals—bread and sausage—for the open-air affair, an ostensibly

straightforward assignment which proved to be quite difficult to carry out. When the

driver returned with the provisions, it became clear that he did not get enough bread for

everyone and he had to go get more. When he returned with more bread, the sausage was

all gone and he had to leave again to get it. “The supply of bread and sausage never did

match.” The absurdity of the situation prompted a high-ranking Soviet official to quip,

“Well, that’s the way a planned economy works,” eliciting a round of laughter from

everyone present at the picnic.132

Wherever he traveled in the USSR in 1958, Dr. Raymond H. Ewell, Vice

Chancellor of Research at the University of Buffalo, invariably met “dynamic and

exuberant” Soviet citizens “eager to crack a bottle” of vodka with him. A Soviet colonel

with whom he shared a train compartment “got pleasantly plastered drinking toasts to

friendship and peace while passing around pictures of his wife and children.”133 One of

the excursions organized for the young musicians of the Eastman Philharmonia in

Kishinev, the capital of Soviet Moldavia, was a visit to a collective farm (kolkhoz)

specializing in the production of wine. After an uninformative question-and-answer

session with the kolkhoz’s deputy chairman, who deflected incisive questions from the

visitors while regurgitating bland statistics about wages and production, “the meeting

adjourned to the table” and the American guests had an opportunity to sample some of

the local production. Once the Soviet officials in attendance raised their glasses to peace

132 Carroll H. Woods, “US Highway Delegation Exchange Visit,” September 29, 1961, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 245, 030 G-P 1961. 133 Shirley and Bob Sloane, “Planning to Visit Russia? You May Be Surprised!” Hartford Courant (March 30, 1958), 7B.

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and friendship (mir i druzhba), “bottoms were only up, in the name of peaceful

coexistence, and whoever faltered in his duty was an enemy of peace.” The white wine,

which Heyward Isham found “palatable, if green,” lifted the spirits of American youth,

except for an unfortunate few “forced to flee precipitantly to the toilets.”134

On his way to Suzdal for a daytime excursion with his wife and friends in the

summer of 1961, Hans Tuch came upon a Soviet army captain, stranded on the side of the

road, and gave him a ride to town in his hired car. When they reached Suzdal, Tuch asked

his Soviet driver to take the army captain wherever he needed to go while he did some

sightseeing with his wife and friends, a Canadian diplomat and his wife, in this old

Russian town on the Golden Ring (Zolotoye kol’tso). As fate would have it, the foreign

visitors ran into the army captain again later in the afternoon. This time he was sitting in

front of “a neat wooden house” with an old man, who turned out to be the father of one of

his comrades. Without a moment’s hesitation, the friendly old man invited the foreign

guests, who had unexpectedly materialized before him, into “his modest home for a cup

of tea” after showing them his garden. Once the old man informed his guests that it was

actually his wife’s 65th birthday, an afternoon tea quickly turned into a lively

neighborhood celebration complete with spirits, zakuski (appetizers), and sweets, and,

perhaps most important of all, good company. For Tuch, “it was as genuinely friendly a

gathering as [he] had ever experienced in this country.” Two hours and many toasts later,

“the whole party went outside for picture-taking and leave-taking, both accompanied by

134 Heyward Isham, “Eastman Philharmonia’s Tour of U.S.S.R.,” February 26, 1962, 5, MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX 39: Jan-June 1962.

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repeated expressions of gratitude on the part of the visitors and protestations of friendship

by the Russian hosts.”135

“How can these people be the enemy?”

Heartening examples of Soviets extending a helping hand to their American guests

without regard for the oppositional logic of the Cold War further cemented the positive

image of ordinary people that American travelers sought to convey to their countrymen

and women. Ideological disagreements and political tensions aside, the Cold War did not

abrogate or preclude common human decency. What lingered in Charlotte Saikowski’s

mind about her trip to the ancient Central Asian city of Bukhara was not the fact that

there was no running water at the Intourist hotel but the genuine friendliness of “a

swarthy-faced Uzbek” who personally escorted her to the famous Samanid Mausoleum

when she approached him on the street to ask for directions.136

James Robinson took an elevator to the top floor of Hotel Ukraine, located in the heart of Moscow, for a panoramic view of the Soviet capital but, much to his chagrin, he found there were no windows facing the Kremlin in the corridor. Fortunately for him, a

Soviet guest, who was staying on the top floor, noticed Robinson’s predicament and not only invited him into his room but also allowed him to take as many pictures of the

Moscow skyline as he wanted out of a window.137 On the night train from Sukhumi to

Tbilisi, Robinson shared a compartment with three Soviet women—two Russians and an

135 Hans N. Tuch, “Three Vignettes To Illustrate the Soviet Enigma,” June 6, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 136 Charlotte Saikowski, “You still can get ‘whiff of Orient, glimpse of Red society,’” Christian Science Monitor (July 27, 1971), 9. 137 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 114.

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Abkhazian, none of whom could speak English. Despite the fact that they had no verbal

means of communication, the women generously shared their prepacked food with him

and brought him hot tea from the dining car.138 They also made sure to wake Robinson

up after he fell asleep in his berth without obtaining bed sheets from the conductor.

“Imagine my surprise to be shaken awake by the youngest of the women, who held out

my two missing sheets. Within three minutes the women had rolled me back and forth,

making the bed properly with me in it!”139

Debbie Sherwood and Olga, an English woman she had met at the Hotel Astoria, shared a memorable and edifying experience using Leningrad’s public transportation system. Sherwood approached a young Soviet woman standing at a taxi stand on a busy street and tried to inquire what bus she and Olga should take to get back to the hotel.

Once it became clear that her detailed instructions in Russian were not understood, the young woman walked Sherwood and Olga to the correct bus stop and waited with them for the right bus to arrive. With her foreign cargo safely deposited on the bus, the young woman made “a rousing speech to driver and passengers alike, the key words of which appeared to be ‘Americanka’ and ‘Gosteenitsa Astoria,’” and only departed after everyone present replied in the affirmative to her instructions.140 While Sherwood looked

for a change box to pay the bus fare, “a woman’s hand suddenly swooped down, plucked

a five-kopeck piece from my palm and sent it, via the hand-to-hand method, to the back

of the bus.”141 The same thing happened to Olga. Suspicion gave way to gratitude,

however, when the woman, who took the five kopecks, presented them both with their

138 Ibid., 202. 139 Ibid., 203. 140 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 191. 141 Ibid., 192.

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tickets and they realized that she had helped them pay for the bus ride and not pinched

their money. Once the bus arrived near the hotel, twenty arms directed the women’s

attention to it and twenty voices instructed them to get off at once. As they thanked the

passengers for their assistance and watched the bus drive away, Olga and Sherwood

concurred that they were unlikely to encounter such kindness and hospitality from

complete strangers either in New York City or London. That weighty realization led Olga

to wonder, “How can these people be the enemy?”142

“We Shall Overcome”

The enthusiasm for, and belief in, peaceful coexistence, expressed by ordinary

Soviets to American visitors, was an essential element in transcending the ideological

divide that threatened the world with thermonuclear annihilation. Ruth Daniloff was

certain that any foreign visitor to the USSR would be “struck by the ordinary citizen’s

tremendous desire for peace.”143 Americans made note of these amicable sentiments to

show that ordinary Soviets were not radical ideologues hell-bent on wholesale destruction but, as Woodford D. McClellan, a graduate exchange student at MGU, reminded his compatriots, “human beings with the same basic hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, aspirations and apprehensions as Americans.” Those unable or unwilling to grasp this fundamental truth were “gripped by a tragic delusion.”144 The popular support for peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers also assuaged whatever fears and doubts lurked in Americans’ minds about the future of not only their own country but of

142 Ibid., 193. 143 Daniloff, “Americans in Moscow,” 16. 144 Woodford D. McClellan, “Report on Participation in U.S.-U.S.S.R. Exchange Program,” June 25, 1961, 11, IREX, RC 53, Reports 60/61.

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all humankind. Alexander G. Park, a USIA officer who accompanied the “Plastics: USA”

and “Transportation: USA” exhibits in the USSR in 1961, thought that one particular

remark epitomized the longing for peace and friendship that Soviet visitors openly

expressed to American guides on every occasion and at every destination, “Two

mountains can never get together, but two people can.”145

After asking Robert Westbrook “sharp questions” about the United States on a crowded Moscow bus, Alex, an affable Armenian medical student, concluded their

conversation on a hopeful note.146 It was quite possible that both capitalism and

Communism had the same goal in mind: “A place where there are no inequalities

between rich and poor. A place where everyone has a job, enough to eat, proper medical

care, and can enjoy life.” There was no doubt in his mind, however, that “Communism

will achieve these goals first.”147 Soviet factory workers greeted Westbrook’s “flowery

speeches about peace and friendship” at Leningrad’s House of Culture with hearty

applause and warm handshakes for two whole hours. “Yes, we must learn to live in

peace,” a Soviet girl seconded his words.148 While drying in the sun after a bracing swim

in the Dnieper River, Victor, a self-proclaimed Communist, told Westbrook that his

Soviet patriotism did not necessitate “forcing my ideas on anyone else.” Since he

believed that the only thing that mattered in the atomic age was brotherhood, not some

trivial political differences, Victor put his arm around Westbrook’s shoulder and

announced, “Let’s be friends, eh?” A sentiment Westbrook readily seconded.149

145 Park, “The Soviet People View America,” 22. 146 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 58. 147 Ibid., 59. 148 Ibid., 93. 149 Ibid., 130.

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Nadia and Katerina completely astonished Irene Kampen and Nila Magidoff with their moving rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” in its entirety in English, on the train ride from Tskhaltubo to Sochi after Magidoff casually asked them to sing an American song.150 Not only was it a popular song among Soviet university students, the Soviet girls informed their stunned American companions, but it carried a very special meaning for them as well. “If we can sing American song about ‘Someday we’ll walk hand-in-hand’ then who knows—perhaps someday it will come true?”151 On her visit to a Moscow kindergarten, Kampen watched the children sing and dance cheerfully before a little boy stepped forward and presented a modest bouquet of flowers to her. The children wanted her to convey their good wishes to American children along with the flowers they grew in the kindergarten’s garden: “Please tell the children of America that the children of

Moscow send greetings to them from across the sea.”152

When Debbie Sherwood informed a Soviet woman, who tried to strike a conversation with her at Moscow’s Operetta Theater, that she was an American, the woman’s face “couldn’t have registered any more shock had I pulled a saber out of my purse and threatened to cut off her head.”153 Sherwood, however, inadvertently defused the tense situation by complaining in Russian about the stifling heat inside the theater during the performance of Die Fledermaus. After confirming that Sherwood was indeed too hot, the woman smiled wryly and announced that she was too hot as well. Once

Sherwood professed her love for Moscow in response to the woman’s question about the

Soviet capital, “the wall of doubt” between the two women came crashing down and

150 Kampen, Are You Carrying Gold, 110. 151 Ibid., 110-111. 152 Ibid., 159. 153 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 102.

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“there was no holding [the Soviet woman] back.” Taking off her shoes unceremoniously,

she sat closer to Sherwood and tried to “explain the operetta from beginning to end” to

her.154

For many Soviets, peaceful coexistence was a necessity, not a choice. The carnage

they witnessed, the hardships they endured, and the sacrifices they made during the

Second World War left an indelible imprint on the psyche of ordinary people faced with

the threat of another, more destructive war. “It was really bad here the last time, and I

don’t want to go through that again,” a Soviet cab driver, who had survived the Siege of

Leningrad, told a U.S. diplomat on the way to the airport in 1959.155 He added poignantly, “War is nonsense.”156 Alexander Park likened “the fear of war” among older

Leningraders to “an obsession.” A fifty-year-old teacher implored one of the guides at the

“Education USA” exhibit to convey a private message to the President of the United

States in his name. “You must tell President Nixon personally that we must be friends.

Then we will have peace,” he declared. “We teachers of Leningrad know what war is and we want none of it.”157 Old babushkas, who had lived through two world wars (not to

mention, a brutal civil war), decried the possibility of witnessing another bloodbath in

their lifetime. “We must not fight, can’t we live in peace? We’ve seen too much war in

this country.”158 A Soviet electronics technician joined Culver Gleysteen, first secretary

of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, at a table in the Lvov airport cafeteria and expressed his

154 Ibid., 103. 155 Paul A. Smith, Jr., “A Cab Driver,” in “Soviet Attitudes Toward Soviet-American Relations; Conversations with Soviet Citizens in Leningrad,” October 5, 1959, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 156 Ibid., 2. 157 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Leningrad, July 2-6, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” July 11, 1969, 5, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs and Expositions, 1970. 158 Daniloff, “Americans in Moscow,” 16.

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profound sense of despair at the state of world affairs. How did things get so out of hand

that every man, woman, and child had to live “under the threat of nuclear destruction,” he

asked himself as much as his American interlocutor.159

The hardships Soviets had to bear in the past did not stifle their heartfelt hopes for a bright and peaceful future. “We have families and kids. We don’t want war, we work hard and are simple workers,” two young Muscovites insisted to Ralph Jones.160 A shop

foreman in Lvov seconded their noble sentiments, pleading with Jones, “we must all have

peace in which to work, live and bring up our children.”161 Soviets assured American

visitors that they were well aware that the provocative pronouncements emanating from

the Kremlin or the White House did not necessarily represent the true feelings of ordinary

people at the grassroots. “None of the common people want war, either in America or

here,” a young Soviet worker told a U.S. Embassy officer in 1959. “They don’t fool us

with all their propaganda. We know only the big shots are looking for trouble.”162 Many

visitors at the “Education USA” exhibit in Kiev in September 1969 held much the same

opinion about the vagaries of the Cold War. “In spite of our leaders, we are friends and

we always will be…we Russians could never raise a hand against an American,” they

assured the American guides. They also had an urgent request for the guides: “Please go

back to America and tell your people we don’t want war.”163

159 Gleysteen, “Observations of Political Interest,” 2. 160 Ralph A. Jones, “On Casual Encounters,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” August 12, 1958, 19, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol Affairs 1958. 161 Ralph A. Jones, “Kiev, Lvov, Uzhgorod, April 1959,” May 8, 1959, 8, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 162 Toumanoff, “Bicycle Banter,” 9. 163 Alexander Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev – Final Report – Visitors’ Reactions,” October 8, 1969, 13, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs + Expositions, 1970.

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Conclusion

Once American Cold War travelers set foot on Soviet soil, it was unavoidable that they would cross paths with Soviet men, women, and children on the streets, at parks and subway stations, on planes, trains, and buses, in stores, restaurants and hotels, in museums, exhibition halls, and auditoriums, and wherever else people congregated. The reactions that such encounters would engender on both sides were far from preordained, however. There was no guarantee that Soviets and Americans would actually get along on a personal level, given the prevailing Cold War tensions as well as old grievances. The countless examples of cordial conversations and constructive encounters cited above make it abundantly clear that neither political ideology nor cultural difference hindered intercultural communication.

The friendly welcome that Soviets extended to American visitors, their insatiable thirst for knowledge about every facet of American life, their obsessive fascination with

American culture and technology, and their undying devotion to peace subverted the adversarial logic of the Cold War. While Soviet and American policymakers worked behind closed doors to improve relations between their two nations, ordinary Soviets and

Americans made great strides for peace, good will, and mutual understanding on their own terms, outside official channels. It was a powerful affirmation of their shared humanity, of the ability of ordinary people to transcend cultural differences, political disagreements, and past controversies and focus on what really mattered—the prevention of a nuclear holocaust that threatened the life of every member of the human race. Even as they cultivated grassroots support for détente, however, many Americans cast a critical eye on the economy, politics, society, and culture of the Soviet Union.

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Chapter 3: “An Underdeveloped Country”

Introduction

While American Cold War travelers left the Soviet Union greatly impressed with

and heartened by the warmth and friendliness of ordinary Soviets, what they saw, heard,

and experienced behind the “Iron Curtain” persuaded them that the United States’

triumph in the Cold War was a foregone conclusion, if only a nuclear confrontation with

the USSR could be averted. The policy of détente promised to temper and stabilize the

volatile relationship between the two superpowers, thus forestalling the possibility of a

nuclear showdown, and place their global competition for hearts and minds on a peaceful

footing, where the American way of life enjoyed a clear-cut advantage. American travelers did not think that the USSR stood much of a chance in a peaceful contest with the American colossus in light of the staggering economic ineptitude and widespread social dysfunction they had witnessed behind the “Iron Curtain.” To a large extent, “the

USSR offered a mirroring conceptual space to that occupied by America; into this space were projected negative characteristics against which a positive image of American character could be reflected.”1 Soviet shortcomings highlighted American achievements.

Carroll Woods, first secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, offered a startling

and damning observation on the state of the Soviet economy:

Not infrequently, as those who have lived in the Soviet Union will know, trivial evidence of

bad workmanship and inefficiency accumulate till one tends to view the entire economy with

scepticism and wonders whether he is living in an underdeveloped country.2

1 Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xii. 2 Carroll H. Woods, “Miscellaneous Economic Notes,” May 18, 1962, 2, RG 84, Classified General Records (hereafter CGR), 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962, National Archives.

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This was hardly a description befitting a superpower. Much like Woods, the Soviet Union

that American men and women portrayed in their travelogues, letters, and reports lagged

hopelessly behind the United States in economic efficiency, technological innovation,

labor productivity, and capital investment, to mention just a few key areas. There was no

doubt in their minds that, given its economic underdevelopment and technological

backwardness, the USSR still had a long way to go in catching up, to say nothing of

actually overtaking, the capitalist West in satisfying its citizens’ material needs and

wants, Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous braggadocio notwithstanding. “The Soviet Union

may have been the first in space,” the Austrian historian Reinhold Wagnleitner has

argued, “but it always came in last in the game of (material) cultures.”3

“Trade goods to the natives”

Once they found themselves inside the Soviet Union, Americans used a seemingly innocuous means to assert the superiority of the American way of life—generosity. “Gifts were important,” Robert Westbrook was informed, since the Soviets were “very fond of exchanging mementos with friends.”4 Indeed, the travel guides that Debbie Sherwood

perused before leaving New York advised Americans that certain consumer goods, which

“were impossible to come by” in the Soviet Union, “could be a passport to unending love

and devotion for anyone who found it in his heart to hand them out to the natives.”5

Ballpoint pens, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll records, cigarettes, paperback books, popular

magazines, posters, beads, chewing gum, and lipsticks were among the items Westbrook

3 Reinhold Wagnleitner, “The Empire of the Fun, or Talkin’ Soviet Union Blues: The Sound of Freedom and U.S. Cultural Hegemony in Europe,” Diplomatic History 23 (Summer 1999), 508. 4 Robert Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), 11. 5 Debbie Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1969), 83.

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and Sherwood made sure to pack in their luggage for the trip. There was, however, an

unmistakable difference in the conduct of these American travelers. Westbrook made

sure to exchange his wares with Soviet youth, quid pro quo. He presented his date,

Sonya, with a paperback copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and she gave him a

toy chicken in return.6 Sherwood, on the other hand, distributed her “souvenirs” to the

Soviet populace as “sort of a ‘goodwill’ gesture.”7 Upon discovering on the eve of her

departure that she had too many “souvenirs” left in her suitcase, Sherwood handed them

over to an astonished Soviet maid, who had inadvertently wandered into her room in

Leningrad’s Hotel Astoria. Sherwood realized that she would not “have much trouble

pawning the stuff on her” once she saw the maid’s eyes widen “by about two inches” at

the sight of capitalist “spoils” spread out on the hotel bed.8

John McVickar, a U.S. Embassy officer, shared his copies of Life magazine with a

Soviet chemical engineer, who happened to sit across from him on the express train from

Leningrad to Tallinn. After watching her carefully scrutinize the magazine’s glossy

pages, he made sure to present one of the copies to her as “a gift” when the train pulled

into the station in Tallinn.9 Richard Funkhouser, the counselor for economic affairs at the

U.S. Embassy in Moscow, “inadvertently dropped an American penny on the counter” of

a Khabarovsk store while paying for his purchase. This exceptionally mundane incident,

which would have gone unnoticed anywhere in the United States, elicited an immediate

and emphatic reaction from Soviet customers. Some “two dozen adult admirers”

6 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 86. 7 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 20. 8 Ibid., 208. 9 John McVickar, “Baltic States: Trip by Embassy Officer to Tallin, June 8-15, 1961,” August 17, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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surrounded the counter at once and stared with undisguised amazement at “the brightest

thing in the shop.” As if this ludicrous spectacle were not sufficiently indicative of

American superiority, the diplomat drove the point home by presenting the penny as “a

souvenir” to one of the Soviet “admirers.”10 The act of giving was not without political

implications, especially when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in an

ideological contest for global supremacy in the production of consumer goods as well as

military hardware. Bestowing—as opposed to exchanging—gifts upon Soviets reinforced

a clear-cut hierarchical relationship between the giver and the receiver.

Jane Harris, a graduate exchange student at MGU (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi

universitet, or Moscow State University), genuinely felt that it was her “purpose” to bring

the light of Western civilization to the benighted Soviet intelligentsia, removed as it was,

in her opinion, from contemporary trends in literature, in particular, by an intrusive state

bureaucracy.11 Shocked by “the lack of information, books, articles, records, texts, even dictionaries” in the Soviet Union, she believed that American exchange students had a moral obligation “to bring as much literature as possible (in all fields, art, music, literature, biology, genetics, chemistry, etc) as possible” into the country for personal distribution to Soviet friends and acquaintances, who were “all dying to read more but

[did] not know where to turn” for help.12 “The fact that the Soviet intelligentsia, not to

mention students, is so out of contact with the ‘spirit of our times’ makes it often

impossible for them to understand a Westerner’s trend of thought, no matter how much

10 Richard Funkhouser, “Prices of Miscellaneous Consumer Goods in Irkutsk and Khabarovsk,” November 30, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 261, 500.2 Cost of Living 1961. 11 Jane Harris, “Final Report,” p. 6, IREX, RC 200, GSEA End of YR Reports 64/65, Library of Congress. 12 Ibid., 5-6.

145 he so desires,” she explained.13 She even solicited 250 titles, including works in

American literature, poetry, drama, and prose, from the Intelligence Advisory Board

(IAC) and the United States Information Agency (USIA) that she donated in the name of

American exchange students at MGU to the Gorky Library in Moscow.14

Consumerism, Soviet-style

Since consumer goods were a rudimentary “measure of sameness or difference,” shopping excursions allowed curious American visitors to examine firsthand the merchandise available to Soviet customers.15 Americans’ vociferous criticism of the high cost, low quality, scant variety, and limited availability of Soviet consumer goods connoted a fundamental difference between the “consumers’ republic” they had left behind and the shortage economy they had encountered in the USSR.16 The long, strenuous months he had spent in Leningrad convinced Nathan Rosen, a graduate exchange student from Hunter College, that the Soviet deficit economy doomed hapless consumers to a “bleak” economic existence, “unless the cold war [sic] ends.”17 He was hardly alone in reaching such a damning conclusion.

13 Ibid., 6. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Emily S. Rosenberg, “Another Mission to Moscow: Ida Rosenthal and Consumer Dreams,” in Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present, ed. Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren (New York: Routledge, 2012), 128. Soviet officials eschewed the term “consumer goods” (potrebitel’skie tovary) for its unsavory capitalist connotations and adopted the cumbersome phrase “goods for popular consumption” (tovary narodnogo potrebleniia) to denote the collectivist ethos of socialist consumption. Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 49. 16 On the rise of postwar consumer society, see Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986), Gary S. Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), and Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 17 Nathan Rosen, “Concluding Section of End-of-Year Report,” June 4, 1962, 1, IREX, RC 53, GSE, End- of-Year Reports, 61-2.

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There was a clear consensus among Americans concerning the prohibitive prices of

consumer goods in Soviet stores, especially when the comparatively low wages of Soviet

workers were taken into consideration. A wool coat on sale at a Kiev department store

was priced at 2,500 rubles (or $250 in 1959), even though the wife of an American

diplomat estimated that it would not retail for more than $60 in the United States.18 The

three American diplomats on a cruise of the Black Sea had to abandon their search for

striped pajamas empty-handed because the cheapest pair they could find anywhere in

Yalta was priced at 268 rubles (or about $27 in 1959).19 The modest attire of local

residents convinced James Robinson that it was very hard for consumers in Khabarovsk

to save enough money to purchase a quality men’s suit for 90 rubles (or $100 in 1962) at

a local clothing store.20 The cheapest pair of poorly-made men’s shoes that Dr. Arthur

Roe spotted on sale in Novosibirsk cost 25 rubles (about $27.50 in 1970).21 Assembly

line workers at the Volga Automobile Plant (Volzhskii Avtomobilnyi Zavod, or VAZ) in

Togliatti “greeted with derision” the suggestion, made by visiting U.S. diplomats, that they would be able to afford a new 5,500-ruble Volga on an average monthly salary of

18 Morris Rothenberg, “Trip to Kiev,” June 2, 1959, 1, RG 306, Records Relating to the Soviet Union (hereafter RRSU), Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1), National Archives. Between February 20, 1950 and December 31, 1960, the official exchange rate was ₽4 for $1. There also existed a tourist exchange rate of ₽10 for $1 between April 1, 1957 and December 31, 1960. After the revaluation of the ruble on January 1, 1961, the official exchange rate became 90 kopecks for $1, or $1.11 for ₽1. Pick’s Currency Yearbook (New York: Pick Publishing) for 1960, 1964-65, and 1969. 19 James A. Ramsey, Joseph T. Kendrick, and Samuel G. Wise, Jr., “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” May 15, 1959, 6, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1). 20 James M. Robinson, Americanski Journalist: Ten Thousand Miles of Russia Through the Eyes of an American Observer (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1969), 50. 21 Arthur Roe, “Trip to Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, May 1970,” June 22, 1970, 8, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 29, EDU-8: Exhibits, 1970, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections.

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130 rubles.22 The retail price of a small black and white television set, “of no great

distinction,” was set at 220 rubles (or $244 in 1971) in Moscow.23

“There isn’t much made here in the Soviet Union that’s worth buying” was the advice that a Soviet customer gave American tourists. Not only were the prices too steep, but the quality of consumer goods left much to be desired. A Soviet woman divulged that

“she preferred to wear American or French nylons even if they had runs in them, rather than be seen in the shoddy Russian variety.”24 Although Robinson purchased two different brands of Soviet razor blades at a kiosk on the ground floor of Hotel Tbilisi, he found that both of them had “rough jagged edges” and were “much worse than the used blades which Americans discard.”25 Walking around GUM (Gosudarstvennyi

Universal’nyi Magazin, or State Department Store), Robert Westbrook found that high

prices did not necessarily denote high quality. There was not a single item on sale he

would even consider purchasing—other than as a souvenir—since everything from

“shapeless, drab” clothes to toys, which “looked as if they wouldn’t take much of a

beating,” was “of poor quality, regardless of price.”26 Debbie Sherwood’s visit to GUM

likewise ended in disappointment. First, she examined the merchandise that female

customers were literally snatching off the shelves at the cosmetics counters. She found

the eye shadow so sticky it threatened to “glue your fingertips to your lids in the process

of applying” and the lipstick so greasy it made “kissing an extremely slippery as well as

22 Thomas Niles and Robin Porter, “Impressions of Togliatti,” November 21, 1970, 5, MC 468, Box 232, Folder 8, EDU-7: Exchange visits, 1971. 23 Crocker Snow, Jr., “Moscow—12 years later,” Boston Globe (March 28, 1971), 68. 24 William C. Ives and Craig E. Lovitt, “Russia 10 Years After Stalin’s Death: How It Has—and Hasn’t— Changed,” Chicago Tribune (December 1, 1963), 2. 25 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 202. 26 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 71.

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telltale business.”27 Sherwood then joined excited young women, who had lined up to

examine the latest shipment of Soviet-made dresses. As soon as she reached the head of

the line, however, it became obvious to her that “they hadn’t been shipped from the

House of Dior.” Attractive flower patterns and vibrant colors could not disguise the fact

that the dresses were “shapeless and poorly made.”28

Perhaps nothing epitomized the structural weakness of the centrally planned

command economy of the Soviet Union for Americans better than a simple question that

Soviet visitors posed to American guides at the 1965 “Architecture: USA” exhibit in

Leningrad: “You mean to say that when a shipment of (for example) bananas comes in

you don’t queue up at the store?”29 Seeing Soviet men and women stand in line,

sometimes for hours, at all seasons to purchase basic consumer goods, both durable and

nondurable, that most Americans could easily find on the shelves of any store back home

underscored once more the superiority of the American way of life. Only after standing in

lines in “the capital of the Soviet Union, a city of perhaps eight million people,” did

Donald R. Lesh, a graduate exchange student at MGU, fully grasp “what a tremendous

effort still must be expended daily” by Soviet men and women “to put even a modest

meal on the table every night.” It was a sobering experience that convinced him that the

USSR still lagged “far behind the United States in the average standard of living and

consumption.”30

27 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 112. 28 Ibid., 114. 29 Marlin Remick, “Visitor Reaction to Exhibit Architecture: USA in Leningrad (May 25-June 26, 1965),” July 1965, 7, RG 306, Research Reports (hereafter cited as RR), 1960-1999, Box 26, R-100-65. 30 Donald R. Lesh, “Final Report,” May 19, 1961, 14, IREX, RC 53, Reports 60/61.

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The wife of a U.S. Embassy officer counted 134 people waiting in line to buy

potatoes at Moscow’s Central Market in 1962 and roughly 80 people lined up to buy

“socks with elastic tops” at a Moscow univermag (universal’nyi magazin, or department

store) in 1963.31 There was more to the story than the inherent inefficiency of the Soviet

economy, however. When Robert Owen noticed “an especially long line” outside a

Moscow univermag in 1958, he decided to find out what enticing commodity was

available for purchase at the store. However, none of the three Soviet shoppers he

approached “in different parts of the line” had any idea “what, if anything, unusual was to

be sold, and two indicated that they had joined the queue solely to find out what the other

people were waiting for.” Owen found the episode “illustrative” of the Soviet scarcity

mentality, according to which joining a queue made perfect sense, even if one was

uncertain what it was for, because the potential gain for doing so, namely procurement of

scarce goods, outweighed the potential costs.32 This mentality can explain the scramble

that U.S. diplomats witnessed for hand towels in Yalta and for overshoes in Leningrad.33

The Soviet women that Americans saw scuffling for these consumer goods knew very

well that they had to make the most of an opportunity to obtain a scarce item on sale

since it was uncertain if and when they would have such an opportunity again.

Patience might have been “a vital requirement for the Soviet buyer,” but it certainly

did not guarantee a successful conclusion to any shopping excursion.34 Soviet consumers

31 Boris H. Klosson, “Soviet Comments on Meat Availability,” June 14, 1962, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 500.2 Cost of Living Data 1962; Merritt Bragdon, “Consumer Appliance Market in Moscow,” June 14, 1963, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 277, 500 General Economic 1963. 32 Robert I. Owen, “Soviet Queues,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, January 7, 1959, 12, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 33 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 24; Yale W. Richmond, “Visit to Leningrad,” December 15, 1967, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 3, CUL-7 1967. 34 William N. Morell, Jr., and Julian F. MacDonald, “Trip Report: Moscow-Kharkov-Belgorod,” March 15, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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knew all too well that they could not count on their luck to obtain something as basic as a

pair of shoes “in the right style, size and fit” at the first store they walked into, but had to

“go from shop to shop time after time until the buyer and a suitable pair finally

coincide[d] in the same place and time.”35 Given such unpredictability, Irving Levine of

NBC News advised American tourists to err on the side of caution: “Buy an item you

want when you see it or you may be disappointed later.”36 The Soviet shortage economy

demanded “more mental and social effort” from consumers than most Americans were

accustomed to expending in procuring goods and services.37

Kermit Holt, travel editor of the Chicago Tribune, saw “hordes of patient citizens”

spend the night in Soviet airports in the hope of securing a seat on the next Aeroflot flight

to their destination. His Intourist guide was happy to report that they rarely had to wait

for more than 24 hours.38 About 60 people stood patiently in line outside a small food

store in Moscow in 1961 to purchase buckwheat groats.39 Unfortunately, their hopes were

dashed by the appearance of a cantankerous clerk who instructed those waiting outside to

disperse since the remaining supply of buckwheat “would suffice only for those already

in the store.”40 James Ramsey, second secretary of the U.S. Embassy, thought that he had

stumbled upon a great deal on eggs when he joined “an extremely long” and slow-

moving queue at a suburban Moscow store in 1959. He bought 20 “cold storage eggs” for

35 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Miscellaneous Notes From Conversations with Soviet Citizens,” January 22, 1959, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 36 Irving R. Levine, Travel Guide to Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 275. 37 Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture, 12. 38 Kermit Holt, “Not For Everybody: The Frustrating, Enlightening Experience of Traveling in the U.S.S.R.” Chicago Tribune (August 16, 1970), H11. 39 John D. Hemenway, Robert I. Owen, and John V. Abidian, “Russians Do Without Favorite Dish,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” June 30, 1961, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 259, 350 USSR 1961. 40 Ibid., 6.

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the “reasonable” price of 14 rubles, but his bargain quickly turned sour, both literally and

figuratively, owing to the poor quality of the merchandise. Some of the eggs were rotten

and some had “a storage flavor” to them, leading Ramsey’s wife to throw them all out.41

A U.S. Embassy officer overheard a conversation between two Soviet men, a worker and a military officer, on the Moscow subway concerning “the difficulty of buying an automobile.” The worker wanted to know “why cars were so plentiful and cheap in [West] Germany” when, in the USSR, he himself could not afford a new

Moskvitch and his friend had been on the waiting list for a car for the past five years.

“Competition” was the officer’s straightforward reply.42 Nothing else needed to be said.

As of July 1962, Julian MacDonald reported from the “only sales outlet for new cars in

Moscow,” the waiting list for the popular Volga and Moskvitch brands had been closed

since March 1956, which means that no new names had been added to it for six years,

regardless of consumer demand. The last customers on the list were not scheduled to

receive their new cars until “the middle of 1963 (for Volga’s) and the 1962-64 period (for

Moskvitches),” however.43 Under these circumstances, it is understandable why two machinists from Tallinn came up with a novel way to sidestep the Soviet shortage economy. Instead of waiting indefinitely to obtain an automobile, they built their own

cars “from materials obtained in their places of work and with used motors purchased

41 James A. Ramsey, “A Run on Rotten Eggs,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, October 6, 1959, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 42 Edward Hurwitz, “Overheard in Subway Car—April 1959,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, May 19, 1959, 10, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 43 Julian F. MacDonald, “Availability of Selected Consumer Durables in Moscow,” May 11, 1962, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 500.1 General Statistics 1962.

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privately.”44 What constituted a casual hobby in the U.S. was an economic exigency in

the USSR.

The average waiting period for a new apartment in Tallinn, the capital of Soviet

Estonia, ranged from two to three years in 1961.45 Consumers in Moscow had to wait, on

average, three years to obtain new tires and five years to acquire a new refrigerator.46

They usually relied on tally boards placed in store windows to track their position on the

waiting lists for household appliances, like refrigerators and washing machines. The

“prevailing reaction” of those checking the tally boards, according to Merritt Bragdon,

second secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, “appeared to be wry laughter or

shrugging resignation” at a situation they could not change.47

There was something utterly incomprehensible and unacceptable about Soviet

consumers’ “shrugging resignation” to a situation that any self-respecting American would regard as both extraordinary and intolerable. David McKenzie and Thomas Riha, graduate exchange students at MGU, described the “patience and docility” of Muscovites as “frightening” after observing the “vast queues” at Moscow’s bus stops.48 Dr. Richard

Hellie of the University of Chicago criticized the “endless patience” of Soviet customers who would wait “for ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes” for service “without moving or saying anything.”49 Customers waiting in line at a cafeteria told Hellie that they chose not

to give formal expression to their underlying discontent with the obvious shortcomings of

44 John A. McVickar, “Baltic States: Trip by Embassy Officer to Tallin, June 8-15, 1961,” August 17, 1961, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 45 Paul A. Smith, Jr. and Richard E. Snyder, “Impressions of Soviet Rule in Tallin,” April 4, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 260, 360.01 Political Subdivisions of Nations 1961. 46 MacDonald, “Availability of Selected Consumer Durables,” 3. 47 Bragdon, “Consumer Appliance Market in Moscow,” 3. 48 David McKenzie, “Travel in the USSR,” 18, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 49 Richard Hellie, “Final Report on Stay in the Soviet Union, September 6, 1963 to September 20, 1964,” February 1965, 8-9, IREX, RC 200, Summary of Americans, GSE, 1963-64.

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the Soviet way of life by lodging a complaint because it was pointless to do so. Officials

might use the complaint as an excuse to close the cafeteria altogether (and a bad cafeteria

was better than no cafeteria), or the complainant might face official retribution.50

Soviet merchandising methods did not whet the consumerist appetites of American

shoppers; on the contrary, they dampened them. Even though “everything from salami to

sewing machines” could be purchased at GUM, Sherwood observed that the available

goods were “displayed about as imaginatively and temptingly as a pile of dead fish.”51

She thought that dresses looked like “a bouquet of potato sacks” on display because they

were crammed onto oversized racks with little consideration for aesthetic appeal.52 Jack

Matlock, a U.S. Embassy officer, was none too impressed with the creativity of store clerks in the Armenian village of Dvin, north of Yerevan, who sought to bolster the

“pathetic” selection of merchandise in their store by sprucing up “sparsely laden shelves

with newspaper cut-outs” of products.53 Not only was “the choice and quality of consumer goods” in Irkutsk and Khabarovsk “unbelievably low,” but Richard

Funkhouser also took issue with the “unattractive” packaging of goods, especially

foodstuffs, which made it extremely difficult to distinguish between items on sale.54

Vladimir Toumanoff, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, found out

that all was not as it seemed when it came to show windows displays in the Soviet Union.

He went to “a household goods store in the center of Moscow” in 1959 to buy “some

50 Ibid., 9. 51 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 112. 52 Ibid., 114. 53 Jack F. Matlock, “Visit to Agricultural Installations in Georgia and Armenia,” December 15, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. Matlock witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union firsthand as the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow from 1987 to 1991. 54 Richard Funkhouser, “Prices of Miscellaneous Consumer Goods in Irkutsk and Khabarovsk,” November 30, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 261, 500.2 Cost of Living 1961.

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very plain but attractively colored blue enamelware coffee mugs” he had spotted on

display in the store’s show window. The store had none in stock—and Toumanoff was

not interested in the “bilious green” ones they did have—but the store manager assured

him that he would be able to obtain the blue mugs for him from the central warehouse if

he would only come back in two or three days. When Toumanoff returned to the store a

few days later, he learned from a salesclerk that the central warehouse did not have any

blue mugs in stock at the present and would not have any in the future. The salesclerk

answered the obvious question of why the store continued to showcase a discontinued

product when Toumanoff asked him if he could purchase the blue mugs on display in the

store’s show window. “Oh, no, that window has been nailed up for years,” the salesclerk

informed the American diplomat. “There’s no way to get into it.”55

Shopping excursions too often turned what should have been a fun experience to

enjoy into an exasperating and time-consuming task to complete since buying the simplest of products was far from straightforward in the Soviet Union. Robert Westbrook and his friend, Parker Donham, experienced the trials and tribulations of socialist consumption when they headed to GUM to buy some soap. They spent fifteen minutes searching for a kiosk selling soap followed by another ten minutes of waiting their turn in line at the counter. The saleswoman, however, informed Donham that he needed to pay the cashier on the second floor for the soap and then bring the purchase ticket to her to get it. The twenty-minute wait in line at the cashier’s desk to buy a 17-kopeck bar of soap gave Westbrook enough time to arrive at the obvious conclusion, “this type of shopping

55 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Consumer Notes from Moscow,” September 1, 1959, in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, October 6, 1959, 9, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959.

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could be very exhausting.”56 Actually, the American teenagers got off relatively easy. Dr.

Arthur Roe from the National Science Foundation, who accompanied the “Education:

USA” exhibit to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk in 1970, watched a Soviet woman spend

an hour and a half in line at a local department store just to buy a pair of shoes. First, she

waited in line “to try on the shoes, then in line at the cashier to pay for the shoes, then in

line again to present her receipt and pick up the shoes” at the counter.57

Irene Kampen learned the hard way that even mailing a postcard was an

unnecessarily cumbersome process in the USSR. After buying the only available postcard

of the Lenin Mausoleum at a tourist camp souvenir shop, she had to drive to the nearest

post office in Rostov-on-Don to obtain the necessary stamps to mail it to the United

States.58 Since the three stamps she bought did not have an adhesive on the back,

Kampen had to walk over to the stamp-glue window at the post office to get them glued

to the postcard. Unfortunately, the stamp-glue clerk performed his duties so carelessly

that he “completely obliterated” her mother’s name and address, leaving Kampen with no choice but to tear the postcard up and throw it away.59

If purchasing goods proved a challenge—at times an insurmountable one at that—

for American travelers, then purchasing quality services was not much easier, as Debbie

Sherwood and Irene Kampen found out first-hand on visits to Soviet hair salons. On the

very morning of her departure, Sherwood decided that “a Russian hairdo” would be a

sure way to make a lasting impression on her return to the United States. “A decrepit old

woman” in charge of the Hotel Astoria barbershop escorted Sherwood into a tiny room

56 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 71. 57 Roe, “Trip to Akademgorodok,” 8. 58 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 60. 59 Ibid., 61.

156 furnished with a distorted mirror, rudimentary hair dryers with exposed wiring, and

“bottles of mysterious-looking liquids in various colors.”60 Things took an unexpected if disconcerting turn after Sherwood accidently saw the old woman gulp down a glass of vodka, vigorously shake her head, and exclaim “Ahhhh!” for good effect.61 With a burning look in her eyes and a maniacal grin on her face, the reinvigorated hairdresser thrust her hands into Sherwood’s red hair and “pushed and twisted my head around on my neck until I was sure it was going to fall off completely.” Once Sherwood spotted the old woman trying to choose which substance—ghastly green or popsicle pink—to use on her hair, she decided she had had enough of Soviet beauty care and left the salon.62

Unlike Sherwood, Kampen saw her visit to “a combination barber shop and beauty parlor” in Yerevan through and lived to regret her decision. An Armenian hairdresser, wearing “a baggy smock and sandals,” materialized in front of her before she could change her mind about getting her hair done.63 Kampen had second thoughts about her decision, however, after he thoroughly scrubbed her hair with “a mixture of Armenian

Clorox and boiling water.”64 Unfortunately, she had no way of explaining that she was no longer interested in his services since she did not speak Russian (or German) and he did not speak English (or French). With her hair already wet and the hairdresser clicking “his scissors open and shut in impatience,” Kampen gave him the go-ahead, reasoning that

“[j]ust because he happened to be an Armenian didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t just as competent to cut hair as an American barber.”65 When Nila Magidoff

60 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 202, 203. 61 Ibid., 204. 62 Ibid., 205. 63 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 87. 64 Ibid., 88. 65 Ibid., 88, 89.

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complimented her on her new haircut, Kampen could only quip that she was wearing a

wig.66

“The most frustrating experience for an American,” according to Robert Druien, a

Russian-language instructor at University of Michigan who spent the summer of 1967 in

the USSR, was “the long tedious process involved in getting the simplest service

completed whether it be in a restaurant or shop.”67 Service in Soviet restaurants and stores lacked essential attributes that most, if not all, Americans had come to take for granted—speed and courtesy. Robert Owen and Kempton Jenkins found Soviet waitresses to be “careless and naturally rude,” while Kampen thought they were

“unusually unpleasant and often downright hostile” to customers.68 More than once,

Sherwood watched “heartless waitresses” disappear into the kitchen for nearly an hour,

without a word of apology or explanation to starving customers, “wincing from hunger

pains” in the dining room, before returning with the first course. “I have never heard of

anyone actually starving to death while waiting for his food,” she wrote, “but there is usually a point at which the rumble of empty stomachs becomes so loud the orchestra is in danger of being drowned out completely.”69 Slow dinner service left Yale Richmond, the counselor for cultural affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and his wife stranded for two long hours in the dining room of the Hotel Europe in Leningrad, even though the dining room was “less than half full” that evening.70 An American tourist pointed out,

66 Ibid., 89. 67 Robert F. Druien, “Participant’s Evaluation,” 2, IREX, RC 200, Final Reports SLT – 1967. 68 Robert I. Owen and Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip Memoranda – L’vov, April 6-7,” in “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov, April 3-7, 1961,” April 25, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961; Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 114. 69 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 55. 70 Yale W. Richmond, “Visit to Leningrad,” December 15, 1967, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 3, CUL- 7 1967.

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tongue-in-cheek, an overlooked benefit of lackadaisical service in Soviet restaurants: “I

don’t get hungry between meals because I spend so much time in the restaurant.”71 The

leisurely pace of customer service led Edwin Levy, a graduate exchange student at MGU,

to advise fellow Americans to set aside at least “an hour and a half for breakfast, two

hours for lunch and two hours for supper” when eating out.72

While waiting in line at a suburban Moscow store, James Ramsey overheard one of

the salesgirls sharply reproach a customer, who had the temerity to complain about the

cleanliness of the eggs on sale, that “some people were dirty too and they should not

mind eating soiled eggs.”73 David McKenzie and Thomas Riha noted that many of their

fellow passengers had no choice but to board the bus from Pskov to Pechory without

tickets through no fault of their own. They were simply unable to purchase them before

the bus’s scheduled departure because only one of the two ticket windows at the Pskov

station was open and “a single, huge, slowly moving line” of customers formed in front

of it. “Behind the other window sat a young woman, calmly reading a magazine,”

completely indifferent to the fact that the bus station was jam-packed with passengers waiting to buy tickets.74 In the Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk, McKenzie and Riha

“saw a conductor pick up a female passenger who had boarded the bus at the wrong end

and hurl her bodily into the street.”75 It bears mention that American visitors did not

place inordinate and unreasonable demands on Soviet service industries since Muscovites

71 Jay Axelbank, “Russia Woos Tourism But Old Stigmas Hurt,” Hartford Courant (October 17, 1965), 6G. 72 Edwin Levy, Jr., Letter to Patricia Lambrecht, June 20, 1967, 4, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-67 Final Reports. 73 James A. Ramsey, “A Run on Rotten Eggs,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, October 6, 1959, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 74 David McKenzie, “Travel in the USSR,” 17, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 75 Ibid., 17-18.

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themselves openly voiced their discontent with the customary discourtesy of “store clerks

who turn their backs on customers” and “waiters who ignore or insult diners.”76

Kampen offered her readers a salient example of the capriciousness of customer

service in Soviet restaurants. “Dining room is closed,” the restaurant manager tersely

informed Kampen and Magidoff at the entrance to his establishment at a Tbilisi hotel.

When Magidoff pointed out that, according to the sign on the door, the restaurant opened

at 7AM, the manager offered the American holidaymakers a perfectly logical explanation

for the apparent discrepancy: “Sign on door has no connection with actual situation.” He

advised them to return later when the “situation may improve” and they might be able to

have breakfast. The manager was nowhere in sight when Kampen and Magidoff came

back, so they sat down at one of the tables in the dining room and waited for service.

“What you want?” a waitress demanded loudly after handing them unintelligible

Georgian-language menus, which were generously “decorated with flyspecks, gravy, and

other interesting memorabilia.” In keeping with the low standards of customer service,

the waitress waited for Kampen to place her order for before blurting out that the kitchen

was closed and walking away from the table.77

Those rare occasions when Americans had the privilege of enjoying courteous customer service merely underscored for them the general shoddy service that Soviet customers invariably had to contend with on a daily basis. Ralph Jones found the operation of a small fruit and vegetable stand (palatka) that he visited on the outskirts of

Moscow in 1959 to be “very remarkable” by Soviet standards. While he waited in line to

76 Alexander Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow – Summary Report – Visitors’ Reactions,” December 8, 1969, 7, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs & Expositions, 1970. 77 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 73.

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purchase some tomatoes and a watermelon, Jones could not help but notice that the

vendor eschewed “the usual pattern of impolite indifference” to customers on the part of

Soviet clerks and provided “service with a smile.”78 He “was attentive to his customers’

wishes, took pains to pick out the best fruit and vegetables and, all the while, kept up a

gay banter.” The friendly vendor, who recognized a new face among his regular clientele,

made sure to let Jones know that he appreciated his business: “Thank you very much.

Please come back and patronize my establishment again.” The American diplomat was

amazed to hear the vendor’s parting words because they reminded him of something he

could have heard from “the proprietor of the corner grocery store back home.”79

Given the low opinion that Americans had of customer service, or lack thereof, in

the Soviet Union, it is hardly surprising that Michael Curran, a graduate exchange student

at LGU (Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, or Leningrad State University),

identified “rudeness and frustration” as “the two most salient characteristics of Soviet life

for an American.”80 Nearly every American exchange student agonized over and struggled with the “slowness and seemingly contrived complexity” of everyday life.81

“Such simple activities as buying a loaf of bread, asking for a book at the bookstore,

seeking help of the Inotdel, visiting Intourist, giving a 3 ruble bill for a 90 kopek

purchase, buying theater tickets, taking clothes to the cleaners, and making official

inquiries [could] all become harrowing experiences” owing to the time and energy

required to complete them.82 Not only did James F. Collins, a graduate exchange student

78 Ralph A. Jones, “Service with a Smile,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” October 6, 1959, 18, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 79 Ibid., 19. 80 Michael A. Curran, “Report,” June 9, 1967, 2, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports. 81 James F. Collins, “Final Report,” August 7, 1966, 7, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Reports 65/66. 82 Jack L. Tech, “Final Report,” 24-25, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Reports 65/66.

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at MGU, spend “more time than seemed warranted” to perform the most trivial of tasks,

but he also had to endure “constant physical battering” in public spaces. “At every turn,”

he grumbled, “whether mounting a bus, getting into an elevator, standing in line, or

simply walking down the street, one must expect to be pushed, pulled, or otherwise

displaced” by Soviet crowds.83

Men (Not) at Work

Americans were critical of the leisurely pace of work, the glaring lack of

mechanization, and the poor quality of workmanship they observed in the USSR—three

crucial factors which they believed contributed to the inherent instability and inefficiency

of the Soviet centrally planned command economy. Western engineers from the New

York-based Von Kohorn International Corporation, working on the construction of a

synthetic fiber (polyester) plant in Kursk, grumbled to a visiting U.S. Embassy officer

about “their inability to get Russians to put in a full day’s work or to work overtime.”84

The Soviet workers that American diplomats observed in Odessa “went about their tasks in a leisurely fashion,” working “at a slow tempo and without any drive” and even wandering about “aimlessly.”85 The ten-person work crew tasked with patching a small section of the road in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with asphalt did not appear to

Carroll Woods to be in any hurry to complete the assignment. Nine workers, all men, were standing idly by, “leaning on their shovels and rakes,” while “[t]he tenth person, a

83 Collins, “Final Report,” 7. 84 Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers,” 2. On the adoption and exploitation of American technology in the Soviet Union, see George D. Holliday, Technology Transfer to the USSR, 1928-1937 and 1966-1975: The Role of Western Technology in Soviet Economic Development (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979). 85 James A. Ramsey, Joseph T. Kendrick, and Samuel G. Wise, Jr., “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” May 15, 1959, 24, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1).

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woman, was busy sweeping” the road.86 The Moscow Dry Cleaning Plant No. 7 had

“none of the bustle” that Julian MacDonald had seen at dry cleaning facilities and laundries back home due, in large part, to the “leisurely air in the working areas.” Most of the pressing equipment, supplied by an American firm, lay idle and no more than ten employees (out of 53) were actually “occupied with production work” at the plant.87

Dr. Abraham Katsh pointed to the oversupply of labor as an explanation for the

leisurely work habits of Soviets. He actually described the Soviet system as “a WPA

government en masse” because of the state policy of guaranteed employment, which, in

his opinion, burdened factories, stores, restaurants, and every other state enterprise with

redundant and unproductive workers on the government dole.88 At times, Soviet officials

resorted to an “appalling” practice that Dr. Richard Hellie dubbed the “primitivization” of

modern technology in order to put surplus labor at their disposal to work. For instance,

the brand-new equipment installed at a Moscow laundromat by an American firm had

been duly “primitivized” by stationing an operator at every machine, thus defeating the

whole purpose of this ostensibly self-service establishment.89 In other words, Soviets

adapted modern technology to fit their outdated needs.

The Soviet Union could put an artificial satellite into orbit and detonate a hydrogen

bomb, yet Soviet workers still had to perform backbreaking manual labor in factories and

fields and on roads with the most rudimentary tools at their disposal. American diplomats

used the adjective “primitive” to describe the construction methods they observed in

86 Carroll H. Woods, “Miscellaneous Economic Observations,” March 27, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 87 Julian F. MacDonald, “Embassy Officers Taken to Cleaners,” March 30, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 274, 500.2 Cost of Living Data 1962. 88 Abraham I. Katsh, “Memorandum to the President of the American Council of Learned Societies,” October 24, 1960, 5, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 89 Hellie, “Final Report,” 10.

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Odessa. “The crew was using three-gallon buckets and rope and pulley to carry stucco,

water, paint, etc., up four stories” at one of the construction sites.90 Employees of a tea

processing plant in Irkutsk helped bring in the autumn potato harvest by digging for the

tubers with their bare hands. Leavitt F. Morris, travel editor of the Christian Science

Monitor, estimated that it would take them at least two weeks of backbreaking manual

labor to harvest the potato fields, whereas “modern equipment could have finished in a

day or two.”91

Von Kohorn engineers at Kursk lauded the intuitive dexterity of Soviet workers

who could make basic repairs with nothing more than “a hammer and a piece of sheet

metal” but decried the lack of “the simplest equipment used in the West.” There were

even brooms without shafts at the factory.92 They were also appalled that Soviet officials

deliberately disregarded the most basic safety standards because they valued “imported

Western equipment” much more than they did the lives of their workers. “The people are

expendible [sic]; equipment not” was the guiding principle at the new plant.93 Traversing the highways and byways of the USSR for three weeks in 1961 made the nine members of the U.S. highway delegation acutely aware of the absence of heavy equipment in road construction. What they did see in use were antiquated replicas of American-made tractors, bulldozers, and pavers which had been out of production in the United States for decades. Given the low priority assigned to road construction and maintenance by the

Politburo, Soviet officials had no choice but to redress the scarcity of machines through

90 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 24. 91 Leavitt F. Morris, “Luxuries found in ‘land of exiles,’” Christian Science Monitor (October 26, 1965), 6. 92 Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers,” 2. 93 Ibid., 3.

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“the excessive use of manual labor, very often women with picks and shovels on

maintenance jobs.”94

Given the laid-back work habits of Soviet workers and the antiquated equipment

at their disposal, it was perhaps unsurprising that Americans took issue with the

substandard quality of completed work. The Soviet Union was facing “an increasingly

large problem of maintenance,” asserted Carroll Woods, because of “the shortcomings

which sooner or later demand major repairs,” including “[t]he poor quality of concrete

work, inadequate wiring, non-galvanized iron plumbing with sloppy joints,” and “poor

foundation work.”95 American tourists could not believe that their hotel in Leningrad was built in 1954 since its “worn condition” mere four years later made them “depressed.”96

Standards did not seem to have improved by 1970. The brand-new hotel that hosted

Richard Dunlop’s tour group in Leningrad might have been open for only six months but

there were already cracks in the plaster and the window sashes were “rotting.”97 An

Odessan engineer explained to visiting American diplomats that cinder blocks made from

a local coral material were extremely brittle and therefore unsuitable for construction of

even one-story structures. Official regulations, however, permitted the use of such cinder

blocks in two-story structures since the coral material was more plentiful and much cheaper than the fine sand needed to make concrete.98

94 Carroll H. Woods, “US Highway Delegation Exchange Visit,” September 29, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 245, 030 G-P 1961. 95 Carroll H. Woods, “Incidental Economic Items,” April 3, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 96 Vladimir Prokofieff, “Impressions of Visiting Americans” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Scene,” ed. Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., May 22, 1958, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 97 Richard Dunlop, “With Few Hardships: A Russian Adventure Trip,” Chicago Tribune (August 2, 1970), G10. 98 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 25.

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American engineers bemoaned the unnecessary damage that a leaking roof caused

to brand-new imported machinery, worth millions of dollars, stored at the site of a textile

plant under construction by the New York-based Intertex International in Kalinin (Tver).

The roof leaked for two unremarkable reasons: (1) the precast concrete slabs set on columns had large gaps between them due to poor design, and (2) these gaps had been ineptly filled with tar.99 Llewellyn E. Thompson, the esteemed U.S. Ambassador to the

Soviet Union (1957-62 and 1967-69), reported that shoddy construction endangered the

lives of Muscovites. Moisture, seeping through cracks in the exterior walls of buildings,

knocked ceramic tiles off the façade upon freezing. City officials had to install nets

around buildings to protect unsuspecting passersby from falling tiles.100 In Murmansk,

the combination of “neglected spots of would-be greenery” and “peeling and mildewed

stucco buildings” gave the Arctic city “a more run-down and neglected appearance” than

other Soviet cities. Municipal officials had expended capital and manpower to spruce up

the city’s public façade by planting flowers, grass, and trees. However, “in typical Soviet

fashion,” they made no effort whatsoever to maintain what had been put in the ground.

The flowers wilted, the grass withered, and the trees died.101

The unusual sight of an apartment building in Frunze whose balconies had either

“fallen off or been removed as a safety precaution” attested, in the opinion of visiting

American diplomats, to the “low quality, even by Russian standards,” of new housing

99 Carroll H. Woods, “Miscellaneous Economic Observations,” March 27, 1962, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 100 Llewellyn E. Thompson, “Possible Trade Opportunity,” January 12, 1960, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 244, 510.22 1960. 101 Kempton B. Jenkins and Julian F. MacDonald, “Trip Report – Leningrad and Murmansk, August 28- September 3, 1961,” September 18, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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construction going up in Central Asia.102 The “unsatisfactory” quality of “prefabricated

and semi-fabricated housing,” according to Julian MacDonald, made it incumbent upon

Soviet officials to spend “large sums” of money and devote “considerable labor” to

ensure compliance with building codes.103 Some Americans experienced an unmistakable

feeling of déjà vu when they came across the ubiquitous three-to-five-story apartment buildings (khrushchyovki) erected in every corner of the Soviet Union. Familiar images of inner-city slums immediately flashed before their eyes. The apartment blocks located behind the Intourist hotel in Donetsk, where itinerant American diplomats spent the night,

“could have passed for slums in any pictorial expose of American society,” even though they were only a few years old.104 If the “endless rows of apartments” he saw in Irkutsk

and Khabarovsk had been “built in the United States as public housing,” Kermit Holt

foresaw “congressional investigations, grand jury action, and, finally, indictments of

contractors and officials responsible” for such a brazen betrayal of public trust.105 The

direct comparison of newly erected apartment buildings with dilapidated tenements did

not reflect favorably upon the efforts of Soviet officials to improve the living conditions

of their citizens.

Americans did not think highly of the quality of the repair work either. William

Morell and Gordon Brown could see that large cracks in “heavily rusted” pipes in the

102 Leo Moser and Robert M. Kline, “Trip to Alma-Ata and Frunze,” May 10, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 103 Julian F. MacDonald, “Public Building in Moscow During 1961,” January 19, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 104 Robert A. Peck and Edward Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Donetsk,” April 13, 1970, 2, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 2, EDX-2: General reports, 1970. 105 Kermit Holt, “This is Siberia? Da!” Chicago Tribune (August 23, 1970), K9. American diplomats described the new apartment blocks that a Soviet taxi driver proudly pointed out to them in Irkutsk as “instant slums.” Joseph Sherman and Wayne Smith, “Air Trip to Maritime Province and Siberia Shows Another Face of the USSR,” October 24, 1967, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, Int 6.

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bathrooms of newly erected hotels in Alma Ata and Tselinograd (formerly Akmolinsk),

where they stopped during their week-long visit to Kazakhstan in 1961, had been patched

“very crudely” by simply smearing the cement “by hand without the use of the most

rudimentary tools.”106 A U.S. Embassy officer, trained as a civil engineer, dismissed the

large-scale restoration of Leningrad’s old buildings as a “superficial” exercise because

Soviet workers applied “cement patches and paint where more substantial work should be

done.” He did not think that the work would hold up for very long.107

“Deficit operations”

Based on their encounters with the centrally planned command economy of the

Soviet Union, Americans concluded that it was neither expertly planned nor efficiently managed. The priority given to the production of capital goods was “visible at every step,” from “the drab, dreary and depressing” clothes worn by Soviet citizens to “the tremendous contrast” between grand “industrial establishments” and miserable “service shops.”108 Every member of the Vacations West tour group heading to the USSR in 1969

received a small package containing “soap and washcloth, rubber stopper, a box of

tissues, and chewing-gum tablets” before departure. Over the course of the two-week trip,

these handy items came to epitomize “the state of the Soviet Union” for the American

tourists: “a great attention to massive projects, a relative inattention to details.”109

106 William N. Morell, Jr. and Gordon S. Brown, “Building Construction – Alma Ata and Tselinograd,” August 17, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 107 Woods, “Incidental Economic Items,” 2. 108 Dziewanowski, “Eastern Europe Revisited,” 2. 109 Albert D. Hughes, “Veteran travelers commend new Soviet conducted tours,” Christian Science Monitor (May 6, 1969), 13.

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Lack of capital investment in new technology threatened the Odessa Cable Factory with obsolescence in the near future in the professional opinion of the West German industrial engineer, who toured the state-owned enterprise alongside American diplomats in 1959.110 Dealing with Soviet bureaucracy on a daily basis left Von Kohorn engineers working at Kursk unable to grasp “how business can operate efficiently” in the USSR given the bloated workforce, “an extraordinary amount of time” wasted in unnecessary meetings, “the volume of talk and paucity of action,” and “the difficulty in getting

‘honest answers’ to the simplest questions” from those in charge.111 They also explained to Funkhouser that erecting buildings was done rather quickly in the Soviet Union owing to the widespread use of prefabricated concrete slabs in construction. What took an inordinate amount of time, however, was procuring building materials like doors, windows, frames, pipes, and tiles needed to complete the job.112

Julian MacDonald left Moscow Dry Cleaning Plant No. 7 under the impression that it was operating in the red. Not that it actually mattered to the plant’s officials who

“praised the Soviet policy of providing high quality services at reasonable cost,” even if it required the state to subsidize “deficit operations” like theirs.113 A visit to the Red

Excavator (Krasnyi Ekskavator) Plant in Kiev in 1961 acquainted Carroll Woods with the convoluted operation of the state pricing system. The plant submitted “a cost estimate based on inputs of labor, materials and other cost elements” to the State Planning

Committee (Gosudarstvennyi planovyi komitet, or Gosplan), which was responsible for fixing the price of manufactured goods by taking into account but not necessarily

110 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 25. 111 Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers at Kursk,” 2, 4. 112 Ibid., 4. 113 MacDonald, “Embassy Officers Taken to Cleaners,” 1.

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following the plant’s estimate. Profitability depended on the plant’s ability to produce

below the fixed price. If it failed to do so, however, “it would not go out of business but

would be carried by other profitable plants.”114 The Soviet social safety net extended far

and wide.

Americans were struck by the shortsightedness of Soviet officials, placed in charge

of large-scale state enterprises, whose underlying—and, seemingly, only—concern with

short-term gains inflicted irreparable damage on the whole Soviet economy, not to

mention their own plants. The decision “to combine to the greatest extent possible the

three phases of building the plant: constructing the buildings; installing the equipment;

and initiating test production,” a self-assured Soviet official pointed out to the visiting

American diplomats in 1970, would bring the Volga Automobile Plant (Volzhskii

Avtomobilnyi Zavod, or VAZ) in Togliatti “into full production much more quickly than a more conventional approach.” Thomas Niles and Robin Porter did not share his myopic optimism, however. Their first-hand observations led them to the conclusion that such grandiose approach to plant construction had negatively affected “the quality of the final product,” quite inevitably so in their opinion.115 They also noted that unwillingness to

standardize “the greatest possible variety of Western electrical and hydraulic controls”

installed at the sprawling plant made repairing and/or replacing them, “not to speak of the

machinery itself,” an extremely difficult and costly proposition.116

114 Carroll H. Woods, “Visits to Excavator Tractor and Agricultural Machinery Factories in the USSR,” November 20, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 115 Thomas Niles and Robin Porter, “Impressions of Togliatti,” November 21, 1970, 2, MC 468, Box 232, Folder 8, EDU-7: Exchange visits, 1971. 116 Ibid., 7-8.

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Even though the polyester factory in Kursk was still under construction in 1961,

Von Kohorn engineers told Funkhouser, plant officials made “frantic efforts” to put at

least part of the imported machinery into operation before the November 7 holiday

(annual celebration of the Great October Socialist Revolution). Disregarding any possible

long-term consequences of their actions, the officials’ sole motivation was “an extra

bonus” they would receive from Moscow for fulfilling the Plan. “For the first time” since

they had arrived in Kursk, Western engineers saw Soviets “work around the clock” at the

plant.117 Officials gave them carte blanche to do whatever was necessary, including but

not limited to improvising, altering plans, and pirating equipment, to get some sort of

production going before the looming deadline. These round-the-clock efforts paid off, at least for those in charge. “The plant officially fulfilled the 1961 Plan by 125 percent” by placing “two out of 140 units…in useless and inefficient operation which ceased immediately after the holidays.”118

Admissions of backwardness

While the Soviet fascination with the Polaroid instant camera offered a handy

illustration of American technological superiority, there were other, no less telling

examples of purported Soviet technological backwardness, and not only in the realm of

consumer electronics. As late as 1962, villagers living mere three miles outside of

Moscow still used “community wells and hand pumps” to obtain potable water.119 Nila

Magidoff’s cautionary note to Irene Kampen that they would be lucky to “have sink

117 Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers at Kursk,” 3. 118 Ibid., 4. 119 Woods, “Miscellaneous Economic Observations,” 2.

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stopper in hotel bathroom” was all too true.120 Debbie Sherwood could not find a drain

stopper anywhere in the bathroom of her room in Moscow’s National Hotel and had to

bathe by sitting in her undersized tub and splashing water all over herself.121 Robert

Westbrook found out on a visit to the Ukrainian countryside that even something as

simple as a wristwatch could have an astounding effect. While hitching a ride with

Ukrainian peasants to the village of Trypillia in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, in and of itself a testament to technological backwardness, an elderly woman asked Westbrook what he was wearing on his hand. His straightforward response that it was a watch did not satisfy the peasants’ curiosity since the old man at the helm stopped the wagon at once and demanded to know how it worked. The explanation that “each dot signified the hour and that long hand took care of the minutes” was met with incredulity. Only after the old man carefully scrutinized “the darkening twilight” and verified to his own satisfaction that Westbrook’s watch did indeed tell the correct time of the day did the wagon move again.122

Out and about in Moscow on a sunny summer day in 1958, a U.S. Embassy official

came upon a large crowd of interested spectators gathered near unkempt public gardens

on Peace Avenue (Prospekt Mira). Once he approached what he reckoned was “one of

the largest crowds I have ever seen in Moscow,” he found out that “the hundreds of

people pressed around the borders of the gardens were watching the operation of a gas-

powered lawn mower.”123 The same year, Richard Harmstone, the American Vice

120 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 24. 121 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 40. 122 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 141. 123 Ralph A. Jones, “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” August 12, 1958, 17, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958.

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Consul, hosted a party in his Moscow apartment and could not help but notice the

fascination of Soviet guests with his kitchen gas stove, which lighted “without the use of

matches.”124 On his visit to the Permanent Exhibition of Achievements of the National

Economy (Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva, or VDNKh) in Moscow in

1962, Richard Funkhouser watched “five well-padded Russian female workers” shovel snow in front of the machine building pavilion, where “a number of extremely large, high-powered diesel trucks, earth-movers and tractors” were on display. This spectacle captured his attention at once because he thought that it provided a graphic illustration of

Soviet technological prowess.125

When Vladimir, who was in charge of Intourist rental cars at Moscow’s Metropole

Hotel, insisted that it was a “terrible undertaking” for Kampen and Magidoff to drive to

Oryol by themselves, Magidoff assured him that “ladies drive alone all the time” in the

United States. “What is difficulty?” she wondered. “You get in car, you push button, and

zoom! You drive. Nothing to it.” Vladimir tempered her enthusiasm by pointing out that

“[i]n Soviet Union is no button to push” because “[i]n Soviet Union is no car with

automatic shift.” Fortunately, Kampen knew how to drive a stick shift.126 “[T]he decision to hire a number of Western contractors to supply and install the electrical and air conditions systems as well as upholstery and other equipment in the new Kremlin

Conference Hall” amounted, in the opinion of Julian MacDonald, counselor for economic affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, to a “tacit admission of Soviet backwardness.”127

124 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Miscellaneous Observations on the Soviet Scene,” May 22, 1958, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 125 Richard Funkhouser, “Visit to the Permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR,” February 12, 1962, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962. 126 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 29. 127 Julian F. MacDonald, “Public Building in Moscow During 1961,” January 19, 1962, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962.

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Soviets paid Western manufacturers the

ultimate compliment by reproducing their industrial equipment via reverse engineering. It

was the “usual practice” in the USSR to take apart and meticulously study “[t]he most

modern and complex machines” produced in the West with an eye toward manufacturing

them domestically.128

“Beeznesmeny”

No trip to the Soviet Union was complete without an encounter with fartsovshchiki,

black marketeers, and valiutchiki, currency speculators, who tenaciously pursued overseas visitors, especially those from the capitalist West, in the hope of securing consumer goods and/or foreign currency.129 These men—and they were invariably

charming young men with foreign language skills—pulled all the stops to get their hands

on what they wanted once they zeroed in on an unsuspecting American. Not only did

fartsovshchiki and valiutchiki shake “the very foundations of Soviet belief,” as Robert

Westbrook put it, but they also demonstrated that the entrepreneurial spirit, so near and dear to many Americans, was alive and well in the Soviet Union, even if it was driven underground by state authorities.130 More importantly, their illicit activities publicized the failure of the centrally planned command economy to meet the demand for quality durable goods, leaving Soviet consumers with no recourse but to depend on the shadow economy to satiate their materialistic desires. “Unable to satisfy their needs at

128 Llewellyn E. Thompson, “Possible Trade Opportunity,” January 12, 1960, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 244, 510.22 1960; Richard Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers at Kursk,” June 7, 1962, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962. 129 On fartsovshchiki, see Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Routledge, 2013). 130 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 118.

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government stores,” ordinary Soviets turned to the black market to obtain “scarce

consumer commodities,” such as “coats and shirts, shoes and socks, lampshades and

water faucets, even meat grinders.”131

Valiutchiki “plied their illegal trade in the lobby of the National Hotel quite

openly,” a young American tourist visiting Moscow informed the American consul Lewis

Bowden in August 1958. They were young, strapping, and smartly dressed Soviet men

who “accosted” her with tempting offers to exchange rubles for dollars at the inflated rate

of 20 to 22 rubles for $1. She also entertained numerous inquiries from interested Soviets

regarding the availability of “unmentionables of ladies’ wearing apparel, nylon hose,

sweaters” and anything else she had brought from the United States.132 A fartsovshchik

approached Westbrook while he was window shopping in Moscow, inquiring politely in

English: “Listen, Robert, do you have any clothes you could sell to me?” This young man

was no amateur operator; he knew exactly what he wanted. “Good clothes. American

clothes. Synthetic shirts or pants. Even underwear.”133 When inflated prices failed to

convince Westbrook to part with his wardrobe, the fartsovshchik pled the case of

American beneficence with exquisite skill. “[Y]ou’re an American. You can buy all the

clothes you want—good clothes too. I don’t have that opportunity, so I ask this as a favor

of you.”134 Unfortunately for the young fartsovshchik, his poignant appeals fell on deaf

ears as Westbrook refused to budge.

131 Douglas Prince, “Corruption Crackdown Under Way in USSR,” Backgrounder on Communism, August 1961, 4, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Crime. Chernyshova has described the shadow (or second) economy as “an essential pillar of the Soviet system.” Soviet Consumer Culture, 99. 132 Lewis W. Bowden, “Moscow to New York via the Black Market,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, November 14, 1958, 6, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs 1958. 133 Robert Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1963), 68. 134 Ibid., 69.

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Debbie Sherwood’s encounter with the Soviet black market ended quite differently.

She was walking back to her hotel in Leningrad when, all of a sudden, “a devastatingly

handsome fellow with soft, wavy, black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a dazzling smile that

displayed a perfect set of pearly white teeth” intercepted her on the street.135 This self-

described “typical Russian boy,” who introduced himself as “Mike,” asked “a typical

American girl” for a favor. He needed her to buy some American cigarettes for him at the

nearby Beryozka store.136 “Mike” intentionally misled Sherwood in order to convince her

to do his bidding, telling her that Soviet citizens were not allowed inside the store.

Anyone with foreign currency could shop at the Beryozka, but the question of how a

Soviet citizen came into possession of any foreign currency was likely to attract the

attention of law enforcement officials, which was exactly what “Mike” was trying to avoid. “A store that didn’t allow Russians inside certainly didn’t sound very comradely.

And buying cigarettes didn’t sound like a form of high intrigue,” Sherwood reasoned to herself. “How could I say no to such a harmless request?”137 After she purchased nine

packs with the Finnish marks he gave her, “Mike” thanked her with a kiss on the cheek

and the inside scoop that he would make “a bundle” selling the cigarettes on the black

market, much to her surprise.138

Edward Hurwitz, a U.S. Embassy officer, had an opportunity to speak candidly

with a Moscow fartsovshchik, who had been previously censured by Komsomol’skaya

Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Youth League, for his unorthodox vocation.

135 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 162. 136 Ibid., 162-163. Beryozka (also spelled Beriozka, “little birch tree”) was a chain of state-run retail stores in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) selling imported Western goods, both durable and non-durable, for foreign currency or special certificates issued to Soviets working overseas. Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 267. 137 Ibid., 163. 138 Ibid., 164.

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The American suit and the Swiss wristwatch that Sergei Sytov sported when Hurwitz met

him made it abundantly clear that this 20-year-old studio cameraman had other, more

profitable means of supplementing his legitimate income.139 Sytov demonstrated the

seriousness with which he approached his black-market work, however unlawful it might

have been, by presenting a business card, which was actually just “a piece of paper with

his name and address in English and Russian,” to the American diplomat.140 Even though

he knew that Hurwitz was unlikely to risk an international incident to make some money,

Sytov could not talk with a foreigner, especially an American, without making “the usual

black market proposals” to him, “offering to sell ikons and to buy dollars, American blue

jeans, recordings, earrings, perfume or any other foreign item.”141 If Sytov seemed to flaunt his outsider status a bit too openly, it was because “the atmosphere for people like himself has greatly improved since 1957,” when Soviet citizens were severely punished for “merely hanging around foreigners” in Moscow’s hotels. Intourist hotels and restaurants remained under strict surveillance—with undercover police officers, whom the Soviet youth called “pirates,” working as waiters or posing as customers—but what

had changed, Sytov told Hurwitz, was the official willingness to mete out punishment.142

The main interests of a young Muscovite employed as a cook in a hotel restaurant were far removed from the kitchen. The self-described “business boy,” whom Morris

Rothenberg had met in downtown Moscow, was concerned with “business and capital,” or making money, which obviously put him at odds with the Soviet authorities. Not that

139 Edward Hurwitz, “Denounced Black Marketeer Continues Activities,” April 2, 1960, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 243, 500 Economic Matters 1960. 140 Ibid., 1-2. 141 Ibid., 2. 142 Ibid., 1.

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he cared anyway. Disdainful of the Soviet system and enamored with “all things foreign,”

the young man told the American diplomat about his two-year plan to get himself and his

brother out of the USSR.143 “The essence of the plan was active engagement in buying

clothes from foreigners for sale to ‘stilyagi,’” a pejorative term for the members of a

Soviet youth counterculture whose attire, speech, and demeanor betrayed an infatuation

with Western, especially American, popular culture.144 The illicit transactions the young

fartsovshchik conducted were, by and large, a means to an end. He needed to save enough

money to pay smugglers for safe passage to Turkey.145

Since increasing tourist and commercial flows transformed the Soviet Black Sea

coast into a highly profitable and relatively safe playground for black market operators,

American men and women who traveled there found themselves literally inundated with

offers from fartsovshchiki and valiutchiki. The port city of Odessa was perhaps the

commercial hub of the Soviet black economy in the Black Sea region. The city’s “private

speculators and traders,” who seemed “unusually numerous” to the visiting American

diplomats in 1961, signaled their identification with Western bourgeois capitalism by

calling themselves “beeznesmeny.” Robert Owen and Kempton Jenkins learned from one

such “beeznesmen,” a young man who had approached them with the usual offers to buy

dollars and clothing on highly favorable terms, that he and his fellow entrepreneurs “did

pretty good ‘business’ with American and English tourists who were both numerous and

willing in the mid-summer season.” The diverse nationalities of local “beeznesmeny,”

143 Morris Rothenberg, “Plans for Escape of Young Spanish-Russian,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” February 9, 1959, 22, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 144 Ibid., 21. For an excellent discussion of the consumerist aspirations of stilyagi, see Gleb Tsipursky, “Living ‘America’ in the Soviet Union: The Cultural Practices of ‘Westernized’ Soviet Youth, 1945-1964,” in The Soviet Union and the United States: Rivals of the Twentieth Century: Coexistence and Competition (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 139-163. 145 Ibid., 22.

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including, among others, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and Transcaucasians, exemplified

Odessa’s cosmopolitan population.146 The city’s reputation for black market dealing even

reached Moscow. A Soviet university student told a U.S. Embassy officer that his prized

possession, a Beatles record, made its way to the Soviet capital from Odessa’s “wild

market” (dikiy rynok), “where goods obtained from visiting sailors and tourists are

exchanged in an area near the port in the early morning hours.”147

The illicit traffic in consumer goods and foreign currency thrived in other towns

along the Soviet Black Sea coast. The crew and passengers, including three U.S.

diplomats and seven U.S. military officers, of a Greek cruise ship, docked at the port of

Batumi in southwest Georgia, “were repeatedly stopped on the [city’s] streets and asked

if they wished to sell articles of clothing and jewelry.” The most sought-after

commodities on Batumi’s black market were “watches (especially ladies’), women’s

clothing, stockings, scarves, perfume, [and] sun glasses” and fartsovshchiki promised a

profit of 100 to 1,000 percent for any of these items.148 James Robinson fended off cash

offers for American “drip-dry shirts” from “black-market entrepreneurs,” who seemed to

be “of high school age,” while lounging on a park bench in the Crimean resort city of

Yalta.149 An urbane young man discreetly approached Irene Kampen and Nila Magidoff

as they were making their way down a flight of marble steps to the bustling beach in

Sochi and made his intentions clear at once. “I am prepared to offer four rubles for one

American dollar. Cash.” His “cream-colored suit” and a pair of “enormous blue

146 Robert I. Owen and Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip Memoranda – Odessa, April 3-4,” in “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov, April 3-7, 1961,” 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 147 Robert A. Peck, “Youth: The Beat Goes On (Faintly),” November 1, 1969, 3, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 13, EDX 10: Foreign Student Program, 1970. 148 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 13. 149 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 173.

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sunglasses” suggested that he was not a horny-handed member of the Soviet proletariat

on holiday.150

Not all Americans withstood the temptation to make a quick ruble, especially given

the constant attention they received from fartsovshchiki and valiutchiki in search of a

bargain. One such American was a 23-year-old Ephron Catlin III, a veteran of the U.S. armed forces and the nephew of Ben Bradlee, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. His ill-advised decision to sell a men’s suit to a Soviet acquaintance brought his vacation to

an abrupt end. Catlin met with Consul Thomas Fain at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on

February 27, 1963, to recount his unfortunate ordeal and seek consular assistance in

leaving the USSR as soon as possible. According to Catlin, he “had met a Soviet citizen by the name of Leonid Ivanov” at Moscow’s National Hotel, where both men were staying, and “they had had several meals together,” conversing in English and Russian.

Once Ivanov “expressed considerable interest in buying” a men’s suit he had “eyed” in

Catlin’s hotel room, it did not take much prodding on his part to persuade the young

American to sell it to him. The two men met near the Bolshoi Theatre to “complete the transaction” but, as soon as the money (“no more than the suit would sell for anywhere else in the world,” as Catlin put it) and the merchandise (“a summer one and fairly well worn”) changed hands, five plainclothes militia officers converged on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere. They placed both men under arrest and escorted them to a local militia station.151

150 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold or Living Relatives, 116. 151 Thomas A. Fain, “Black Market Incident Involving American Tourist in Moscow,” March 5, 1963, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 277, 500 General Economic 1963.

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Militia officers released Catlin from custody after he gave a full confession but

confiscated his proceeds from the sale and instructed him to return to the station the

following day, which he did.152 It was during this second meeting that he was strongly

advised not to report the incident to the U.S. Embassy lest the Soviet authorities would

have to make an official case out of the whole matter. He obviously did not heed that

word of caution. Not only was he “unable to sleep or eat since the incident,” Catlin

confided to Fain, but he was also gravely concerned that the Soviets “would still get him

even after he left the country because he had committed a crime against Soviet laws.”

The American Consul assured Catlin that he need not worry about the global reach of

Soviet criminal law and put him on the next flight out of Moscow. The last he had heard

from Catlin was that “he had arrived in Paris and all was OK,” bringing the whole

unfortunate affair to a prompt and satisfactory conclusion. Neither Catlin nor Fain had

any idea what had happened to Ivanov.153

The illicit trade in consumer goods and foreign currency constituted only a segment, albeit an important one, of the Soviet shadow economy. Americans both experienced and witnessed other segments of the black market in operation firsthand, compiling an impressive record, in terms of range as well as scope, of entrepreneurial activity in the Soviet Union. The business acumen, resourcefulness, and fortitude that

Soviet entrepreneurs—men and women, young and old, Russian and non-Russian— displayed was all the more remarkable considering the fact that they lived in a country whose raison d’être was, after all, the overthrow of bourgeois capitalism.

152 Ibid. 153 Ibid., 2.

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After visiting the Moscow Polytechnic Museum in 1958, Robert Martens, a

political officer at the U.S Embassy, took a private taxi to Spaso House, the residence of

the U.S. ambassador in the Soviet capital. The Soviet driver told him that the car he used

to make money was state property but the fare was all his own.154 When Martens quipped

that this arrangement sounded a lot like capitalism to him, the driver laughed and replied

that it surely did. If Martens had any lingering doubts that the driver was well aware of

the operation of market forces, then paying double the usual rate for the ride should have

dispelled them at once.155 Many taxi drivers in Moscow charged unsuspecting passengers

“three or four times the official state-controlled rates” after sundown.156 The same illicit

practice prevailed in Yerevan in 1966. It was “common knowledge,” according to

Lafayette Grisby, a USIA officer, that private operators handled “a significant portion of

the city’s taxi service,” even though they “arbitrarily set their own rates.” The fact that

the private operators charged 20 to 40 percent more for their services that did legal

operators did not appear to adversely affect their brisk business in the city.157

Robert Owen, first secretary at the U.S. Embassy, spotted “an aproned

entrepreneur” who sought to capitalize on “the popular Soviet passtime [sic] of feeding

pigeons” by selling little bags of bird seed to interested passersby near a Moscow subway

station.158 On an excursion around Kishinev in 1961, Owen and his travel companion,

Kempton Jenkins, “observed eight or ten small children offering small bunches of wild

154 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Miscellaneous Observations on the Soviet Scene,” April 8, 1958, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 155 Ibid., 5. 156 Snow, “Moscow—12 years later,” 68. 157 Lafayette Grisby, “Audience Attitudes at Hand Tools-USA Exhibit in Yerevan, December 4-18, 1966,” January 6, 1967, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 19, TP-8 Hand Tools 1967. 158 Robert I. Owen, “Of Doves and Friendship,” January 2, 1959, in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, February 9, 1959, 15, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959.

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flowers for sale to passersby” on one of the city’s main streets. The approach of a

militiaman sent the street urchins scampering in all directions, but several of them

reconvened further down the street and resumed their unlicensed trade.159 Strolling through the kolkhoz market in the Arctic port of Murmansk, Jenkins and Julian

MacDonald were struck not by the pitiful selection of local meats and produce on sale but by the business acumen of Soviet railroad employees peddling apples and tomatoes at the market. It was quite easy for the U.S. Embassy officers to determine the peddlers’ legitimate occupation because they wore smocks over their state-issued uniforms. Given the likelihood that these itinerant merchants had transported their merchandise to the

Arctic region for the express purpose of reselling it for a profit, they were engaged in speculation and contravened Soviet law. Not that anyone seemed to care.160 Since the

popular demand for movie tickets in Tselinograd outstripped the available supply,

Richard Funkhouser, who paid a visit to the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan in 1961, was not

surprised to see scalpers plying their illicit trade outside the town’s movie houses, which

provided “the principal legitimate amusement in town.” What he did not expect to see,

however, was scalpers operating with impunity “under the nose of the militiaman.”161

A U.S. Embassy officer stumbled upon a lively black market operation at a

Moscow gas station in 1961. First, he saw the gas station attendant let a customer fill up

“an ancient privately-owned Pobeda” at his discretion, without “payment in cash or

coupons or even an exchange of words,” after she “identified him by glancing through

159 Robert I. Owen and Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip Memoranda – Kishinev, April 4-5, 1961,” in “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov, April 3-7, 1961,” 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 160 Jenkins and MacDonald, “Trip Report – Leningrad and Murmansk,” 3. 161 Richard Funkhouser, “Moral Breakdown in Virgin Lands,” October 18, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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her window.” The American diplomat then watched the driver of a gasoline delivery

truck syphon gas from his truck’s tank into “large four-gallon cans” and sell them to the

owner of “a privately-owned car parked out of sight behind the station.” Both of these

transactions took place in the space of ten minutes.162 A resident of Yerevan disclosed to

Grisby, who had accompanied the “Hand Tools: USA” exhibit to the capital of Soviet

Armenia in December 1966, that underground restaurants, operated in private homes,

were quite popular in the city because they usually offered “tasty dishes not found in

public restaurants” and opened for business earlier and closed their doors later than legal

establishments.163 The restaurant that he frequented for breakfast, the man reported,

would generally draw about fifty customers, most of them “from the immediate

neighborhood,” on any given morning.164

Richard Harmstone reported that a Soviet acquaintance of his, a Moscow university

student, took advantage of the inability of the Soviet economy to keep up with consumer

demand to make a tidy profit of 25,000 rubles (or $2,500 in 1958) without moving a

muscle. The feckless entrepreneur “sold his place in the waiting line for a new Pobeda

car” and used the proceeds to bankroll a two-week-long bash replete with “wine, women, and song.”165 Another way to make money in the lucrative automobile trade was to wait

one’s turn in line, purchase a car, and then sell it for “two or more times” its original

price to those willing and able to pay not to wait.166 The same business model could

162 John D. Hemenway, Robert I. Owen, and John V. Abidian, “Moscow Gasoline Black Market,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” June 30, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 259, 350 USSR 1961. 163 Grisby, “Audience Attitudes at Hand Tools-USA Exhibit,” 4. 164 Ibid., 4-5. 165 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Socialist Wares and Free Enterprise,” in “Miscellaneous Observations on the Soviet Scene,” April 8, 1958, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 166 Grisby, “Audience Attitudes at Hand Tools-USA Exhibit,” 5.

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obviously be applied to other durable goods for which waiting lines existed, such as

refrigerators and washing machines.

The Soviet authorities might have regarded the world’s oldest profession as an

unfortunate relic of capitalism, destined for extinction with the triumph of communism,

but it remained an important and highly profitable sector of the black market economy

from the very founding of the state of Soviets to its ultimate demise. James Ramsey and

Francis Meehan, second secretaries of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, found out that “the

best hotel in Astrakhan” offered guests much more than a good night’s rest when they

visited the southern Russian city in 1961. Not only did the place have “all the charm of a workers’ dormitory,” but it also doubled as an after-hours brothel. The American diplomats, who had the only double room on the third floor, noticed that “gay living went on quite freely” outside their door, “especially during the evening hours.” The foot traffic on a Saturday night reminded them of “hotels in towns near very large army camps when the soldiers are on leave.”167

Richard Funkhouser witnessed the same “moral laxity” during his stay at an

overcrowded hotel in Tselinograd. He thought the loose and easygoing atmosphere on his

floor “closely resembled the stereotype of a house of ill repute” on the frontier, which

was not too far from the truth considering the primitive living conditions in the Virgin

Lands of northern Kazakhstan. Much of the action seemed to revolve around an unlikely

protagonist, “a peroxide blonde who was wearing a Soviet version of stretch pants and an

expression from a Klondike saloon.” The “free and affectionate” relations she maintained

with Soviet officials, who roamed the corridors at will in their pajamas to the

167 James A. Ramsey, “Trip Report: Stalingrad, Astrakhan and Caucasus,” May 11, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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accompaniment of female giggling, did not make it hard for Funkhouser to figure out her

vocation.168 The fact that both Astrakhan and Tselinograd were provincial towns far

removed from Moscow, both geographically and temporally, made the local officials

much more lenient in dealing with prostitution.

A Soviet woman approached Hans Tuch and William Peterson, who were standing

in the bustling lobby of a Baku movie theater with their friends, Gizo and Tatiana, as

soon as she overheard them “exchange a few words in English.” She asked Gizo in

Russian whether his companions were Americans and received a prompt response in the

same language from Tuch that he was indeed an American. These were the only words

the American diplomats had the chance to exchange with the woman before Gizo ushered

them away from the scene. He had no choice but to act swiftly, Gizo explained to Tuch

and Peterson, because “the lady was obviously no lady but a prostitute trying to make

contact” with potential foreign customers, which was not an unusual occurrence in a

bustling port city like Baku.169

Robert Peck and Edward Hurwitz, political officers at the U.S. Embassy in

Moscow, made contact with two American graduate students at RGU (Rostovskii

gosudarstvennyi universitet, or Rostov State University) when they visited Rostov-on-

Don in 1970. Richard Schupbach and Bruce Menning, who “enjoyed considerable

freedom to mix in and observe the local scene,” reported that “professional prostitutes”

plied their trade in the city’s major restaurants, while many young women, especially

university students, maintained “an active amateur status” due to economic exigencies. A

168 Richard Funkhouser, “Moral Breakdown in Virgin Lands,” October 18, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 169 Hans N. Tuch, “Trip Report: Baku and Tbilisi, April 30 to May 5, 1959,” May 29, 1959, 3, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological.

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female student in her early twenties told Schupbach that she worked “the university

dormitory on Friday and Saturday evenings” because she simply could not live on the

meager wage she earned as a sales clerk.170

While the black market directly (and, it can be argued, defiantly) contravened

Soviet criminal law, the grey market defied statutory definition because it precariously straddled the boundary between legality and illegality, between the permissible and the forbidden. Americans encountered several Soviet entrepreneurs, whose market-oriented

activities seemed suspiciously bourgeois even if they were not deemed to be prosecutable

offenses. Whitney Dyke, a University of Chicago graduate student, stopped by the U.S.

Embassy in Moscow and talked with Robert Martens about some of the experiences he

had in the USSR over the course of a four-week trip in 1958. Martens was particularly

interested in Dyke’s visit, along with two journalists from Business Week, to the home of

a Soviet furniture dealer who imported “furniture, rugs, paintings and other articles for

comfortable living from abroad for high-ranking regime officials.”171

The Soviet broker, who not only spoke English fluently but used American slang as

well, shared some inside information about his clientele with Dyke. While most medium-

and low-ranking officials were “chary” about using his services to obtain foreign

luxuries, fearing that “present permissibility might be revoked” at any moment, nearly all

high-ranking officials “showed no hesitancy in acquiring these luxuries from abroad.”

The broker’s “sumptuous” apartment, appointed with lush carpets, Scandinavian and

American furniture, and even an original Picasso, attested to the profitability of his line of

170 Robert A. Peck and Edward Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Rostov-on-the-Don,” April 10, 1970, 2, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 2, EDX-2: General Reports, 1970. 171 Robert J. Martens, “Catering to the Soviet Upper Classes,” September 12, 1958, 1, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological.

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work, even in the State of Soviets. However, he confided to Dyke that all the luxuries in

the world could not stave off the lingering feeling that “he lived on the edge of a

‘swirling pit’ into which he might fall at any time if regime policy concerning contacts

with the West changed.”172

Franz Misch joined about 300 avid Soviet collectors at an impromptu open-air

market near Moscow’s Gorky Park in 1967. They were busy “exchanging, buying and

selling coins, stamps, postcards, lapel buttons and old books” until the militia arrived on

the scene. The American diplomat spotted three officers who “spread out through the

crowd and ordered individuals to pack up their collections and move on.” A sizable

portion of the crowd refused to budge, however. As it turned out, it was not the first time

that the militia had forcibly dispersed such a gathering in Moscow and the outraged

collectors demanded to know where they could meet to pursue their hobbies, which were

not illegal, without the threat of official interference hanging over them. One of the

officers stated that he was not authorized to assign a meeting place for the collectors, the

only thing he was authorized to do was remove them from this specific location at once.

He replied to the question by whose authority he acted by patting his leather pouch and

announcing “confidential document” without actually producing it. Once he realized that

the pleas that he was only doing his job and the allegations that gatherings of this sort

offered the perfect cover for black market activities fell on deaf ears, the officer turned to

insults. He called the collectors unemployed bums, singling out “an unshaven teenager

for a sarcastic lecture on the evils of postcard collecting” to make his point.173

172 Ibid. 173 Franz H. Misch, “Numismatists, Philatelists, and Other Collectors Harassed,” August 22, 1967, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 3, CUL 1967.

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On the evening of February 23, 1967, John Lodeesen, a political officer at the U.S.

Embassy in Moscow, happened upon a satirical program broadcast on Soviet state television. It publicly denounced a certain Moscow recording studio/record store for

“selling recordings of vulgar, Western-style popular music” to impressionable Soviet youth, “not yet ready to tell the difference between good music and bad.” The following day, like many other Muscovites who had watched the program the night before, he headed to the infamous Studio of Voice Letters (Studiya zvukovykh pisem) on Gorky

Street with his wife and found it brimming with customers, most of them eager teenagers.

The list of records available for purchase, “handwritten on cardboard sheets,” included the music of the “the ‘American’ Beatles (so described by buyers), the Rolling-Stones, and some West German combos,” as well as popular dances, such as “twists, shakes, cha-

cha-cha’s, and rock and roll.”174 A 78-rpm record produced in the studio had a three to four-minute track inscribed on a thin piece of plastic film and cost 92 kopecks.175 But

customers had to wait at least 45 minutes to pick up their order since each record was

made upon purchase.176

Lodeseen found the two records he bought so flimsy he had to glue them to

something more substantial before he could actually play them on a gramophone. It was

also impossible to listen to any record more than a few times since the quality of the

sound, not too good to begin with, deteriorated rapidly with every spin of the record on

the turntable. There is no doubt that young Soviets were well aware of the many

deficiencies of these shoddy “records” but they still flocked to the studio because it was

174 John S. Lodeesen, “It Pays to Advertise the Shake in Moscow,” March 3, 1967, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1964- 1967, Box 3, CSM 14 Communist Youth 1967. 175 Ibid., 2. 176 Ibid., 1.

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“the only commercial outlet for transcriptions of those types of music from the West

which [were] subjected to official censure.”177 Lodeseen’s anecdote perfectly

encapsulates the (fatal) attraction of Western consumer culture. “Engagement with the

West and in particular consumption of its products (both those that were indeed produced

there and those that were inspired by them) fuelled not only a vibrant second culture,” the

social historian Juliane Fürst has posited, “but a second economy, whose complicated

practices soon dwarfed the Soviet person’s relationship with the official market.”178

“They say you are fascists”

No matter what seemingly isolated corner of the vast Soviet nation an American

traveler found herself in, she was never out of reach of some sort of political propaganda,

be it a radio broadcast or an informational poster. The omnipresence of overt propaganda

in the Soviet Union allowed Americans to underscore an unmistakable divergence in

political culture between the two superpowers for readers back home, a divergence that

they undoubtedly believed redounded to the benefit of the open and pluralistic American

society. What is more, the steady diet of ideologically charged images, slogans, and

appeals that Party officials force-fed their subjects on a regular basis betrayed a

defensive, if not insecure, attitude, underscoring the inherent precariousness of the closed

Soviet system.

“In America, you have God; in Russia, we have Lenin,” a Soviet teenager informed

Robert Westbrook. Indeed, it was hard to overlook the cult of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin since

177 Ibid., 2. 178 Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27.

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“there were constant reminders” of him, such as “busts, statues, posters, and signs,”

everywhere.179 On the drive from the airport to the hotel, Irene Kampen could not fail to

notice the enormous arches, “decorated with huge photographs of Lenin” and

emblazoned with political slogans, which were erected over Moscow’s main

thoroughfares in preparation for the centennial of Lenin’s birthday in 1970.180

Westbrook, James Robinson, and Debbie Sherwood all made the prescribed pilgrimage to

the Lenin Mausoleum at the Red Square, where they exercised the privilege, accorded to

foreign visitors, of cutting in line to view the embalmed body of the revolutionary

founder of the world’s first socialist state.

Propaganda seemed to follow Americans wherever they set foot. U.S. Embassy

officers who visited Khabarovsk in 1958 heard Radio Moscow newscasts blaring out of

“horn type loudspeakers” installed along the city’s main street.181 Westbrook was amazed to hear music reverberate through the small Ukrainian village of Trypillia, just south of

Kiev. A loudspeaker set up in the center of the village was broadcasting Radio Leningrad for all to hear. What he thought was an admirable gesture of cultural enlightenment on the part of the Soviet government turned into an Orwellian nightmare when he heard the whole village echo with political slogans and realized that the villagers had no way of escaping “the incessant propaganda that poured from the irremovable loudspeaker” night and day.182 On a visit to a madrasa (a Muslim religious school) in Bukhara in 1961,

Joseph Norbury and Leo Moser heard “the Communist party line” expounded over a

179 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 88. 180 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 25-26. 181 Paul Tabailloux, Richard C. Harmstone, and Edward L. Killham, “Preliminary Trip Report – Highlights of Visits to Barnaul, Kemerovo and Khabarovsk, November 12-19,” November 28, 1958, 4, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1). 182 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 142.

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loudspeaker mounted in the courtyard.183 Passing through remote villages tucked deep in

the Soviet hinterland, Kampen found that “[t]he poorer the village the more statues of

Lenin and Hail-to-the-Glorious-Communist-Party banners” were on display.184 Sherwood

spent an hour “splashing around” at a Moscow public pool “under huge red and white

signs bearing the ever-present ‘Glory to the Party’ messages” while a curious “mixture of

pop tunes and propaganda” blared from the loudspeakers.185 Robinson encountered

propaganda posters featuring the universal themes of peace, friendship, democracy, and

freedom at every single stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway.186

It was hardly a coincidence that Kermit Holt felt as though he was “bombarded

with propaganda” over the course of his Soviet trip in 1970. A foreign visitor was clearly

a target of choice for Soviet propagandists. Holt came across “Communist Party books

and government publications…tucked in the pockets of airliner seats,” stacked on “tables

and racks in Intourist waiting rooms at the air terminals,” and placed in “drawers of tables

in hotel rooms.” The large sign, “Long Live the Peaceful Foreign Policy of the U.S.S.R,”

greeted him and fellow American tourists on arrival at Irkutsk’s airport and another sign,

“Ideas of the Peaceful Lenin Thrive and Win,” was prominently displayed in the

terminal. The fact that both signs were in English clearly denoted their purpose.187 Soviet academics used “every occasion” at the 25th International Congress of Orientalists, held in Moscow in August 1960, to “propagandize both the Soviet aims of drawing to

183 Joseph B. Norbury and Leo J. Moser, “Trip to Central Asia,” December 18, 1961, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 184 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 52. 185 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 101. 186 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 69. 187 Holt, “This is Siberia? Da!” K9.

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themselves the neutral or doubtful peoples of the world and the Soviet views on various

scholarly questions.”188

A chance conversation an American exchange student had with a ten-year-old

Soviet girl at Moscow’s Gorky Park brought to light the underlying emphasis on anti-

Americanism in Soviet propaganda. Upon learning that she was speaking with an actual

American, the girl asked him, in all seriousness, “They say you are fascists, but it’s not true, is it?” The American student explained to her that it certainly was not. She also wanted to know “what country is it that wants war” since she could never remember what

“they” told her at school. He assured her that no country in the world wanted war, least of all the United States.189

Sheila McCartney, an American exchange teacher who spent three months in the

Soviet Union in 1969 teaching English language classes in high schools in Moscow and

Leningrad, informed U.S. Embassy officers about the “distorted” and “distinctly dated”

depiction of the United States in Soviet textbooks. She recounted one particularly

memorable example she had come across in a Soviet English-language textbook. It was a

story about a well-off white woman who lamented the fact that she could not invite a

talented African American musician over for a social visit because “her husband would

not like to have a Negro in his home.” Her annoyance with racialized social conventions

did not preclude her from remarking to her friend, “But aren’t niggers musical!”

Objections American teachers raised about the inclusion of “blatant anti-American

188 John Albert White, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” November 10, 1960, 2, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 189 Morris Rothenberg, “Effect of Propaganda on a Ten Year Old,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, May 19, 1959, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959.

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propaganda” in foreign-language textbooks were met with the Marxist-Leninist dictum

that “it is impossible to separate politics from the teaching of English.”190

However crude and fallacious it may have been, anti-American propaganda revealed the sore points that Soviet officials hoped to exploit to discredit the U.S. for a domestic audience.191 Westbrook came across a poster depicting Klansmen beating a black man on sale for 10 kopecks at a Leningrad bookstore.192 Though the nominal theme

of the “Soviet Russia” art exhibit at Moscow’s Manezh Gallery in 1967 was the fiftieth

anniversary of the October Revolution, the American diplomats in attendance reported

that Soviet officials placed “considerable emphasis” on the contemporary sins of the

United States, namely racism and militarism. F. P. Reshetnikov’s “The Shame of

America” depicted a vicious dog “lunging with bared fangs” at “a handcuffed Negro”

who is held in a headlock by a policeman. Another of his paintings featured “hooded

Klansmen” ominously surrounding “a young Negro” while a policeman present at the

scene pointedly looks the other way. There was also an engraving, “The Sword of

Damocles,” of a white-cloaked “figure of death” with “an elongated atom bomb in the

form of a sword” in its hand and a “military cap bearing the letters ‘US’” on its head.193

For all its aesthetic flaws, socialist realism did make the underlying political message of

these works of art easy to grasp.

190 Marlin Remick and McKinney Russell, “Exchanges: American Teachers in Soviet Secondary Schools,” January 23, 1970, 2, MC 468, Box 230, Folder 39, General USSR 1970. 191 For an interesting study of anti-American visual propaganda in Pravda, the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, see Kevin J. McKenna, All the Views Fit to Print: Changing Images of the U.S. in Pravda Political Cartoons, 1917-1991 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 192 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 91. 193 Yale W. Richmond and John Tuohey, “‘Soviet Russia’ Art Exhibit at Moscow’s Manezh,” October 20, 1967, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 3, CUL 1967.

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Irene Kampen turned on the communal television set in the lobby of a sanatorium

for mine workers in Tskhaltubo and watched “a large female” anchor “in black lace and

an unfortunate hairdo…seated underneath a portrait of Lenin” deliver the six o’clock

news on the only available channel.194 Nila Magidoff, who joined her on the couch in the

lobby, provided a succinct summary of the main points covered, in descending order of

importance: “She says situation in United States is terrible. She says workers are starving and black people downtrodden. Policemen beating up students. Students setting fire to policemen. Everybody on strike. Lake Erie polluted. Fish dying. President Nixon has had cold.”195 George Humphrey and Robert Barry, political officers at the U.S. Embassy,

visited a Moscow park in 1970 to view the latest display of anti-American propaganda

billboards. The main themes, they reported, remained the same as before: “how rotten

things are in the US and how extensive are American-sponsored efforts to cover this up

and to subvert Soviet citizens.”196 Indeed, Soviet citizens were warned not to trust what

they saw or heard at American exhibits. Washington knowingly exploited these public

forums to “spread lies” and conceal the defining features of contemporary capitalist

societies, namely “sex, violence, sensationalism and drugs,” from gullible visitors.197

On the surface, the prominent place accorded to anti-Americanism in state-

sponsored propaganda made perfect sense in light of the Cold War rivalry between the

two superpowers. However, as a State Department analyst in the Office of Soviet Union

Affairs, pointed out in a confidential memorandum to Ambassador Jacob Beam in 1970,

194 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 100. 195 Ibid., 101. 196 George Humphrey and Robert L. Barry, “Anti-US Display Beefed Up in Soviet Park; Zionism an Added Attraction,” May 22, 1970, 1, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 2, EDX-2: General Reports, 1970. 197 Ibid., 1-2.

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it was worthwhile for U.S. policymakers to step back and reflect on the function of such

propaganda in the context of the shifting bilateral relationship between the United States

and the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era. After “several decades of broadcasting, trips abroad, tourists visiting the USSR, [and] Amerika magazine,” surmised Peter Semler,

Soviet citizens were “more knowledgeable about the West” than ever before. Whether direct or indirect, the increased contact that ordinary Soviets had with the West in general

and the U.S. in particular caused a fair amount of consternation in the Kremlin. Time and

again, the Communist Party resorted to “antidotal propaganda” in an effort to neutralize

the popular infatuation with the West, with seemingly minor success.198 Therefore, the

unrelenting attacks on the United States reflected weakness rather than strength, doubt

rather confidence on the part of the Soviet leadership.

“Take me to America”

Chance encounters with aspiring Soviet defectors, chronicled in vivid detail by

American tourists and diplomats, lent credence to the popular perception of the USSR as

a totalitarian state that kept its downtrodden subjects under lock and key against their

own will. When Dorothy Kieferdorf informed a young Soviet woman, who had

approached her on a busy Moscow street to compliment her on her earrings, that she was

an American working at the U.S. Embassy, the woman’s face betrayed a mixture of

amusement and dismay and she walked silently away. Kieferdorf did not take more than

five steps, however, before the Soviet woman reappeared by her side and said in English,

“I wish I could go to America.” She walked away once again after hearing Kieferdorf’s

198 Peter Semler, “Letter to Jacob D. Beam,” November 23, 1970, 2, RG 59, BPR, Box 25, PPB Anti- American File 1969-1971.

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sincere reply, “I wish you could go, too.” But it did not take long for the woman to

materialize beside Kieferdorf for the third (and final) time. This time, she grabbed hold of

Kieferdorf’s elbow and whispered in her ear, “There is no freedom in Moscow,” before

melting into the crowd in front of a Moscow subway station.199

A tense standoff ensued between two Soviet women and Soviet officials on the

floor of the “Industrial Design: USA” exhibit in Moscow in February 1967. The women

were “poorly-clad” mother and daughter who came to the exhibit, “with their pitifully

few belongings tied up in little bundles,” to seek assistance in leaving the USSR. What

they lacked in worldly possessions, they more than made up for in spirit. Although U.S.

officials reiterated in no uncertain terms that they “could and would not do anything for

them,” the desperate women vowed to remain in the exhibit hall until their demand was

met. They “hurled insults” at the agitated militiamen and attendants trying to grab hold of

them and unabashedly “damned the Soviet system” in front of Soviet and American

spectators. The standoff came to an end—a predictable one, perhaps—when four Soviet

attendants picked the women up and physically removed them, kicking and screaming,

from the hall. “Well, here you have it—this is our kind of democracy,” one of the Soviet visitors, who had witnessed the whole unsavory spectacle unfold, acerbically remarked to an American guide.200

Robert Westbrook and two of his friends were browsing through magazines at a

bookstand in the lobby of MGU when “a short, slight woman of about sixty” approached

199 Dorothy Kieferdorf, “A Prospective Immigrant?” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” May 19, 1959, 12, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 200 Hans Holzapfel, “‘Industrial Design-USA’ Exhibit, Moscow – Feb. 26-Mar. 19, 1967: A Review of Audience Reaction and Interest,” April 11, 1967, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 19, TP-8 Industrial Design 1967 #2.

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them. She had “a dazed but happy look on her face” and “talked and walked in jerky,

rapid fashion.” After verifying that they were indeed American citizens, she pled with

them: “Take me to America. Save me from Communism.” The woman justified her

unusual request, which left Westbrook and his friends speechless, with two simple

questions: “In America you have two parties instead of one, don’t you?” followed by

“And you are free in America, aren’t you?” She certainly knew the answers to these pointed questions but she felt obliged to ask them in order to accentuate the fundamental differences between the American and the Soviet political systems that would strike a chord with any American. As the woman frantically reiterated her request, one of the teenagers made the dubious suggestion that she might be able to reach America by way of Poland and then Western Europe.201 Even though the Americans knew very well that

she was unlikely to get very far, she still offered each one of them a hearty handshake and

a sincere thank you before taking her leave. Reflecting on this “unnerving experience,”

they could only conclude that the woman had to be “slightly insane.”202

Debbie Sherwood’s experience with a prospective Soviet defector left her similarly

shaken. She was walking back to the hotel with Lou, a stockbroker from St. Louis she

had met in Moscow, after watching the ballet Don Quixote when “a man stepped out of

the darkness” and begged them for help in broken English. Although “his face was

haggard and his skin had a tough, leathery look,” his distinctive attire of “Western type

blue jeans and a red and black plaid sports shirt” clearly identified him as a member of

the younger generation. After confirming that he was indeed speaking with Americans,

201 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 61. 202 Ibid., 62.

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the man explained exactly what kind of help he needed: “I want to go to America.”203

Unlike the older woman who approached Westbrook and his friends for help, this man

devised a rudimentary escape plan that required the two Americans to get him inside the

U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow. When Sherwood objected that he would not get

past the Soviet guard posted at the embassy’s gate, the man’s response demonstrated that

he had considered the situation and was prepared for such a contingency. “I have

American clothes. I wouldn’t have to say anything. I could pass through the gate with the

two of you.”204 After they handed him a pack of American cigarettes and a ballpoint pen

as a sort of consolation prize, Lou told the young Soviet that they would not help him to defect.205 Unable to face the dejected man, whose “whole body crumpled under the weight of the rejection,” any longer, Sherwood fled the scene in tears.206 Even though she

agreed with Lou that they did the right thing, “the man’s haggard face and his blue eyes,

moist with tears, haunted” Sherwood in her sleep.207

Conclusion

If, as Melvyn Leffler has argued, “[t]he Cold War tested the capacity of two

alternative systems of governance and political economy to deal with the challenges of a

postcolonial and postindustrial age,” then the Soviets were clearly not up to the task.208

Whatever the reason for their presence in the Soviet Union, American Cold War travelers

invariably portrayed a backward and inefficient command economy producing low-

203 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 129. 204 Ibid., 130. 205 Ibid., 131. 206 Ibid., 131-132. 207 Ibid., 132. 208 Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 465.

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quality consumer goods, a scarcity mentality inducing diffidence and obedience among

helpless consumers, a diversified shadow economy flourishing on the margins, an

unproductive and apathetic labor force lounging on the state payroll, and a one-party state apparatus clumsily attempting to impose political conformity on its subjects. Such an unstable and inefficient economic system, “a socialism of deficits,” to use Donald

Raleigh’s apt phrase, hardly posed an existential threat to capitalism.209 Remarkable as

they were, according to David Caute, Soviet technological triumphs in thermonuclear

physics, space exploration, and jet propulsion could not obscure the fact that “the Soviet

state was forever struggling against underdevelopment, both real and feared, reinforced

by self-imposed insulation against the global market.”210 This underdevelopment, in turn,

“discredited the Soviet system not only in the outside world but also in the eyes of its

own people.”211 The economic and political shortcomings that Americans identified went

hand in hand with the social and cultural problems afflicting Soviet society, which I will

discuss in the next chapter.

209 Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 228. 210 David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 35-36. 211 Vladimir O. Pechatnov, “Soviet-American Relations Through the Cold War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 117.

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Chapter 4: A New Sparta

Introduction

In addition to the economic, technological, and political shortcomings of the socialist system, American Cold War travelers took issue with the organization and manipulation of Soviet society and its institutions by the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union (CPSU). They were unapologetic in their criticism of the imposition of collectivist conformity, the rampant alcoholism, the blatant politicization of artistic expression, the unmitigated utilitarianism in public education, the cynical repression of religious belief, the overt expressions of prejudice, and the subversion of gender norms. The stark contrast between the open and pluralist society that Americans believed they had left behind and the austere and dysfunctional society they encountered was laid bare before their eyes.

In 1960, an American professor reflected on the palpable difference between home and abroad:

The change between the almost Babylonian mood of New York and the rather Puritanical aura

of Leningrad and Moscow almost defies description. There I left the fun loving affluent

society where conspicuous consumption and waste are almost a virtue, a symbol of status and

success; here was the Puritanical, Spartan society worshipping work, frugality and discipline.

There, a fat, dripping prosperity, here an austerity severe, rigid and bare. There one spends

two billion dollars a year on wrappings alone, here one saves newspapers to wrap food…1

There was not much to like, much less admire, about such a bleak and regimented existence. This was a sick society on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown. As

1 M. K. Dziewanowski, “Eastern Europe Revisited,” November 7, 1960, 1, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959, Library of Congress.

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long as a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers could be averted, the

American Cold War travelers reassured their harried compatriots, the U.S. victory in the

Cold War was a foregone conclusion. The key was to keep the lines of communication

open and the geopolitical tensions at bay.

“For the good of the whole”

It was impossible for American travelers to overlook the collectivist

weltanschauung, which defined and governed everyday life in the Soviet Union. After

all, not only did it bring to the fore for readers back home the fundamental difference

between the two superpowers during the Cold War, but it also made it possible for

Americans to condemn the Soviet way of life for effacing the individual in the name of

the collective. The collectivist weltanschauung dictated how people lived, got married,

and traveled. Multifamily high-rise apartment buildings—as opposed to single-family

detached homes familiar to most Americans—were a conspicuous presence in whatever

Soviet city or town American travelers found themselves. Marriage palaces, where as

many as fifty weddings per day could be performed by a judge for a modest honorarium,

proved to be an enduring attraction for foreign visitors. Since there were “relatively few private cars” on Soviet roads, Soviet citizens had to rely on an extensive (and affordable) public transportation system, which included buses, trolleybuses, taxis, subways, trains, ships, and, to a lesser extent, planes, to travel short and long distances.2

Robert Westbrook offered his take on what he considered the “unbridgeable gulf” between the American and the Soviet ways of life. “I am a product of the John Locke

2 Irene Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold or Living Relatives? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 52.

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philosophy—where society is for the good of the individual—whereas the Russians are products of a philosophy which says that the individuals are alive only for the good of the whole.”3 The “dreadfully efficient” emphasis on the collective in Soviet public education

(from nursery to university) made it “hard for Russians to understand,” much less accept,

the argument for “I” versus “We” propounded by Nathan Rosen, a graduate exchange

student at LGU (Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, or Leningrad State

University).4 Even something as mundane as postal regulations reinforced the lowly

position of the individual vis-à-vis the state in the Soviet Union since the standard format

for writing one’s mailing address followed the hierarchy of country, city, street, and

name. “It’s just like our system,” a Soviet acquaintance told a Boston Globe reporter.

“The state comes first, and the individual last.”5

Debbie Sherwood thought that dining best exemplified the ideals of socialism in

the Soviet Union since it was communal and egalitarian. An empty place at the table was

an open invitation to join since “[a]nyone can eat with anyone, whether they know each

other or not.”6 Dr. Arthur Roe found the communal consumption of kvass, “a fermented

beverage served on many street corners from a large truck,” utterly unappealing because

“there were only two or three glasses available, which were rinsed out casually between

customers” by the vendor.7 Even automated soft drink dispensers “scattered throughout

Moscow and Leningrad” operated on the principle of collectivist consumption. There was

only one glass available and each customer was responsible for rinsing it out before using

3 Robert Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), 138. 4 Nathan Rosen, “Concluding Section of End-of-Year Report,” June 4, 1962, 1, IREX, RC 53, GSE, End- of-Year Reports, 61-2. 5 Crocker Snow, Jr., “Moscow—12 years later,” Boston Globe (March 28, 1971), 65. 6 Debbie Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1969), 52. 7 Arthur Roe, “Trip to Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, May 1970,” June 22, 1970, 8, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 29, EDU-8: Exhibits, 1970, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections.

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it.8 The strategic placement of television sets in the lobby of Soviet hotels transformed

what was considered a private activity in the United States into a communal pastime in

the Soviet Union. A Soviet teacher informed Vladimir Toumanoff that “the usual way to

acquire the right to space in new buildings” was to contribute labor to their construction

at “the standardized rate of three full days of labor per square meter of living space.” She

herself was working at nights and on holidays for the next two months to earn “the right

to occupy and rent one room” in a new apartment building in Moscow.9

Soviet officials relied on public humiliation—a communal practice—to discourage

citizens from engaging in what they considered to be socially detrimental behaviors. A

U.S. Embassy officer who had attended lectures at MGU (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi

universitet, or Moscow State University) noted the Komsomol’s reliance on wall newspapers to reprimand university students for personal conduct and/or physical

appearance unbecoming of future builders of Communism. These broadsheets usually

included “cartoons and photos” of students accused of tardiness, slovenliness, incivility,

and carelessness—both inside and outside the classroom.10 Photographs of notorious

“speculators” and “free-loaders” (known in the vernacular as zaytsy, or rabbits) were

posted in stores and on buses and trolleys, respectively.11 Poster featuring the “names and

8 Bob Eddy, “Lenin’s Chilly Tomb Draws Daily Throngs,” Hartford Courant (August 12 1967), 6. 9 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Voluntary Labor on Housing,” in “Miscellaneous Notes From Conversations with Soviet Citizens,” January 22, 1959, 4, RG 84, Classified General Records (hereafter CGR), 1941- 1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959, National Archives. 10 John A. Baker, Jr., “First Year of Class Attendance of the History Faculty of the Moscow State University,” in “Observations in Various Universities in the Soviet Union,” May 14, 1958, 10, RG 306, Records Relating to the Soviet Union (hereafter RRSU), Box 1, USSR – Sociological, National Archives. 11 Douglas Prince, “Corruption Crackdown Under Way in USSR,” Backgrounder on Communism, August 1961, 4, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Crime; Robert A. Peck and Edward Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Rostov-on-the-Don,” April 10, 1970, 4, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 2, EDX-2: General Reports, 1970.

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photographs” of shoplifters attracted “substantial” popular interest in Vitebsk’s main

department store.12

Robert Owen joined a small crowd of passersby gathered about the display of

colorful satirical posters, “depicting in exaggerated fashion some undesirable form of

Soviet behavior,” outside a Moscow subway station in 1959.13 Photographs of

individuals, “identified by age, occupation and address,” who had been arrested for

engaging in the proscribed behaviors, accompanied each poster.14 The posters

denouncing drunkenness and speculation held little interest for Owen; it was the

whimsical depiction of “an unattractive couple of young people in exaggeratedly western

dress and hair styles…dancing very close to one another” that caught his attention. The

poster and the accompanying photographs of five “rather attractive” young women, who

had been arrested for “dancing in a vulgar manner” at local clubs, were meant to caution

Soviet youth about the serious consequences that infatuation with Western culture could

have.15 In Kursk, Soviet women were publicly chastised on a public display, known

locally as “the crocodile board,” for going out with Western engineers working on the

construction of a polyester plant in town.16

American diplomats came across the same colorful caricatures, “mocking and

chastising by name and address Soviet citizens guilty of such social crimes as

12 Serge Taube and Edward Hurwitz, “Trip Report – Vitebsk (September 26, 1970),” October 7, 1970, 4, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 8, EDX-7: Visits, 1970 13 Robert I. Owen, “Rogues’ Gallery A La Russe,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, January 7, 1959, 10, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 14 Ibid., 10-11. 15 Ibid., 11. 16 Richard Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers at Kursk,” June 7, 1962, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962. The term “crocodile board” derived from the popular satirical journal Krokodil, which famously ridiculed perceived shortcomings of the Soviet system in prose, verse, and illustration.

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drunkenness, unseemly public conduct, [and] wearing flashy dress,” on display in Irkutsk

in 1961. Yet, the few pedestrians who actually bothered to stop and examine the display, which was mounted in “a show window on one of the busiest street corners in Irkutsk,” found the caricatures amusing rather than didactic.17 The general public in Rostov-on-

Don greeted official efforts to combat “anti-social behavior” with the same lighthearted,

if not dismissive, attitude. The photographs and “sordid case histories (including names,

home addresses and places of employment)” of “local miscreants,” which were posted on

a bulletin board in the city’s main park, attracted popular attention because they provided

local residents with free public entertainment. Drunks received prominent coverage on

“the board of public shame,” as Robert Peck and Edward Hurwitz dubbed it, but it was

the caption accompanying a picture of an elderly woman that caught their attention.18

“Isn’t this a nice-looking grandmother? Can’t you just picture her at home helping out

with the shopping, cooking for her children, looking after the grandchildren? But no,

that’s not the life for her. Instead she spends all her time at a porcelain shop where she

waits for shipments of gold coffee spoons. She buys them up as they come in, then resells

them on the black market. Do her children know of this?”19

On two separate occasions, U.S. diplomats had the opportunity to attend a session

of a residential comrades’ court (tovarishcheskii sud) in Moscow. A comrades’ court was

an informal tribunal comprised of ordinary Soviet citizens, elected for the position by

collectives in state enterprises, street committees, apartment houses, educational

institutions, collective farms, and other organizations, to adjudicate minor offenses and

17 William N. Morell, Jr., and William Horbaly, “Miscellaneous Observations: Irkutsk and Khabarovsk,” May 30, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 18 Peck and Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Rostov-on-the-Don,” 3. 19 Ibid., 4.

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impose non-criminal penalties, such as fines. On June 18, 1960, Vladimir Toumanoff, a

U.S. Embassy officer, spotted an announcement on the bulletin board of house #45, a new ten-story apartment building on Lenin Prospect in which he was living at the time, informing all residents that an open session of a residential comrades’ court would be held in the evening. He found the court in session in the apartment building’s “red corner” (krasnyi ugolok), a basement room decorated with portraits of Karl Marx,

Vladimir Lenin, and Nikita Khrushchev, and set aside by the collective for social gatherings, wholesome recreation, and political agitation.20 A three-man tribunal, headed

by a chairman, an inarticulate man with a bad stutter, according to Toumanoff, with two

assistants on each side of him, attempted to govern the proceedings. The overflow

audience in attendance was composed “almost entirely of women.” What Toumanoff

witnessed that evening was “a sad tale of three incompatible families cooped up in a

three-room apartment,” whose domestic relations fluctuated between “bitter vindictive

arguments” and “hateful silences.”21

The ostensible point of contention which brought the parties before the comrades’

court that evening was a refrigerator which belonged to the plaintiff but was located in

the apartment’s communal kitchen. The plaintiff, “a wiry, persuasive man in his early

sixties,” accused the defendant, “a handsome young man of about thirty,” of ripping out a

section of electrical wiring, which he had installed to connect the refrigerator to his

submeter, during one of their many arguments.22 The hearing, however, made it

abundantly clear to Toumanoff that the refrigerator was merely the tip of the iceberg. The

20 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Soviet Comradely Court in Operation,” July 28, 1960, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941- 1963, Box 243, 360.01 Political Subdivisions of Nations 1960. 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Ibid., 3-4.

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sordid exchange of petty accusations between the plaintiff and the defendant brought into

the open the deep-seated resentments, aggravated by “poverty, drunkenness, promiscuity, and arteriosclerosis,” which had been seething in that crowded apartment for a year and a half.23 “The defendant was a drunk! The plaintiff brought home a new ‘wife’ every six

months! The defendant walked out of the bathroom naked! The plaintiff didn’t take his

own trash out of the kitchen! The defendant shocked the plaintiff’s aged mother into a

heart attack and the ambulance had to be called! Any fat old hag that did nothing all day

but stuff herself in front of the television set would get a bad heart, besides she had lots of

heart attacks and it’s about time she croaked anyway!”24 After two and a half exhausting hours of hurling insults at one another and rehashing old grievances, the two antagonists finally grasped the shameful spectacle they had staged in front of their neighbors and agreed to “a reconciliation of sorts” before the chairman adjourned the court.25

In 1961, William Watts, who succeeded Toumanoff as political officer, attended an

open session of a residential comrades’ court after coming across a public announcement

posted at the entrance of a Moscow apartment building. Since “no particular measures

were taken to screen those who entered,” he proceeded to the building’s “red corner,”

located once again in the basement, and took a seat in the packed room. Watts noted the

presence of a secretary responsible for recording the court proceedings alongside the

chairman and his two assistants. The case pending before the court involved a mundane

quarrel of the he-said, she-said variety between two residents. At a public meeting held to

elect a residential comrades’ court, an elderly woman had accused one of the candidates

23 Ibid., 4. 24 Ibid., 3. 25 Ibid., 4.

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vying for the position of bribery. When he responded to her allegation by calling her a

scandal-monger, she took offense at his disparaging remark and brought him before the

comrades’ court for slander. At the outset of the hearing, the chairman laid out the court’s

ground rules for the sake of all those gathered in the basement. “[E]ach principal could

make a statement, following which three witnesses could be called from each side.

Thereafter, the principals could cross-examine each other, and interested parties from the

audience would be allowed to enter questions.”26

Once the plaintiff and the defendant repeated their respective allegations about one

another before the court, without producing any admissible evidence to that effect, they

summoned their character witnesses. The elderly woman found herself on the defensive

since her only witness merely reiterated that the well-worn claim that the defendant had

accepted bribes without commenting on her character or reputation, which was, after all,

the issue at stake. Watts could sense “the mood of the audience” in the basement

gradually turn against the woman as long-standing animosities flared up. “Some complained that she had lived in the building since 1929, that she was quite impossible, and that everyone had hoped that she would move out when she became a pensioner.”

Once more, strained interpersonal relations came to the fore. Before leaving the room with his assistants to reach a verdict in the case, the chairman made sure to clarify to everyone present the difference between criticism (kritika), which “had a justifiable basis and could lead to formal action,” and slander (oskorbleniye), which did not. Since the plaintiff “had made her accusation at a public meeting without showing any evidence,”

26 William Watts, “A ‘Comrade’s Court’ in Action,” January 22, 1962, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 370 Public Order and Safety 1962.

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the court found her guilty of slander and sentenced her to censure.27 Watts thought that

the comrades’ court conducted its business in “a rather informal and quasi-legalistic

fashion” due to the fact that “all the participants in the ‘trial’ were well acquainted with

each other.” This contrived intimacy of collective housing did not bode well for the

elderly woman, who “was ‘convicted’ on the basis of her reputation, and not on any clear

presentation of facts” in the case.28

Watts and Toumanoff found out firsthand that justice was neither blind nor

impersonal in a comrades’ court. However, observing the operation of comrades’ courts

in Moscow convinced them that these courts were not set up to dispense justice in the

first place. Toumanoff thought that a comrades’ court was “a useful mechanism for

dealing with problems of personal relations arising from crowded housing, poverty, and

sheer orneriness,” which ordinary Soviets had to contend with on a daily basis. As he saw

it, a comrades’ court served two interrelated social functions: first, it afforded people a

controlled environment to express their frustration, anger, and discontent, and, second, it settled minor domestic squabbles before they “reached such proportions of violence or other social liability as to require the attention of true judicial organs.”29 The collectivist

framework in which a comrades’ court discharged its duties lent itself to the application,

“in relatively severe and unnerving fashion,” of “a form of social pressure against a

minor offender.”30 After all, these informal tribunals were set up to “show the offender

27 Ibid., 2. 28 Ibid., 3. 29 Toumanoff, “Soviet Comradely Court in Operation,” 1. 30 Watts, “A ‘Comrade’s Court’ in Action,” 3.

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the error of his ways and to strengthen communist morality both in him and in the group

to which he belongs” by persuasion rather than coercion.31

Attendance at the comrades’ court inspired Toumanoff to reflect on the social

adjustments most Soviet citizens had to make to cope with crowded living conditions. He

speculated that one such just adjustment concerned the development of a distinct set of

interpersonal skills by residents. Among these he included “a quality of self-restraint

(rather than tolerance) which seemed capable of preventing or bottling up seemingly natural reactions to provocation and frustration,” “a surprising resignation or acceptance of physical discomfort, pain and even death,” and “a refined capacity to commit extreme and prolonged verbal assault without resort to, or response by, physical violence.”32

These were hardly the skills that any American would wish to nurture. What Toumanoff

and Watts witnessed in those Moscow basements clearly did not redound to the benefit of

the Soviet way of life, exposing as it did the simmering resentments and frustrations that

permeated the walls of Soviet apartment buildings and beleaguered the everyday lives of

so many men and women.

“Would you marry a Negro?”

American visitors found out that official efforts to portray the multiethnic Soviet

nation as the embodiment of interracial brotherhood—and the antithesis to the white

supremacist United States—clashed with the actual conditions on the ground. Verbal

abuse heaped upon and physical brutality directed against African university students

31 Harold J. Berman and James W. Spindler, “Soviet Comrades’ Courts,” Wash. L. Rev. 38 (Winter 1963), 843. 32 Toumanoff, “Soviet Comradely Court in Operation,” 2.

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pointed out the divergence between the promise of racial harmony and the reality of

racial prejudice in the USSR. If there was one thing that “nearly all the peoples of the

Soviet Union” agreed upon, according to an American exchange student, it was that the

African student was “an over-sexed monkey in trousers which has come to the Soviet

Union to complain; to live in the restaurants on an exorbitant stipend; and to do in general

everything but study.”33 Many Soviets had no qualms or reservations about divulging the

racial prejudices they harbored against Africans to guides on visits to American exhibits.

There were some who did not feel the need to conceal or justify their racist predilections.

“I can’t stand Negroes,” declared a Soviet visitor at the “Education: USA” exhibit in

Kiev. “I hate them because they are black.”34 Another visitor, a university student in

Leningrad, exclaimed, as if it was an undisputable fact, that Africans were not even

people.35 However, most of those who expressed animosity toward Africans refrained

from making crude racist statements but sought to rationalize their prejudice by

naturalizing it, making racism seem like a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.

Soviet university students complained about getting the short end of the stick because of

the privileges they believed university officials were unfairly bestowing upon

undeserving African students simply because of their skin color and national origin.

Africans were “not even required to attend class” and received larger stipends and choice

dormitory assignments, the students grumbled.36

33 Richard Hellie, “Final Report on Stay in the Soviet Union, September 6, 1963 to September 20, 1964,” February 1965, 11, IREX, RC 200, Summary of Americans, GSE, 1963-64. 34 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev – Final Report – Visitors’ Reactions,” October 8, 1969, 11, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs and Expositions, 1970. 35 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Leningrad, July 2-6, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” July 11, 1969, 3, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs and Expositions, 1970. 36 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev, September 11-17, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” September 23, 1969, 7, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs and Expositions, 1970.

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But, even among students, it was a visceral aversion to intimate relations between

black men and white women that fueled much of the popular animosity toward Africans

in the Soviet Union. Whether real or imagined, the specter of miscegenation shaped

public opinion and social discourse. Kievans denigrated local women who dated African

men as “prostitutes” and deplored “a rise in the number of black children born into white

families,” while Leningraders backed the use of physical violence to keep African men

“in line.”37 An MGU student was actually surprised that more Africans were not “knifed” in the streets for pursuing white women.38 Some Soviet visitors to U.S. exhibits sought to

garner sympathy—and normalize their bigotry—by posing what they considered to be a

rhetorical question, “Would you marry a Negro?” to American guides. It was not hard to

detect “the look of horrified astonishment” that would creep across Soviet faces once

they heard the invariable reply, “Yes, I would, if I loved him.”39 Soviets, who found such

statements startling, especially given the emphasis on rampant American racism in Soviet

propaganda, informed the American guides that they were “more Communist” than any

of them, if they actually meant what they said.40

A disenchanted Kenyan student at MGU reported a “racial incident,” involving two

Senegalese students from the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in

Moscow, to Terrence Catherman, a United States Information Agency (USIA) officer, in

1963. After having dinner in downtown Moscow, the Senegalese students, whom the

Kenyan described as “quiet and good-mannered,” joined a queue at a taxi stand to catch a

37 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev – Final Report,” 11; Marlin Remick, “Visitor Reaction to Exhibit Architecture: USA in Leningrad (May 25-June 26, 1965),” July 1965, 13, RG 306, Research Reports (hereafter cited as RR), 1960-1999, Box 26, R-100-65. 38 “Soviet Views of America,” August 11, 1964, 8, RG 306, RR, 1960-1999, Box 21, R-112-64. 39 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev – Final Report,” 11. 40 “Soviet Views of America,” 8.

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cab back to the dormitory. “When their turn came,” however, “a Russian who had been

standing behind them pushed them aside and got into the waiting cab” without a word of

explanation or apology. This deliberate act of discourtesy elicited an immediate and

forceful response from one of the Senegalese students, who grabbed hold of the taxi door

before the Russian man had a chance to close it and made sure that it stayed open, thus, in

effect, precluding the car from departing. It did not take long for a crowd of interested

onlookers to gather at the scene of the tense standoff and it took even less time for the

crowd to choose sides, subjecting the African students to verbal abuse and threatening

them with bodily harm. A militiaman, who arrived on the scene before the situation could

get out of hand, seemed to share the crowd’s prejudices. He was not at all interested in

what the Senegalese students had to say and placed them under arrest based on the

statement he obtained from the Russian man in the taxi. He then sent the man on his way

and hauled the students off to a nearby militia station.41

One of the Senegalese students was released after a brief interrogation but he categorically refused to leave the station without his friend, prompting militiamen to unceremoniously drag him outside. Back at Lumumba University, the incensed

Senegalese student recounted the evening’s unfortunate turn of events to galvanize other

Africans, including the young Kenyan who related the whole ordeal to Catherman, into action on behalf of his unjustly detained compatriot. A contingent of African students marched to the militia station and demanded the immediate and unconditional release of the Senegalese student still in custody, a demand that was reluctantly met following “a

lengthy argument” between the opposing sides. Once he was safely back among friends

41 Terrence F. Catherman, “Racial Incident Involving African Students in Moscow,” February 15, 1963, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 278, 570 General 1963.

214 and compatriots, the visibly shaken Senegalese student divulged the physical and mental abuse he had suffered at the hands of Soviet militiamen. He “had been interrogated intensively, half-stripped, slapped several times in the face, and told that if he were in

America he already would have been lynched for his arrogance.”42 Catherman reported that the Kenyan student, who became “quite agitated” while recounting the incident, was embittered by the popular animosity he and other Africans experienced in the Soviet

Union and expressed in no uncertain terms his desire to continue his studies elsewhere, preferably in the United States. He was well aware of the racial problems plaguing

American society but told Catherman that he would much rather live in an openly racist society, “where he would know exactly where he stood” at all times, than remain in the

Soviet Union, “where Africans were constantly told that they were equal in every respect to Soviet citizens but where, in fact, the most rampant racial prejudices obtain.”43 These prejudices could easily turn violent.

An American correspondent on a temporary assignment in Moscow described the brutal assault on three African students he had witnessed on July 27, 1963, to a U.S.

Embassy officer. Hearing a commotion of some sort outside, the correspondent looked out of his hotel window and saw a large mob of 100 to 150 people, “men and women of all ages,” gathered in a circle around “three young Negroes and five or six Russian men” at a clearing near an entrance to Gorky Park. The Russian men were repeatedly punching the African students. The correspondent had “the weird sensation” that he was watching a game of marbles since the Russian assailants kept knocking the “badly blood-splattered”

African students into the enraged mob and the mob kept knocking them back into the

42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 2.

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hands of the vicious assailants in the center of the circle. He watched the brutal attack

unfold for good ten minutes before the militia finally arrived on the scene to quell the

disturbance.

The six militiamen, who attempted to disperse the unruly crowd, only succeeded in

instigating a general melee and it took them another ten minutes to reach the African

victims in the ensuing chaos.44 However, the horrendous ordeal was not over just yet. As

they were leading the three African students away, the militiamen did absolutely nothing

to stop the Russian “tormentors” from “running up from behind and kicking the Negroes,

full force, and occasionally beating them in the small of the back.” Reflecting on what he

had witnessed that day, what struck the American correspondent the most was not only

“the savageness of the attack” on the Africans but also the mob’s full and active

participation in the assault.45 The fact that the assault occurred on a Saturday was not an

insignificant curiosity since an African student told a USIA officer in Kiev that he made

sure to spend weekends in the relative safety of the university dormitory. “It’s Saturday

night and lots of people are drinking. That’s when we catch it the worst,” he explained.46

“We’re all good unprejudiced people here”

The conversations they had with Soviet citizens made Americans aware of the

existence, and nature, of the “national question” in the USSR. The crux of the matter,

according to Dr. Richard Hellie, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, was

44 Robert K. German, “Race Riot in Moscow,” August 16, 1963, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 278, 570 General 1963. 45 Ibid., 2. 46 Alexander Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev – Final Report – Visitors’ Reactions,” October 8, 1969, 11, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs and Expositions, 1970.

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that “a vast number of the people of almost all nationalities don’t like the people of

almost all the other nationalities of the Soviet Union, or at least harbor incredible

prejudices about them.”47 These tensions certainly did not bode well for the future well-

being of Soviet society. The Russians seemed to have a knack for vehemently denying

the existence of the “national question” and unabashedly expressing bigoted views in the

same breath. Russian visitors to the “Plastics: USA” and “Transportation: USA” exhibits

in Volgograd made a point of “disclaiming the existence of racial or national bigotry in

the USSR” to American guides: “We’re all good unprejudiced people here.” But the same

people also boasted of their “pure Russian” lineage and made condescending remarks

about other nationalities; for instance, accusing Armenians living in Volgograd of

speculation.48 In similar fashion, two Russian youths alleged that “no Georgian living in

Moscow” made an honest living but engaged in illicit speculation by trading produce for

consumer goods and “making a neat profit at both ends.”49 A lieutenant colonel of the

MVD (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, or the Ministry of Internal Affairs) felt no qualms

about referring to a fellow Soviet citizen as a “dirty Kazakh” in the presence of a U.S.

military attaché.50 At least some Russians in Alma Ata had no qualms about describing

Kazakhs as “a degenerate race” on the brink of extinction.51 Such ethnocentrism

47 Richard Hellie, “Final Report on Stay in the Soviet Union, September 6, 1963 to September 20, 1964,” February 1965, 10, IREX, RC 200, Summary of Americans, GSE, 1963-64. 48 Alexander G. Park, “The Soviet People View America,” January 9, 1962, 12, RG 306, RR, 1960-1999, Box 2, R-1-62. 49 John D. Scanlan, “Another Visit With Two Soviet Youths of the Privileged Classes,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, January 7, 1959, 3. 50 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Miscellaneous Observations on the Soviet Scene,” April 8, 1958, 8, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 51 Hellie, “Final Report,” 11.

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prompted a young Uzbek to remark acerbically: “There are 120 nationalities in the

USSR, and the Russians hate 119 of them.”52

Russians, however, were not the only members of the Soviet family of nations to

harbor animosity. It was to be expected, given the recent history of occupation and forced

deportation, that the peoples of the Baltic republics would not hold Russians in high

regard and find their presence highly objectionable. A Lithuanian woman told a U.S.

Embassy officer that Lithuanians wanted nothing to do with Russians and refused to

speak the “abhorrent” Russian language on principle.53 An Estonian cab driver told

visiting American diplomats that Estonians “do not care to learn Russian actively and

what passive learning opportunities would normally exist are minimized because [they]

watch Finnish television and listen to Western radio” broadcasts.54 The “adherence to

western standards of taste, persistent devotion to religion, and awareness of developments

in the west” denoted Estonians’ cultural orientation away from the Soviet Union.55 Two decades of Soviet rule did not temper the anti-Soviet and anti-Russian sentiments among

Latvians, who despised “the Russians as people, not merely as Communists.”56 Some 130

Latvians visited the “Medicine: USA” exhibit in Moscow and Kiev in 1962 for the express purpose of speaking with a Latvian-American guide in their native tongue.57

Over the course of these conversations, they lamented “the influx of Russians,” mainly

52 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 10-16, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” November 19, 1969, 5, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs & Expositions, 1970. 53 Lewis W. Bowden, “Lithuanians and the Russian Language,” April 17, 1959, in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, May 19, 1959, 9, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 54 Joseph P. Hayes, “Foreign Publications: Observations on Trip to Riga and Tallinn, February 8-11, 1967,” March 7, 1967, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, Int 6. 55 Paul A. Smith, Jr. and Richard E. Snyder, “Impressions of Soviet Rule in Tallin,” April 4, 1961, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 260, 360.01 Political Subdivisions of Nations 1961. 56 “Some Lettish Views on Soviet Society,” June 19, 1962, i, RG 306, RR, 1960-1999, Box 9, R-63-62. 57 Ibid., 1.

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into Riga, “the position of privilege” the outsiders enjoyed, “the economic exploitation of

their country,” and the political indoctrination in public schools.58

Georgians voiced similar complaints about the “arrogance” of Russians living in

Tbilisi to American guides. Even though they assumed “an attitude of superiority” over

Georgians, Russians had nothing to boast about. They were dishonest and untrustworthy

people who had no sense of loyalty and would “sell you and your family” without a

second thought.59 The common practice of relocating talented Ukrainian artists to

Moscow for work irked the Ukrainian film director Anatoli Slesarenko since, in his

opinion, it merely reinforced the objectionable notion that “everything good has to be

Russian, produced in Russia by Russians and, especially, in Moscow.”60 A Ukrainian

university student bemoaned the predominance of the Russian language in the Donbass

region of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The number of Ukrainian speakers in

the region was declining rapidly, he explained to visiting American diplomats, due to

discrimination against the Ukrainian language and culture in local schools.61

Armenian visitors to the “Hand Tools: USA” exhibit in Yerevan stressed that “they

do not always judge Soviet interests to be their interests” because their national identity

as Armenians trumped their civic identity as Soviets.62 The division of labor in Central

Asia seemed to follow a racial logic that Hellie found all too familiar as an American.

The Russians invariably occupied the managerial positions while the Central Asians, just

58 Ibid., 2. 59 Park, “The Soviet People View America,” 13. 60 John A. Baker, Jr. and David E. Mark, “Conversation With Ukrainian Film Director,” April 14, 1958, 5, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1). 61 Robert A. Peck and Edward Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Donetsk,” April 13, 1970, 3, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 2, EDX-2: General reports, 1970. 62 Lafayette Grisby, “Audience Attitudes at Hand Tools-USA Exhibit in Yerevan, December 4-18, 1966,” January 6, 1967, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 19, TP-8 Hand Tools 1967.

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as invariably, did “the heavy, hot, wet, dirty work.”63 It is no wonder that Americans

heard repeated allegations of economic discrimination leveled against the “Great

Russians” by representatives of various national minorities at the 1967 “Industrial

Design: USA” exhibit in Moscow.64 The “national question” thus threatened to unravel

the multiethnic fabric of Soviet society.

“The ‘well-patient’ business”

While Soviets were entirely convinced of the superiority of the “cradle-to-grave” medical care available to them free of charge, Americans expressed some serious reservations about the Soviet approach to healthcare. Irving Levine advised Americans to see a local dentist before departing for the USSR. “Soviet dental techniques are years behind the West,” he reported, “and metal crowns are often used for front teeth.”65 Dr.

John S. Theodorou, a Chicago dentist who accompanied the “Medicine: USA” exhibit on

its Soviet tour in 1962, was highly critical of the “very low” level of dental medicine in

the USSR. Patients received local anesthetics “only for extractions, not for crown work or

deep drilling,” as was customary in the United States, and the only piece of modern

dental equipment he ever saw at the clinics he visited in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev

was a Czechoslovak-made replica of an American high-speed drill.66 As late as 1963, the use of general anesthesia for major surgical procedures was largely confined to the major urban centers of the USSR, which was an achievement in and of itself for Soviet

63 Hellie, “Final Report,” 11. 64 Hans Holzapfel, “‘Industrial Design-USA’ Exhibit, Moscow – Feb. 26-Mar. 29, 1967: A Review of Audience Reaction and Interest,” April 11, 1967, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 19, TP-8 Industrial Design 1967 #2. 65 Irving R. Levine, Travel Guide to Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 55. 66 Carroll H. Woods, “Incidental Economic Items,” April 3, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 500 General 1962.

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medicine. “Outside the larger cities,” reported Foy D. Kohler, the U.S. Ambassador to the

Soviet Union (1962-67), “qualified anesthesiologists are not abundant and local

anesthesia is used for major surgery because that is all the surgeon has.”67

Dr. Roger O. Egeberg, Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs in the

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, who visited the USSR in 1970, noted that

the greater number of doctors and beds per patient in the Soviet Union resulted in longer

hospital stays for patients, which was not an optimal approach given the conventional

wisdom that “people recover much faster out of hospitals than in them.”68 Quantity did

not guarantee quality, either. Egeberg asserted that the large number of doctors and

nurses in the USSR, which certainly looked impressive on paper, obscured the fact that

these medical professionals did not work very hard for a living and enjoyed an early

retirement because there were “too many of them.” He also cited what he regarded as a

typical case of a Soviet child kept out of school for eight days “on suspicion of a cold” to

chide the Soviet medical establishment for taking “prevention to the point of absurdity.”

Socialized medical care was not without its drawbacks, some of which Egeberg gleaned

from conversations he had with Soviet officials at the Ministry of Health. The mother-in-

law of an official made a habit of calling in doctors to discuss, for at least an hour, “her

nervous complaints” without any financial liability on her part, and a high-ranking

official, diagnosed with high blood pressure, enjoyed an annual month-long respite at “a

magnificent sanatorium” in Sochi at the state’s expense.69

67 Foy D. Kohler, “Letter to Frances P. Bolton,” April 1, 1963, 2, RG 59, Front Office Files, Box 1, Official Correspondence 1963. 68 Adolph Dubs, “Dr. Egeberg’s Visit to the Soviet Union,” November 16, 1970, 1, RG 59, Bilateral Political Relations (hereafter cited as BPR), Subject Files, Box 25, Public Health Exchanges 1972. 69 Ibid., 2.

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Medical emergencies afforded American men and women a singular opportunity,

for better or worse, to observe the Soviet medical bureaucracy in action from the patient’s

point of view—from the inside out. Their firsthand impressions, however, did not reflect

credit on its operation. Maurice Warshaw, a Russian-born American businessman from

Salt Lake City, Utah, spent a few days in Moscow’s Botkin Hospital in 1970. He was none too impressed with the upkeep and operation of arguably “the best general hospital in the U.S.S.R.”70 Even though he had no complaints about the treatment he had

received, Warshaw “was surprised to see that a rich country like Russia would have such

a worn-down building and unsanitary conditions” at one of its leading medical

institutions.71

Following the birth of her son in 1963, Rebecca Matlock, the wife of a U.S.

Embassy officer, convalesced, albeit reluctantly, for ten days at the Scientific-Research

Institute for Obstetrics and Gynecology in Moscow, where she received “VIP

treatment.”72 Upon her arrival in the delivery room, she was handed a pair of “old felt

shoes,” which she surmised had been used by many expecting mothers before her and

would “be used by many to come,” and placed on a delivery table mere four feet from

another woman, “who was in the process of giving birth.” The large delivery room at the

institute seemed to function as a public forum of sorts since Matlock saw “people drift in

and out, write reports, gossip, or watch a delivery if one happens to be in progress,” as if

it was the most natural thing to do.73 She herself had an empathetic and animated

70 Kohler, “Letter to Frances P. Bolton,” 1. 71 Maurice Warshaw, “Letter to Jacob Beam,” December 12, 1970, 1, RG 59, BPR, American Visits to the USSR, 1963-1970, A1 5345, Box 18, TRV: Am Visits to USSR, 1970. 72 Kenneth A. Kerst, “Childbirth – Soviet Style,” May 28, 1963, RG 59, BPR, Subject Files, Box 3, 1241(c) – Hospitals 1943-1963. 73 Rebecca Matlock, “Ten Days in A Soviet Maternity Hospital,” May 28, 1963, 1, RG 59, BPR, Subject Files, Box 3, 1241(c) – Hospitals 1943-1963.

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audience of “half-dozen or so women,” who shared her suffering, “in typical Slavic fashion,” by chanting and wailing loudly during the delivery.74 That was not the last time

Matlock attracted unwanted (female) attention. A small group of women “almost

invariably” gathered outside the room she shared with two other patients and made her

feel like “a monkey in a cage” by peering inside through the “full-length glass door.”75

Since Soviet doctors did not perform episiotomies to enlarge the vaginal opening,

Matlock required surgical attention to repair the damage from natural tearing that occurred during childbirth.76 Just as she feared, the surgical procedure was

“accomplished without any anesthetic, much to my objection and discomfort.” The young female doctor, who performed the procedure, also made use of leeches to “break small

blood blisters which form sometimes during delivery.”77 The major point of contention

between Matlock and Soviet doctors during her hospital stay concerned her use of

sanitary pads, an unknown (and hence unavailable) commodity in the Soviet Union, to

absorb the lochia (postpartum vaginal discharge). She found the Soviet alternative of

lying on “a sort of cup-towel” for a week unfathomable and unbearable and successfully

fended off repeated admonitions from doctors (and nurses) to refrain from using pads.78

She also received the same cursory response to her requests for relief from the

“persistent and extremely painful after-pains” she experienced after childbirth: “The

pains are necessary so your uterus will go back to normal.”79 Small packets of camphor

and two vitamin tablets was all the medication she received over the course of ten days.80

74 Ibid., 2. 75 Ibid., 4. 76 Ibid., 2. 77 Ibid., 3. 78 Ibid., 4. 79 Ibid., 3. 80 Ibid., 10.

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The sanitary standards at the institute left much to be desired. Identical green buckets

were used to dispense soup to the patients, empty bed pans, and mop the floors, the senior

nurse was the only staff member Matlock “ever saw wash her hands regardless of what

service had been performed for the patients,” a nurse picked up some vitamin tablets she

had accidently dropped on the floor and placed them back in the container as if nothing

had happened, and, finally, “there seemed to be no regular system of changing bed

linens.”81

Charles Thayer, the Russian-speaking former head of Voice of America, gained an

insider’s perspective on the operation of the socialized healthcare system out in the

provinces from a Soviet doctor he had fortuitously met at the lobby of a Moscow theater

in 1959. The loquacious Anatoli, a 34-year-old tuberculosis specialist from Smolensk, advised Thayer that tuberculosis still threatened the lives of peasants in the countryside.

Thayer’s comment on the availability of antibacterial medication to treat the infectious disease prompted Anatoli to divulge the unpleasant truth about the hardships of everyday existence on the rural periphery of Smolensk to his American interlocutor. There were certainly “very strong medicines” available to successfully treat tuberculosis, Anatoli acknowledged, but they “wouldn’t do any good” for his patients given the simple fact that “[n]o medicine can cure you if you live miserably and eat badly.” And, without exception, his patients, who still wore bast shoes, lived “badly” and their diet was

“thoroughly inadequate.” This unfortunate reality, which Anatoli could not alter by his own efforts, left him with the highly disagreeable task of deciding “which [patients] try to heal and which to let die.” To add insult to injury, there were simply not enough doctors

81 Ibid., 3-4, 9, 10, 12.

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and hospital beds in Smolensk to help all those in need of medical attention.82 Anatoli

also raised the issue of remuneration. He considered himself an intellectual but could not

afford to “live and dress” like one on the monthly salary of 900 rubles he received from

the government. “Why spend six years of your life studying if you are paid so little,” he

asked rhetorically.83

“The world’s oldest tranquilizer”

“[T]he Russians have a problem of excessive drinking, and drunks are no curiosity

on the streets of their cities,” James Robinson recounted in his travelogue.84 The much- heralded achievements of socialist modernity in space exploration, educational attainment, industrial development, and cultural production, just to name a few, lost some of their luster for Americans who had the misfortune to come across the all-too-common sight of “totally unconscious sloppy drunks” passed out on the street.85 The public

displays of drunkenness they had witnessed on streets and trains, in restaurants and

airports at all times of the day and in all corners of the USSR had an adverse effect on

American attitudes, making it abundantly clear that alcoholism remained a pervasive and

intractable social problem, despite the state’s best efforts to combat it.86

82 Charles W. Thayer, “The Friendliest Russian,” November 30, 1959, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 83 Ibid., 3. 84 James M. Robinson, Americanski Journalist: Ten Thousand Miles of Russia Through the Eyes of an American Observer (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1969), 134. 85 John D. Hemenway, Robert I. Owen, and John V. Abidian, “The Soviet Drunks,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” June 30, 1961, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 259, 350 USSR 1961. 86 It is important to note that Russians’ seemingly unquenchable thirst for vodka has been inextricably linked to state policy since the sixteenth century. The state (whether Tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet) has depended on alcohol consumption to generate revenue from lucrative taxes on spirits. See Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Robert Owen and Kempton Jenkins cited “a fairly typical example of Soviet

drinking habits” they had witnessed in a Lvov restaurant in 1961 when an inebriated man

brought an evening of “very heavy drinking” with his friends to a fitting close by “falling

heavily from his chair to the dirty wood floor.”87 Robinson and his young Muscovite

acquaintance stumbled upon “single persons and couples” lounging on soft needles in a

pine grove on the banks of the Don River in southern Russia with empty bottles of vodka

scattered about. The young man suggested that this type of activity constituted a secular

substitute for religion by directing Robinson’s gaze to a closed church “visible through

the trees.”88 The widespread incidence of public drunkenness made an impression on

U.S. Embassy officers who stopped in Murmansk in 1961 and Rostov-on-Don in 1970.

The “unusual number of drunks” loitering on the streets of Murmansk, even early in the

morning, “seemed to be even further ‘gone’ than the usual Soviet drunks.”89 The

recurrent “fist fights” instigated by local drunks in bars, on public transit, and on the

streets of Rostov-on-Don regularly escalated into “large-scale street brawls,” which

required official intervention.90 “[A] completely inebriated” passenger “clad only in his

shorts” was forcibly removed from a train compartment by railroad personnel on the

Odessa-Kishinev line, while another “totally inebriated man” was “half dragged and half

carried” from the airport in Ufa by “a militia officer and a man in civilian clothes.”91

87 Robert I. Owen and Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip Memoranda – L’vov, April 6-7,” in “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov, April 3-7, 1961,” April 25, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 88 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 228. 89 Kempton B. Jenkins, “Trip Report – Leningrad and Murmansk, August 28-September 2, 1961,” September 18, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 90 Peck and Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Rostov-on-the-Don,” 1. 91 Leo J. Moser, “Trip to Ukraine and Moldavia,” May 31, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962; Jonathan B. Rickert and William T. Pryce, “Visit to Ufa,” January 10, 1967, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, Int 6.

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The commonplace Soviet reaction to the physical presence of intoxicated

individuals, regardless of their conduct or condition, was one of deliberate apathy. Robert

Owen watched a drunkard slowly drag his barely conscious friend through heavy traffic

on a busy Moscow thoroughfare in full view of a militiaman, stationed mere 50 yards

away, who “seemed to be deliberately avoiding notice.” This was merely “one

particularly sad case” he had seen among “the usual fairly large number of ‘dead or

dying’ drunks about town, usually being helped by friends,” during the New Year’s

holiday season in the Soviet capital.92 The diners at a Kazan restaurant were not disturbed

in the slightest by “the enthusiastic activity of a drunk deaf mute,” sitting in a corner,

“who was surrounded by a pool of chicken bones of his own creation.”93 Not a single

customer filing in and out of Alma Ata’s central market paid the least bit of attention to

an unconscious drunk lying prostrate nearby, with a “great swarm of flies buzzing around

him.”94 The general public in the villages and towns that Culver Gleysteen visited in

Yaroslavl Oblast displayed the same attitude of “complete indifference” at the somber sight of men in “a state of utter intoxication” steered back home by their wives, “who seemed resigned to the situation.”95 Owen witnessed perhaps the most egregious example

of public apathy—and its social costs—on a Moscow street in 1961. A man so intoxicated that he was “lying down in the mud and unable to get up,” even when a friend tried to lend him a hand, viciously kicked a three-year-old boy, who “had approached the

drunk out of curiosity.” The boy’s tears did not surprise Owen one bit; the callous

92 Owen, “Unnoticed Alcoholism,” in “Miscellaneous Notes,” ed. Jones, January 7, 1959, 11. 93 Morris Rothenberg, “Trip to Kazan and Ulyanovsk,” April 3, 1959, 3, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological (Folder 1). 94 William N. Morell, Jr., “Miscellaneous Observations During Trip to Alma Ata and Tselinograd, August 3-10, 1961,” August 25, 1961, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 95 Culver Gleysteen, “Trip to Old Russian Towns North of Moscow,” July 21, 1961, 1-2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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indifference of the four bystanders, who had witnessed the incident and did absolutely

nothing to comfort the boy or reprimand the drunk, did.96

“I do not like it and I do not understand it”

Art, in all its forms, was not simply a means of self-expression in the Soviet Union; it was a politicized tool of ideological indoctrination that enforced obedience to socialist realist dogmas through direct state intervention the process of artistic production. When bureaucrats acted as middlemen between artists and audiences to enforce the Party diktat,

“art for education’s sake,” however, the art inevitably suffered since propaganda proved to be a poor yardstick for artistic quality. As a matter of fact, the shoddy quality of socialist realist art on display at Moscow’s Manezh Gallery in 1967 was not hard for Yale

Richmond and John Tuohey to discern. They came across “[a] painting of a village and fields in which the houses cast long shadows in one direction, two pedestrians in another, and tall fence posts in a field cast no shadows at all,” as if they all existed independently on one another on the canvass. The American diplomats might have found the quality of most artwork on display to be “laughable” at best, but they were certainly not amused by the genuine earnestness with which Soviet visitors of all ages, “including busloads of school children,” approached and examined the paintings and sculptures featured in the exhibit.97

Aside from aesthetic objections, American visitors took issue with the politicization

of art in the USSR because it necessarily resulted in state repression, induced stultifying

96 Hemenway, Owen, and Abidian, “The Soviet Drunks,” 4. 97 Yale W. Richmond and John Tuohey, “‘Soviet Russia’ Art Exhibit at Moscow’s Manezh,” October 20, 1967, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 3, CUL 1967.

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conformity, and encouraged popular narrowmindedness. MGU expelled six students for

their participation in an unauthorized student club devoted to the “freedom of art.” The

fate awaiting the other nine participants was yet to be decided when Jack Matlock,

second secretary of the U.S. Embassy, composed his report on May 28, 1963. He did hear

that the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security), which, in all likelihood, had uncovered the existence of the student club and identified its informal membership, placed the responsibility for imposing punishment in the hands of university officials because the students involved did not actually break any law.98

Richard Schupbach, an American graduate student at RGU (Rostovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, or Rostov State University) in Rostov-on-Don, shared an exemplary tale of “the Party’s cultural repression in the provinces” with visiting

American diplomats. A friend of his, “Sasha,” who happened to be a “primitivist” painter, was expelled from the local art institute and was denied membership in the local artists’ union “because he refused to conform to the mediocre standard” expected of

Soviet artists. Direct interference of “the local Party watchdogs” made it impossible for him to showcase his paintings at local exhibitions, despite the strong backing he had received from fellow artists.99 Such was the unfortunate fate of a creative nonconformist

in the Soviet Union.

An elderly Armenian wood carver lamented the fact that politics and art were so

closely intertwined in the USSR as to be nearly inseparable because this unfortunate state

of affairs had “a restrictive, inhibitive effect on the creativity of the artist.”100 It was not

98 Jack F. Matlock, “Six Students Expelled from Moscow University,” May 28, 1963, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 276, 350 USSR May-Sept 1963. 99 Peck and Hurwitz, “Trip Report: Rostov-on-the-Don,” 6. 100 Grisby, “Audience Attitudes at Hand Tools-USA Exhibit,” 6.

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difficult for American visitors to observe that effect in operation. While attending

lectures at MGU, John Baker befriended a Soviet undergraduate student from the history

of art department, who indulged in modernist art (and poetry) “in his sparetime.” He told

Baker that his paintings would grace the walls of Soviet art galleries “when shrimp begin

to whistle.”101 Richard Hellie overheard a conversation between “[t]wo middle-aged

men” at Moscow’s Lenin Library about “a stormy meeting” of the writers’ union. The

point of contention, it seems, was “the book manuscript of a well-known author” who

“had used impermissible forms of analysis in his work.” Under pressure from the union,

the author capitulated and agreed to revise his analytical approach in exchange for more

paper for his book since a larger book meant a larger payday.102

The American composer Joel Spiegelman, on his fifth visit to the Soviet Union in

1970, used the adjective “anomalous” to describe the position of Soviet “non-orthodox

composers.” They were full-fledged members of the composers’ union and were free to

write the music of their choice, but they rarely heard their compositions performed in

Soviet concert halls.103 A Soviet literary critic confided to an American guide at the 1965

“Architecture: USA” exhibit in Leningrad that his creative output was confined to

producing “‘analytical’ reviews of literature” since he was not “free to state his own

views about writing.” He also mentioned that a critical review of a popular author’s work

could have an adverse effect on a literary critic’s career in the USSR.104 Even graphic

design was not immune from political interference. A Soviet designer submitted “15

101 Baker, “First Year of Class Attendance,” 5. 102 Hellie, “Final Report,” 17. 103 McKinney H. Russell and Thompson R. Buchanan, “Sarah Lawrence ‘Summer School’ in Moscow is surprisingly successful,” August 7, 1970, 2, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 12, EDX 18: U.S. Student Program, 1970. 104 Remick, “Visitor Reaction to Exhibit Architecture: USA,” 11.

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versions of a book jacket” to a state publishing house “before one was ruled ideologically

acceptable.”105

Another Armenian artist, a 22-year-old jewel engraver from Yerevan, offered another perceptive observation about the uninspired and stagnant intellectual habits of his fellow citizens. Most Soviets, he contended, had “no feeling or understanding for abstract art,” or any deviation from the prescribed norm, one might add, because they felt

“knowledgeable and safe only with works of socialist realism.”106 They dismissed and

ridiculed what they did not understand, much like Nikita Khrushchev had infamously

done on an impromptu visit to an exhibit of Soviet avant-garde art at the Manezh on

December 1, 1962. “Who painted this picture? I want to talk with him. What’s the good of a picture like this? To cover urinals with?” was one of the more subtle critiques he offered that day.107

A Soviet civil engineer, with whom a U.S. diplomat struck up a conversation on the

flight from Leningrad to Moscow in 1959, offered a very straightforward explanation for

his aversion to the modernist art he had seen at the American National Exhibition in

Moscow’s Sokol’niki Park: “I simply don’t understand it. To put up a collection of wire

and some distorted forms and call them art is a poor business indeed. I did not like it.”108

He did not think too long or too hard about the suggestion, made by his American

acquaintance, that “one does not necessarily have to dislike that which one does not

understand,” perhaps because he did not fully grasp its meaning, but merely reiterated his

105 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 18-23, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” November 26, 1969, 5, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs & Expositions, 1970. 106 Grisby, “Audience Attitudes at Hand Tools-USA Exhibit,” 5. 107 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 590. 108 Paul A. Smith, Jr., “A Civil Engineer,” in “Soviet Attitudes Toward Soviet-American Relations; Conversations with Soviet Citizens in Leningrad,” October 14, 1959, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959.

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dictum, “I do not like it and I do not understand it,” this time with more intensity and

resolve.109 After spending two hectic days interacting with Soviet visitors to the 1964

“Graphic Arts: USA” exhibit in Leningrad, Donald Wilson, deputy director of USIA, had

to acknowledge that “[l]ack of comprehension often elicited a certain hostility.” The

“barrage of questions” he faced from baffled Leningraders regarding the exhibit’s

featured paintings, included such sentiments as “That’s ridiculous. Why do you try and

call that art?”110

The politicization of art was not without its internal contradictions, which some

Soviets seemed to delight in pointing out. A lecture on modern art at MGU did not go as

planned for the featured speaker, an American exchange student in attendance told Lewis

Bowden. After firing the usual propaganda salvos at modern art as “the incomprehensible

gibberish of dying capitalism,” the speaker opened the floor for questions. A Soviet

student set the trap by asking why Adolf Hitler had “so ruthlessly suppressed” modern art

in the Third Reich. The speaker offered the straightforward response that “the totalitarian

Nazi Party had found that realism was a better vehicle for getting its propaganda across to

the people.” If that was the case, another student quickly asked, then why was modern art

“not only permitted but encouraged” by the “reactionary” Eisenhower administration in

the United States? The audience burst out laughing at the “absurd contradiction” into

which the speaker had unwittingly stumbled, parroting the official Party line.111

109 Ibid., 2. 110 Donald M. Wilson, “Report on the Soviet Union,” June 1, 1964, 9, RG 59, Records of Llewellyn Thompson, Box 15, USIA, National Archives II. 111 Lewis W. Bowden, “Another American Student Comments on Art Lecture,” December 23, 1958, in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, 10, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959.

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“Enemies of the Communist Party”

“You have freedom of religion in America, we have not!” exclaimed a young

Latvian Catholic upon meeting a U.S. Embassy officer at Riga’s Church of Our Lady of

Sorrows in 1962.112 The state-sanctioned repression of organized religion in the Soviet

Union brought into sharp relief for American visitors the unbridgeable chasm between

the protection of religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution and the forcible imposition of state atheism (Gosateizm) by the Communist

Party. Soviet believers had to live with a nagging sense of uncertainty, insecurity, and

powerlessness since their religious faith placed them in an adversarial, if not outright

hostile, position vis-à-vis the state. It was “difficult” for Christians “to know which way

to turn because, on one day, churches are being reconstructed and, on the next day,

praying is forbidden,” an elderly woman confided to American diplomats visiting the

Aleksandr Nevskii Monastery in Leningrad in 1958.113 A Ukrainian visitor to the

“Architecture: USA” exhibit in Leningrad in 1965 mentioned that “the pressure against

religious belief in the USSR” was so intense that even talking about religion could get

you into trouble.114

The propagation of atheism in schools, universities, houses of culture, trade union

clubs, and lecture halls had the desired effect on public opinion and social conduct. A

surprisingly large number of Soviets, who were convinced that religion was “a form of

primitive superstition, incompatible with a scientific outlook on the world,” kept asking

112 John D. Hemenway, “Latvian Catholics Appeal to Khrushchev for Relief,” April 18, 1962, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 570.3 Religion 1962. 113 Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Scene,” May 22, 1958, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs 1958. 114 Remick, “Visitor Reaction to Exhibit Architecture: USA,” 13.

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guides at the 1959 American National Exhibition a variation of the same question: “Why

is it that in a country as progressive as the United States—a country so advanced in

science—there are still so many people who believe in God?”115 The teenage son of a

Lutheran minister in Tallinn complained to American diplomats about the incessant

harassment he had to endure at school and at work from local Komsomol members

“because of his father’s profession.”116 John Hemenway, a political officer at the U.S.

Embassy in Moscow, “saw several swastikas chalked against” the street-facing wall of

the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Leningrad.117

Reverend Ilya M. Orlov of the Moscow Baptist Church explained to his American visitors, Jack Perry, second secretary of the U.S. Embassy, and Reverend Donald

Roberts, the resident Protestant chaplain, why he and his flock, who were branded as

“enemies of the Communist party,” had to be “circumspect…in all areas of life.” Some kids who knew Orlov from the local polyclinic, where he worked as a dentist, saw him leaving the church one day and promptly reported “his improper behavior” to school officials.118 This was all the evidence that Americans needed to surmise that “the

standard Soviet pattern of indirect pressures and semi-official harrassment [sic] have not

been without effect, particularly among the younger generation, in reducing the role of

religion in everyday life.”119

115 USIA. Office of Research and Analysis. “What Works and What Does Not Work in Communicating with the Soviet People,” April 1, 1960, 13, RG 306, RR, 1960-1999, Box 1, R-20-60. 116 Smith and Snyder, “Impressions of Soviet Rule in Tallin,” 3. 117 John D. Hemenway, “The Catholic Church in Leningrad,” April 30, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 570.3 Religion 1962. 118 Jack R. Perry, “Visit of Second Secretary Perry to Moscow Baptist Church,” in “Miscellaneous Observations on Religion,” ed. Jack R. Perry, Peter S. Bridges, and William D. Morgan, April 2, 1963, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 278, 570.3 Religions 1963. 119 Smith, Jr., and Snyder, “Impressions of Soviet Rule in Tallin,” 3.

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Soviet officials also made use of the considerable state powers at their disposal,

such as taxation and regulation, in an effort to close up houses of worship and remove

clergymen from office. The assistant to the imam of the Leningrad Mosque, Mr.

Mayazin, complained to John Hemenway about the “excessive and discriminatory” taxes

levied on property and income by the state. The annual property tax bill for the mosque

came to 1,600 rubles, while both the imam and his assistant had to forfeit a quarter of

their monthly salaries—50 and 25 rubles respectively—in taxes.120 The situation was

quite different at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, which had the unenviable

distinction of being the “only operating Roman Catholic church” in Leningrad in 1962.121

Father Joseph Kozlas, a 75-year-old Latvian priest, told Hemenway that property taxes on the church amounted to 300 rubles per year, but his 250-ruble monthly salary was taxed at nearly 40 percent (“between 90 to 100 rubles each month”). In addition to these expenses, the church had to spend “about 1000 rubles” on repairs, even though the property legally belonged to the state.122 The young Catholic, whom Hemenway had met

in Riga, shed some light on the odd discrepancy in tax rates. Although the Ministry of

Finance had ostensibly devised “a difficult-to-define formula,” based on “useable area

together with the value of church property,” to determine the tax rate for active religious

institutions, in reality “it simply taxes as it likes.”123 The nonpayment of tax liabilities

resulted in closure.

120 John D. Hemenway, “Observations Made During a Trip to Tallin and Riga, April 2-4, 1962,” June 22, 1962, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962. 121 Hemenway, “The Catholic Church in Leningrad,” 1. 122 Ibid., 2. 123 Hemenway, “Latvian Catholics Appeal to Khrushchev,” 1.

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Protestant and Catholic priests found “the Soviet law forbidding religious

indoctrination of the young” particularly odious since it made the presence of children

and teenagers under the age of 18 in churches all but illegal, even with parental

consent.124 In effect, the law precluded “the participation of children and young people in

baptisms, confirmation, religious processions, and such traditions as service as altar

boys.”125 The Baptists also refrained from organizing any youth activities or “pressuring

young people to go to church” for fear of being held criminally liable.126 Each clergyman

worked at the discretion of the state and could only minister to the congregation at which

he was officially registered. “We can’t go into other churches to say mass. It is illegal,”

Father Smilga of the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows explained to Hemenway. “I am

registered here, and here I must work.”127 Soviet officials had the authority to revoke the

registration of any clergyman at any time for any reason, which essentially amounted to a

death sentence for any religious institution due to the chronic shortage of qualified young

seminarians able to fill vacant positions. The case of the Roman Catholic Church in

Latvia was illustrative. In 1962, there were only 12 priests to attend to the spiritual needs

of 50,000 Catholics in Riga and there were only 11 students at the Riga Seminary,

“representing an annual output of one or two priests” at most.128

Like clockwork, the anti-religious campaign gathered momentum every spring when Party apparatchiks and Komsomol members would scramble to disparage and even disrupt the annual celebration of Easter (Paskha), “traditionally the most holy of days in

124 Perry, “Visit of Second Secretary Perry to Moscow Baptist Church,” 2. 125 Hemenway, “Latvian Catholics Appeal to Khrushchev,” 2. 126 Perry, “Visit of Second Secretary Perry to Moscow Baptist Church,” 2. 127 Hemenway, “Latvian Catholics Appeal to Khrushchev,” 3. 128 Ibid., 2-3. The situation was even worse in Lithuania, where Catholics formed a clear majority of the population. The annual output of the Kaunas Seminary was only seven to ten priests. Hemenway, “Catholic Church in Leningrad,” 2.

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the Orthodox Church.”129 American diplomats had come to expect nothing less. From

Kiev to Frunze, Soviet citizens, whether they were believers or not, had to stomach “a

heavy dose of anti-religious propaganda” packaged and disseminated for popular

consumption in lectures, books, and the news media.130 An article Thompson R.

Buchanan read in Sovetskaia Kirgiziia (Soviet Kirghizia) on the eve of Orthodox Easter,

while visiting Frunze with his family in 1963, alerted “the faithful and the naïve” alike to

the economic costs and moral pitfalls associated with this nominally pagan (“ancient pre-

Christian”) holiday.131 Easter celebrations, wrote a certain Mr. Baranov, distracted agricultural workers from the all-important task of spring planting, “when every hour is dear,” and too often degenerated into “drunken orgies, particularly in the countryside.”132

Zealous young members of the Komsomol, however, did not confine themselves to

verbal assaults on old pieties but sought to put an end to outdated traditions, like Easter,

through direct action. In Kiev, they “formed a bloc of hecklers in the midst of the densely

crowded worshipers” at one of the cathedrals and “swayed in unison, creating an

unbalancing effect” upon everyone inside.133 When an elderly man scolded young men

and women wearing red armbands, who were causing a disturbance outside the Church of

St. Nicholas in Moscow, for acting like “hooligans,” they retorted that the real hooligans were inside the church.134 Teenagers in Frunze, “stimulated by the snickers of friends and

liquid encouragement,” formed “a flying phalanx” and forced their way into a church,

129 Lewis W. Bowden, “Easter Services Packed but Harassed,” April 27, 1960, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 244, 570.3 Religion 1960. 130 Ibid., 2. 131 Thompson R. Buchanan, “Religious Footnotes from Soviet Central Asia,” June 21, 1963, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 278, 570.3 Religions 1963. 132 Ibid., 2. 133 Bowden, “Easter Services Packed but Harassed,” 1. 134 Kermit S. Midthun, “Orthodox Easter Services, 1962,” May 1, 1962, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 570.3 Religion 1962.

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pushing elderly women out of their way and paying no heed to the righteous indignation

of the congregation.135 All of these incidents took place in full view of American visitors.

Robert Martens offered an explanation for the callous behavior of young Soviet militants.

“While religious views have been strongly retained by the older generation,” he wrote,

“there has been considerable erosion, and frequently obliteration, of such beliefs among the younger generation, especially the better educated.”136 The preponderance of “gnarled

old women in black” within the ranks of worshippers in nearly every church that

Americans had an opportunity to visit in the Soviet Union also suggested a growing

generational divide between young and old, believers and nonbelievers.137

Perhaps the most striking manifestation of Gosateizm that Americans noticed in nearly every corner of the USSR was the intentional irreverence with which Soviet officials handled venerable religious buildings under their supervision. William Phelps and Richard Harmstone stepped inside Leningrad’s Church of the Resurrection “out of curiosity” after watching passersby, “mostly elderly women,” enter the imposing sanctuary through the open doors. What the American diplomats saw inside was both disheartening and exhilarating. The “boards, planks, and scaffolding” they noticed

“stacked along the walls in a haphazard manner” betrayed the present function of the

church as a “theatrical warehouse.”138 There were “layers of pigeon droppings” everywhere in sight. Phelps and Harmstone were, however, amazed to find “some of the most beautiful mosaic work that we had ever seen, covering the walls from floor to

135 Buchanan, “Religious Footnotes from Soviet Central Asia,” 2. 136 Robert J. Martens, “Some Observations on Popular Soviet Attitudes,” in “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion,” ed. David E. Mark and Edward L. Killham, 8-9, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 137 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 92. 138 William W. Phelps, “A Sanctuary Briefly Opened,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, May 19, 1959, 12, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959.

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domes.” Some of the women carefully cleared the dust off the holy images covering the

church walls and “fervently” kissed them while “praying quietly and crossing

themselves.” When workers, who had opened the church doors to load a truck parked at

the front entrance, ordered everyone inside the church to leave, the American diplomats

stood back and watched people pick “their way over the boards and debris that littered

the floors of this once dignified place of worship.”139

This was hardly an isolated instance of desecration of religious property. The

pictures of Kazan’s “noblest-looking churches of the past” that U.S. Embassy officers

had seen in Soviet guidebooks did not correspond with reality since the churches they

visited in person “either had their domes decapitated and/or been neglected and

transformed into Communist Party Archives.”140 Ralph Jones, second secretary at the

U.S. Embassy, visited two old Russian Orthodox monasteries situated along the Moscow

River. Novospassky Monastery was now a coal and lumber yard and what remained of

Simonov Monastery was turned into a children’s park.141 A Uniate church in Uzhgorod

served as an art gallery and a local university used a Uniate seminary as a physics

laboratory.142 The “glass stained windows” of Catholic churches in Lvov were

“shattered” and their “great ornate doors” were either “broken or removed” to make room

for trucks “to unload and store sacks of grain and cement or piles of lumber or coal” right

in the naves. Such needless destruction “shocked” American diplomats.143 In Bukhara,

“the two principal madrasas were being used as warehouses, another one for residential

139 Ibid., 13. 140 Rothenberg, “Trip to Kazan and Ulyanovsk,” 2. 141 Ralph A. Jones, “A Likely Target,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” May 19, 1959, 19, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 142 Ralph A. Jones, “Kiev, Lvov, Uzhgorod, April 1959,” May 8, 1959, 14, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 143 Ibid., 9.

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and office space, and one principal mosque is a pool hall.”144 Party officials throughout the USSR certainly did their best to wean their subjects off Karl Marx’s “opium of the people.”

American visitors devoted considerable attention to the seemingly endemic problem of antisemitism plaguing Soviet society, both in its official and popular manifestations, since it exposed the duplicity of Moscow’s denunciations of racial injustice in the United States as well as the vacuity of its ideological pretensions to justice and equality. Soviet Jews accused the state of making every conceivable effort to hinder the operation of Jewish religious institutions and to discourage religious practice and expression among people of faith. Rabbi Katz of the Tallinn Synagogue divulged to John

Hemenway that he had to forfeit 25 percent of his 200-ruble monthly salary to the state in taxes.145 The official classification of the Hebrew language under “religious instruction”

precluded him from offering Hebrew lessons to Jewish children because of the legal

prohibition on religious instruction to anyone under the age of 18.146 The Tallinn

Synagogue also had the latest edition of the “prayer to the Government” on hand, which

was, according to Hemenway, “[s]tandard equipment in USSR synagogues.” This revised

edition included an expression of gratitude to Nikita Khrushchev for “protecting peace”

in the world.147 Hemenway also noted that “1962 was the first year in the Soviet period

when matzohs [sic] were not baked by state bakeries in Leningrad,” making Jews responsible for preparing their own for Passover.148 A Soviet teacher told American

144 Joseph B. Norbury and Leo J. Moser, “Trip to Central Asia,” December 18, 1961, 5, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961. 145 John D. Hemenway, “Jewish Communities in Six Western USSR Cities,” June 12, 1962, 1-2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962. 146 Ibid., 2. 147 Ibid., 2-3. 148 Ibid., 3.

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diplomats of an official crackdown on minyans, small informal congregations which held prayer services in rented rooms in Moscow.149

The conversations that Americans had with Jews and Gentiles in the Soviet Union led them to paint a wholly sympathetic picture of a marginalized and persecuted Jewish minority forced to bear an onerous double burden. On the one hand, the Soviet state singled out its Jewish subjects “through various acts of discrimination and oppression, which limited their professional and social opportunities” and alienated them from Soviet society.150 On the other hand, Soviet Jews had to contend with a deep-seated popular

anti-Semitism of their fellow citizens, which likewise had an alienating effect on them.

Indeed, Americans heard the most banal anti-Semitic stereotypes regurgitated and the most pernicious anti-Semitic prejudices espoused, without the slightest apprehension or hesitation, in the USSR.

Soviet visitors accused Jews “of closing down the Christian churches, of figuring prominently in the NKVD during the purges of the 1930’s, of profiting from speculation, and of insinuating themselves into high places” within earshot of American guides at the

“Plastics: USA” and “Transportation: USA” exhibits. Yet they firmly dismissed any allegations of prejudice on their part by resorting to outworn stereotypes: “We don’t discriminate against Jews because of their race but because they are shrewd.”151 A “rosy-

cheeked” attendant at the Odessa airport informed Robert Owen and Kempton Jenkins

that “nobody anywhere loves the Jews” because they pursued “the easier professions like

149 Richard T. Davies, Herbert S. Okun, and Kermit S. Midthun, “Jewish New Year Observances in Moscow,” October 12, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 274, 570.3 Religion 1962. 150 Samuel Dash, “Operation ‘Contact’ in the Soviet Union,” September 21, 1972, 9, RG 59, BPR, American Visits to the USSR, 1971-73, Box 19, TRV – American Visits, 1972. 151 Park, “The Soviet People View America,” 12.

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teaching and trade” to avoid manual labor.152 A young Soviet man felt obliged to share

his unflattering opinion of Jews with American diplomats in a Frunze restaurant. “You

know how they are. They’re tricky, unreliable, always making deals. You can’t trust

them.”153 An American guide visiting Leningrad with the “Architecture: USA” exhibit in

1965 was the victim of “an unprovoked assault” by local youths, “who knocked him to

the ground,” simply because “they thought he was a Jew.”154 A Soviet film director was

quite certain that Jews were to blame for Russia’s many woes. “The Marxists are all

Jews, and they are all stupid,” he declared unequivocally.155 The prevailing sentiment

among non-Jewish Kievans was that there were too many Jews in Kiev.156 Given the

animosity they faced, Americans were not surprised to hear Soviet Jews, especially

members of the younger generation, describe the nationality label, printed in their internal

passports, as “a millstone” or “an albatross” around their necks.157

“Preparation for the collective life”

From its very inception, according to American observers, the overriding purpose

of the Soviet educational system was “to advance the interests of the State,” namely, “to

train highly efficient components of a machine” which the Communist Party had “entered

152 Owen and Jenkins, “Trip Memoranda – Odessa, April 3-4,” in “Trip to Odessa, Kishinev, and L’vov,” 3. 153 Kermit S. Midthun and Herbert S. Okun, “Views of Frunze Residents on Trial of Economic Offenders,” June 18, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 273, 370 Public Order and Safety 1962. 154 Remick, “Visitor Reaction to Exhibit Architecture: USA,” 13. 155 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow – Summary Report – Visitors’ Reaction,” December 8, 1969, 10, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs & Expositions, 1970. 156 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev, September 11-17, 1969,” 8. 157 Andrew T. Falkiewicz, “Soviet Attitudes and Comments on Jews,” June 29, 1962, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962; Heyward Isham, “Eastman Philharmonia’s Tour of U.S.S.R.,” February 26, 1962, 5, MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX 39: Jan – June 1962.

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in a global, indeed cosmic, race for economic, political and military supremacy.”158 Dr.

Franklin D. Murphy, chancellor of the University of Kansas, did not believe that “[t]he emancipation of the individual and his own self-development” were even considered to

be legitimate, much less primary, objectives of compulsory public education in the Soviet

Union.159 Indeed, Dr. Abraham Katsh of New York University accorded the USSR the

dubious honor of being “the only country in the world where ‘free education’ is used

systematically to stifle the mind.”160 The educated citizen’s sole responsibility, according

to Richard W. Judy, a graduate exchange student at MGU, was “to master his specialty,

to push out the frontiers of technical knowledge” in his (or her) field while leaving the

thorny “business of political decisions to the self-perpetuating oligarchy of leaders”

ensconced in the Kremlin.161

The palpable shock with which many Soviets greeted the disclosure that

“Americans entrusted [the] responsibility…for indoctrinating young people with

society’s social and patriotic values…to the family” called attention to another glaring

discrepancy between the two systems.162 The belief that moral and civic instruction could

not occur without direct state involvement led Soviet citizens to ask: “But how can any

person learn to love his country if the schools fail to teach him?”163 There was an

underlying assumption behind the question that the development of “the moral fibre of

158 Franklin D. Murphy, “Some Comments on Soviet Higher Education,” January 6, 1959, 2, MC 468, Box 228, Folder 13, Miscellaneous, ca. 1959-76; Richard W. Judy, “A Jayhawker Among the Soviet Elite,” Alumni Magazine, December 1959, 7, MC 468, Box 228, Folder 12, EDX 39 Exchanges and Reports, 1959. 159 Murphy, “Some Comments on Soviet Higher Education,” 2. 160 Abraham I. Katsh, “Memorandum to the President of the American Council of Learned Societies,” October 24, 1960, 4, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 161 Judy, “A Jayhawker Among the Soviet Elite,” 7. 162 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow – Summary Report,” 6. 163 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev – Final Report,” 6.

243 the American people” depended solely upon “the teaching of an ‘American ideology’” in schools, akin to “the teaching of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet schools.”164 After all, they pointed out that the inculcation of moral values, social obligations, and patriotic duties, or, to be more precise, “preparation for the collective life,” began “as early in life as possible” in the Soviet Union. “You don’t know what a battle it is to make children play or eat correctly,” Soviet teachers told American guides at the 1969 “Education: USA” exhibit in Moscow. Of course, the irony of teaching children conformity, which

Americans took to be the guiding principle of Soviet education from kindergarten through university, during “periods of unsupervised play” was not lost on the guides.165

The Soviet educational system was centralized in administration and uniform in content, making local officials mere executors, as opposed to architects, of policy flowing directly from Moscow. Considering the fractured and parochial nature of the U.S. public education system, it is unsurprising that Americans were not sold on the idea of imposing

“one class and one lesson throughout the entire country” to ensure that each and every student was “exposed to precisely the same educational content” in the classroom. Yet

Soviets took pride in their public education system precisely because it was, as far as they were concerned, “uniform and equal.”166 Soviets also flouted the utilitarian logic underpinning their system of higher education, which placed state interests above personal ambitions. “If you need engineers, your education system should program from them” was one piece of advice they offered freewheeling Americans.

164 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Kiev, September 11-17, 1969,” 4. 165 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 18-23,” 5. 166 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow – Summary Report,” 4.

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Soviets were highly critical of the freedom of choice accorded to students in

selecting their own field of study and courses at American universities since it rendered

education “unsubstantial and of little use in life.”167 The whole educational system, in the

opinion of many Soviets, had to be closely linked to “the specific job needs of the

country” in order to fulfill its underlying social function, or “serve society” at large.168

There were obviously costs associated with elevating state interests above all other

considerations. A young Soviet woman, who attended the “Architecture: USA” exhibit in

Leningrad in 1965, expressed her disappointment at being directed by the powers that be

to study engineering rather than pursue her abiding passion for English literature.169

Funneling students into specific specializations went hand in hand with placing them in

selected positions upon graduation. It was self-evident to many Soviets that university

students, who had obtained “the advantages of specialized education” for five years “at

public expense,” were “duty bound to accept employment at posts where they [were]

needed” without objection.170 State needs trumped individual aspirations once again.

Visits to educational institutions, such as kindergartens and schools, merely reinforced the perception that Soviet citizens were forcibly indoctrinated by the state from the cradle to the grave. Robert Westbrook was astonished by the fantastic performance put on for American visitors by children at a Kiev kindergarten. After a boy expressed his gratitude to the Communist Party for giving him “such a wonderful childhood,” a girl fervently praised the party for sending the first man into space.

Fittingly perhaps, considering the audience at hand, the show concluded with “a rousing

167 Ibid. 168 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 10-16, 1969,” 4. 169 Remick, “Visitor Reaction to Exhibit Architecture: USA,” 7-8. 170 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 18-23, 1969,” 4.

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song” about the international class struggle performed by the whole kindergarten in

English.171 Debbie Sherwood visited a special foreign-language school, specializing in

the instruction of the Queen’s English, in Leningrad. At the teacher’s request, “[a] little

girl with long, skinny braids wrapped tightly around her head” recited “a lengthy ode” to

Lenin in “an emotion-packed voice” with “her hands clasped dramatically under her

chin.”172 Students in every one of the seven Soviet universities that John Baker visited in

1957 and 1958 had to endure four hours per week of “ideological instruction” in political economy and Marxism-Leninism for four years and history of the Communist Party for two, regardless of their major.173 There were also Komsomol meetings, ceremonial

evenings, lectures, and current events briefings to attend; some compulsory, others

optional. As if that was not enough, students were strongly encouraged by the Komsomol

to “volunteer” to perform physical labor on Sundays and in the summer, usually

agricultural work in the Virgin Lands of northern Kazakhstan.174

Dr. Paul Luebke, deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Overseas

Schools, laid bare the pedagogical shortcomings of the Soviet educational system on a

visit to a special English-language school in Moscow on October 4, 1967. Students had

no difficulty in replying —in English—to questions the answers to which they had

memorized beforehand. However, they “demonstrated poor comprehension and limited

ability to respond to questions for which they had not prepared in advance” when Dr.

Luebke attempted to converse extemporaneously with them. One of teachers confided to

171 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 137. 172 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 199. 173 John A. Baker, Jr., “Observations in Various Universities in the Soviet Union,” May 14, 1958, 5-6, RG 306, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. Baker visited the universities in Riga, Lvov, Uzhgorod, Kiev, Baku, Tbilisi, and Moscow. 174 Ibid., 9.

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the visiting Americans that most of the students at the school did not take their studies

seriously or even bothered to speak English.175 Yet, only a few visitors to the “Education:

USA” exhibit in Moscow in 1969 considered the possibility that “a highly centralized

educational system that depends on rote memorization as its principal learning technique

is perhaps less effective as an educational tool than an unstructured one whose goal is

teaching children to think.”176

Gender Trouble

American travelogues are replete with implicit and explicit critiques of the Soviet

way of life for failing to uphold normative standards of female beauty and behavior. Not

only were Soviet women disproportionately overweight, according to American travelers,

they also wore unflattering clothes that did not properly accentuate their feminine

physiques, performed hard physical labor unbecoming of ladies, and acted much too

innocently around the opposite sex. Such critiques paralleled the derisive treatment of

“femininity, motherhood, and fashion behind the Iron Curtain” in contemporary U.S.

propaganda.177 It is important to note that the criticism leveled at Soviet women

suggested that their physical appearance, work habits, and purported naïveté had clearly

defeminized them, at least as far as Americans were concerned.178 By failing to uphold

normative standards of femininity, therefore, the Soviet way of life blurred the sacrosanct

175 G. Norman Anderson, “Visit to Special English-language School Number Seven,” October 13, 1967, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 7, ORG – Organization & Admin. 1967. 176 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow – Summary Report,” 4. 177 Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 152. 178 On the defeminization of Soviet women in American popular culture, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), Ch. 1, and Robert L. Griswold, “‘Russian Blonde in Space’: Soviet Women in the American Imagination, 1950-1965,” Journal of Social History 45 (June 2012): 881-907.

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boundary between the sexes, much like Soviet conductors’ “disconcerting habit” of

placing passengers in train compartments without regard to sex.179

Normative standards of female beauty were part and parcel of the cultural baggage that American travelers brought with them to the Soviet Union. The backhanded compliment that Ralph Jones paid to a young Ukrainian woman he had met in Lvov, describing her as “attractive in her plump way,” perfectly illustrates the inordinate emphasis that American visitors placed on the physical appearance of Soviet women.180

A Connecticut travel agent quipped that “a foundation concern would starve” in the

USSR because Soviet women were already “about 30 pounds overweight.”181 On his first day at a summer camp in Ukraine, Robert Westbrook shared a table with “two heavy

Russian girls” during breakfast and watched in amazement as they devoured full bowls of kasha and then “tore greedily” into fried meat patties and potatoes without ever raising their heads.182 Culver Gleysteen placed an undue emphasis on physical appearance in his

unflattering and condescending description of a Soviet woman, with whom he had shared

a train compartment on the trip from Kiev to Lvov in 1961, as “an immensely fat and

jolly housewife of about 40.”183 James Robinson needed only one word to describe

Nadya, his Intourist guide in Leningrad: “big.” He explained to his readers the

179 Dean B. Mahin and Richard M. Scammon, Soviet Russia: A Guidebook for Tourists (Washington, D.C.: Governmental Affairs Institute, 1959), 14. 180 Ralph A. Jones, “Kiev, Lvov, Uzhgorod, April 1959,” May 8, 1959, 7, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 181 Anthony J. Spatafora, “Hartford Travel Agent Tells Of Visit To Russia,” Hartford Courant (July 26, 1959), 28A. 182 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 127 183 Culver Gleysteen, “Observations of Political Interest on Trip to Western Ukraine,” November 30, 1961, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 246, 210.9 Trip Reports 1961.

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“objective” criteria he used to make that judgment: “In America she would be twenty pounds overweight.”184

Debbie Sherwood found herself in the company of Soviet women when she visited a public swimming pool in Moscow. In the close intimacy of the locker room, she could not help but take note of the stout physiques of her female companions, made all the more conspicuous by the saggy swimsuits they wore. Their swimsuits “drooped” unattractively, she concluded, because they were made of flimsy material that “had apparently given up” when “forced to stretch over all that Russian flesh.”185 Irene

Kampen shared a similar intimate experience with Soviet women at a sanatorium for mine workers’ (and their wives) in Tskhaltubo. Showering in a damp, poorly lit basement with thirty-five women without the luxury of hot water gave Kampen some food for thought. “I really must sincerely advise anyone with Communist leanings to visit

Tschaltubo [sic] and take a shower with thirty-five Soviet mine workers’ wives before signing anything. Fat. FAT FAT FAT FAT FAT FAT FAT.”186 Even a famous Soviet film actress carried “unflattering extra poundage.” Sherwood met Masha Movie Star, as she retrospectively named her, at the Moscow home of an American correspondent and

“was enthralled to see that she was dressed in true starlet fashion,” including “a thin organza blouse which was not only too small but was in definite danger of popping open at any minute in several crucial places.”187

The physical appearance of Aeroflot stewardesses elicited unfavorable, if not abusive, comment from American passengers, accustomed to seeing “lovely young things

184 Robinson, Americanski Journalist, 258. 185 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 100. 186 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 104. 187 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 62.

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in spiffy red uniforms” at work on Western airlines.188 An American businessman on an

Aeroflot flight from Helsinki to Leningrad disparaged one of the Soviet stewardesses for

her figure (“very stout”), her attire (“a plain gingham dress”), and her carelessness

(“unkempt hair”).189 The humorist Art Buchwald speculated that Aeroflot recruited

“stewardesses for their strength instead of their looks” to discourage would-be

hijackers.190 After all, he quipped, who would be foolish enough to mess with a

stewardess who was “built like—and look[ed] like—a Chicago Bear tackle after a hard

scrimmage[?]”191

The clothes that Soviet girls wore made it extremely easy for Sherwood to spot

them in the International Bar of Moscow’s National Hotel because most of them “had on

drab skirts and blouses made of a flimsy material that hung shapelessly on their rather

full frames.”192 The drab, shapeless, and poorly made clothes that most Soviet women

were obliged to wear thus further undermined their already tenuous claim to physical

attractiveness, as far as Americans were concerned. The “highly fashion-conscious”

owner of a boutique in New York City, who visited the Soviet Union in 1958, “was

amazed by the lack of style in women’s clothing.”193 Westbrook found that “the clothes

of the Russians matched the dreariness of the buildings.”194 The women, young and old,

188 Kermit Holt, “Not For Everybody: The Frustrating, Enlightening Experience of Traveling in the U.S.S.R.” Chicago Tribune (August 16, 1970), H10. 189 A Westerner, “One Man’s Story—What’s It Like to Arrive in U.S.S.R. as a Tourist?: Intourist Takes Visitor by the Hand,” Christian Science Monitor (January 6, 1961), 7. 190 Art Buchwald, “Traveling Russia: the Tape Is, of Course, Red,” Los Angeles Times (August 1, 1968), A5. 191 Holt, “Not For Everybody,” H10. 192 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 35. 193 Vladimir Prokofieff, “Impressions of Visiting Americans” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Scene,” ed. Theodore L. Eliot, Jr., May 22, 1958, 4, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 221, 350 USSR Internal Pol. Affairs, 1958. 194 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 51.

250 he encountered in the Soviet Union wore what he described as “plain-patterned sacklike dresses” and “the universal plainly patterned, shapeless summer dresses,” leading him to conclude that “women in the Soviet Union are certainly not stylish.”195 The unavailability of consumer goods—and the concomitant reliance by many Soviet women on home production—accounted, at least in part, for the glaring lack of style. “A woman in the

U.S.S.R. is chic in keeping with her ability to fashion clothes from cloth she is able to buy,” explained the preeminent anthropologist, Dr. Irene Diggs, to the readers of the

Baltimore Sun.196

For her part, Kampen discovered on the train ride from Tskhaltubo to Sochi that

Soviet female consumers themselves acknowledged, without any inducement or coercion, the existence of a discernible difference in product quality between American-made cotton dresses and Soviet-made “shapeless cotton summer dresses.”197 Nadia announced with an unmistakable excitement in her voice that she knew Irene Kampen and Nila

Magidoff were Americans the moment she and Katerina joined them in the train compartment on account of the simple cotton knit dresses they wore. After feeling the material of Kampen’s dress with her fingers, Nadia inquired about its price. “Her eyes widened” when Kampen said that it had cost $25 since, according to Nadia, “such a dress would cost fifty rubles at least” in the Soviet Union and would not be made of “such excellent material.”198 The belief that “the West offered vastly more comfortable and appealing products for women than could be obtained in communist states” kindled an

195 Ibid., 51, 81, 134. 196 Irene Diggs, “The Soviet Union Thrice Visited,” Baltimore Sun (October 20, 1964), 16. 197 Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 26 198 Ibid., 108.

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intense yearning for “access to Western fashion, greater abundance, more convenience,

and better quality materials” among Soviet female consumers like Nadia.199

Considering the fact that women constituted the majority of students in Soviet

institutions of higher education as early as 1958, one would perhaps expect American

visitors to commend “the determination of the Soviets not to waste potential brain power

whether dressed in trousers or in skirts,” just as Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, chancellor of

the University of Kansas, did after visiting the USSR with a delegation of American

university presidents in 1958.200 That was not the case, however. “The American on his

first visit to Russia is shocked when he sees women cleaning the streets, working in

buildings and factories at work which he is unaccustomed to seeing women do,”

remarked an American scholar.201

Wherever they found themselves in the USSR, Americans invariably came across women of all ages and dispositions transgressing accepted norms of feminine demeanor by performing physically taxing work, usually alongside men.202 The young musicians of

the Eastman Philharmonia on tour of the Soviet Union in 1962 found “the sight of

women toiling on heavy jobs” in the midst of a cold winter “particularly depressing.”203

American engineers contracted with Von Kohorn International Corporation to build a

199 Emily S. Rosenberg, “Another Mission to Moscow: Ida Rosenthal and Consumer Dreams,” in Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present, ed. Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren (New York: Routledge, 2012), 136. 200 Franklin D. Murphy, “Some Comments on Soviet Higher Education,” January 6, 1959, 8, MC 468, Box 228, Folder 13, Miscellaneous, ca. 1959-76. The USSR boasted the highest rate of female employment in the world. See Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 190. 201 Katsh, “Memorandum to the President,” 4. 202 It is no coincidence that U.S. propagandists, most of them men, touted the suburban nuclear family as one of the crowning achievements of democratic capitalism in postwar America. The high wages of male workers, so the story went, had finally made it possible for their wives to stay at home and take care of the growing family in the privacy of their own house. See Belmonte, Selling the American Way, Ch. 5. 203 Heyward Isham, “Eastman Philharmonia’s Tour of U.S.S.R.,” February 26, 1962, 6, MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX 39: Jan-June 1962.

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new polyester plant in Kursk shared their compatriots’ sentiments, telling a visiting U.S.

Embassy officer that they hated to “see young girls carrying bags of cement” at the

construction site.204

Americans observed Soviet women, among other things, produce textiles,

manufacture electrical cable, build and maintain roads, erect apartment buildings, and

assemble light bulbs. Elderly women, in particular, seemed to comprise an important part

of the unskilled labor force. Not only did Americans see them perform backbreaking

agricultural labor in the countryside, they also encountered them employed as vendors,

elevator operators, gas station attendants, street sweepers, and hairdressers in the cities.

Westbrook bought a cup of synthetic grape soda from “[a]n old woman in a shapeless

patterned dress” for three kopecks at the Moscow train station in 1960, while Kampen

watched “[a]n old woman in cracked boots and with a babushka on her head swe[ep] the

gutter with a straw broom” when her Intourist car stopped at a traffic light in Moscow in

1969.205 The chief engineer of a large construction project in Yalta explained the

preponderance of women in the Soviet work force to his American guests by pointing to

an existing shortage of male workers.206

The behavior of Soviet women clearly transgressed the gender normative expectations Robert Westbrook had brought with him from home. After losing a basketball game at the summer camp to Soviet girls, who played like “professional football players,” Westbrook concluded that there was no such thing as Soviet femininity.

Not only were many of the girls at camp “just as strong as boys” because they exercised

204 Richard Funkhouser, “Discussion with Von Kohorn Engineers at Kursk,” June 7, 1962, 2, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 272, 350 USSR 1962. 205 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 49; Kampen, Are You Carrying Any Gold, 26. 206 Ramsey, Kendrick, and Wise, “Report of Trip to Soviet Black Sea Coast,” 25.

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too much, but they also “wore no makeup, had no sense of pretty clothes, and did not

watch their weight.”207 They also participated too eagerly in and enjoyed too unabashedly physical activities that Westbrook regarded dismissively as “childish games and giggles” inappropriate for young pubescent women. Female campers played on swings and slides, enjoyed a good game of Ring Around the Rosy, and got “terribly excited at seeing who can climb through a hoop the fastest.”208 Their perceived emotional immaturity merely

accentuated for Westbrook the failure of Soviet women to embrace and perform

normative standards of femininity.

At a Komsomol party in Moscow, Westbrook asked “a plump, healthy-looking girl

named Irma” to dance.209 However, his first dance with a Soviet girl proved to be “a

painful and unnerving experience” because Irma was too “stiff and formal” in her

movements and they ended up stepping on each other’s toes the whole time.210 The same

technical difficulties he had encountered with Irma—stepping on each other’s toes and

not keeping time to the music—persisted at the summer camp, despite his best efforts to

“be friendly” and dance with as many girls as he could. Westbrook found the overall

mood at camp dances to be exceedingly formal and abstemious, much more suitable for a

high-society ball than a teenage summer party, since “[c]ouples danced at a dignified

distance” from one another while carrying on a polite conversation.211 He was even more

surprised to see how little romantic interaction actually occurred between the sexes at the

207 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 134. 208 Ibid., 136. 209 Ibid., 92. 210 Ibid., 93. 211 Ibid., 132.

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camp, considering the fact that campers ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-five and were under minimal adult supervision.212

The underlying reason for the lack of amorous entanglements, Westbrook posited, was naïveté since female campers were “amazingly unsophisticated” for their age in the ways of the world. Even some women over the age of twenty “would giggle nervously

when spoken to by a boy, and sort of edge away from him.”213 Willis Konick, a graduate

exchange student at MGU, shared Westbrook’s sentiments, describing the Soviet

devushka (young woman) “as naive and unsophisticated as any woman could be in the

20th century.”214 Morris Rothenberg and Harry Wetzork witnessed the prudishness of

Soviet youth firsthand at Ulyanovsk in 1959. Sharing the dining room at a hotel

restaurant with a large group of Soviet skiers, the U.S. Embassy officers were puzzled by

the “strange” behavior of these young men and women, even though they acknowledged

that they were judging them by “American standards.” “Of the 150 or so diners between

the ages 17 and 22,” Rothenberg and Wetzork reported, “we saw boys and girls seated

together at only one table” at the restaurant.215 There was not much of an interaction

between the sexes at evening dances (vechera) that American exchange students at LGU

frequented on weekends; female students danced with one another while male students

lounged about, eating ice cream and smoking cigarettes.216

Soviet women who adhered to the normative standards of femininity in their

appearance and behavior, whether intentionally or not, attracted male attention because

212 Ibid., 134. 213 Ibid., 135. 214 Willis Konick, “Report on USA-USSR Student Exchange,” 10, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 215 Rothenberg, “Trip to Kazan and Ulyanovsk,” 14. 216 Alton S. Donnelly and Patrick L. Alston, “Report to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants,” June 4, 1959, 4, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports.

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such women stood out, both literally and figuratively, in the sea of drab colors, shapeless

clothes, and plump bodies. Westbrook felt an immediate and intense attraction to Nadya,

describing her as “perhaps the most beautiful girl I met in the Soviet Union.” The source

of his attraction was Nadya’s femininity. Unlike other young women he had met at the

summer camp, she was physically attractive (“she was slender and delicate”), always

dressed in good taste (“she wore colorful red dresses and tiny bikinis”), and behaved like

a lady (“[n]either went in for strenuous, physical exercise, working in factories, or

expounding political propaganda”). In other words, she looked and acted like an average

young American woman.217 The “polished” directress of an art museum in Uzhgorod

“stood apart from the usual Soviet woman,” according to a U.S. Embassy officer, by

dressing “in good taste” and making “modest use of jewelry and cosmetics” to enhance

her appearance.218 Surveying the teeming crowds who flocked in ever increasing

numbers to the “Industrial Design: USA” exhibit in Moscow in 1967, Hans Holzapfel

could not help but notice the transformative effect that an adept use of cosmetics could

have on the physical appearance of Soviet women. “Occasionally a flash of Western

styles brightened the predominantly dull colors,” he reported, “just as a little eye makeup

and lipstick did wonders for some of the female visitors.”219

The naïveté of youth, which Americans found so staggering, was merely a

manifestation of Soviets’ extremely moralistic attitude to all things related to human

sexuality. There were two or three paintings of nudes, executed “in the finest tradition of

217 Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, 144. 218 Ralph A. Jones, “Kiev, Lvov, Uzhgorod, April 1959,” May 8, 1959, 19, RG 306, RRSU, Box 1, USSR – Sociological. 219 Hans Holzapfel, “‘Industrial Design-USA’ Exhibit, Moscow – Feb. 26-Mar. 19, 1967: A Review of Audience Reaction and Interest,” April 11, 1967, 1-2, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 19, TP-8 Industrial Design 1967 #2.

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realism,” at the All-Union Art Exhibition in Moscow which Theodore Eliot, a U.S.

Embassy officer, attended in 1958. In light of the unusual subject matter on display, he paid special attention to the reactions, or lack thereof, of Soviet visitors to these paintings. “There was a good deal of shy giggling from girls and no visible interest from women. Few men stopped for close looks.”220 Virginia Van Wynen, a graduate exchange

student in Russian literature from Cornell University, felt “incredibly safe” in Moscow as

a young single woman about town. There was no doubt in her mind that only in the

puritanical Soviet society would a man approach a young woman on the street at one

o’clock at night to express concern for her health: “Devushka, button your bottom coat

button. Your knees will get chilled and you’ll catch a cold!”221

Soviet hotels relied on the moral vigilance of dezhurnye (female floor monitors) to enforce virtuous behavior among guests, Soviets and foreigners alike. A dezhurnaya kept a close eye on the comings and goings of guests on her floor and took care of the room keys, which could not leave the hotel premises under any circumstances. Debbie

Sherwood’s tense standoff with the dezhurnaya on the fourth floor of Moscow’s Hotel

National convinced her that the “stony-faced, middle-aged” women, who usually served as floor monitors, were strategically “posted at every crucial spot where stairs meet landings and elevators deposit passengers” to ensure that an unmarried couple did not enter the same hotel room between the hours of 10PM and 8AM.222 It was well past ten

o’clock at night when Sherwood and Tony, a young Englishman she had met in Moscow,

headed to his room so that she could retrieve her camera. Suddenly, a “mountain of a

220 Eliot, “Miscellaneous Observations,” 6. 221 Virginia Van Wynen, “Final Report,” 3, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Final Reports 1967-1968. 222 Sherwood, A Redhead in Red Square, 57.

257 woman” in “thick white socks” and a nightgown, which hung “like a great tent over her solid frame,” emerged “in all her ghoulish splendor” from behind the counter, where she was sleeping, and blocked their path. Once it became clear that no explanation would make the woman get out of the way, Tony took hold of Sherwood’s hand and pressed forward without a moment’s hesitation. The agitated woman kept yelling “It is forbidden!” and “I cannot allow it!” at the top of her voice as she pursued the young renegades down the hall, with her “nightgown whipping up behind her like a sail caught in a typhoon.”223 Tony confronted the woman and the elevator man, who had joined in the pursuit, at the door of his room, daring them to step inside, but they backed off and watched, in “shocked silence,” Sherwood and Tony enter the room together and close the door behind them.224

In 1967, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow obtained a copy of a Soviet sex education pamphlet for young girls, “What Every Girl Wants to Know.” Its purpose, according to the reporting officer Benjamin Zook, was “to educate young girls on the facts of life, as well as some of the practical and moral problems involved in relations between the sexes.” Its method left much to be desired, however. The chapter “About Boys and

Playing with Fire” cautioned curious young girls to keep their distance from easily aroused and irresponsible boys. “The girls are advised not to flirt with everybody,” Zook noted, “not only because they will enjoy greater respect, but also because caresses lead add fuel to the flames of passion and lead to sexual relations and the production of babies.” If Soviet girls were taught that flirting with boys was a slippery slope leading inevitably to pregnancy, it is perhaps not at all surprising that many young women chose

223 Ibid., 59. 224 Ibid., 60.

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to eschew contact with the opposite sex. Many might have been heeding the pamphlet’s

alarmist advice: “Don’t play with fire. Learn to control yourself!”225 Even though the

pamphlet did not include anatomical diagrams of any kind and “was quite bland by

Western standards,” Zook thought that its publication indicated that the Soviet Union was

“backing slowly but inexorably into the 20th century.”226

Conclusion

The Soviet way of life held few charms for freewheeling Americans. They were

highly critical of many aspects of social, cultural, and public policy under the hammer

and sickle. In their recollections, American Cold War travelers identified deep-rooted

social problems, such as collectivism, prejudice, alcoholism, and defeminization, which,

they believed, bred dysfunction in the Soviet society. They also deplored the Communist

Party’s heavy-handed meddling, to the detriment of all concerned, in affairs best left to

public or private purview, such as art, education, religion, and healthcare. The state

seemed intent on using its unchecked powers to infringe upon the rights and privileges of

Soviet citizens to act, think, and express themselves as individuals, much to the chagrin

of American observers.

The criticism of the socialist experiment leveled by American Cold War travelers

denoted difference—a stark contrast between two distinct and irreconcilable approaches

to organizing society and achieving modernity. The popular, if perhaps overused,

expression “way of life” gained such currency during the Cold War because “[i]t

225 Benjamin M. Zook, “Sex Education in the Soviet Union,” March 21, 1967, 1, RG 84, CGR, 1964-1967, Box 6, HLTH. 226 Ibid., 2.

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simultaneously implied normality and difference” for Soviets and Americans alike.227

The emphasis on difference between “us” and “them” made perfect sense in the bipolar

context of the Cold War; indeed, it explained and rationalized it for millions at home and

abroad. The ideological contest with the Soviet adversary “was inspired and then

maintained—on a public level at least—by the belief that ‘our’ values were better than

‘theirs,’ that ‘our’ way of life was superior, that ‘our’ version of modernity was

progressive and workable.”228 And in this contest for global supremacy, there could only

be one winner.

227 Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 97. 228 Ibid., 220.

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Conclusion

“Despite its gloomy officials, slow service, drabness and general lack of joy,” the noted journalist Stanley Karnow ruminated upon his return, “the Soviet Union is a country that every traveler ought to visit—with his eyes and ears open.”1 Finding themselves behind the “Iron Curtain,” American Cold War travelers made sure to follow his advice. They dutifully chronicled genuine gestures of friendship, expressions of admiration, and convulsions of curiosity on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens they had encountered in order to humanize and individualize the monolithic, nameless Cold War adversary for their compatriots back home. At the same time, they also made sure to draw attention to the many seemingly irreparable shortcomings of the socialist system, including but not limited to the inefficiencies of the centrally planned command economy, technological backwardness, imposed political conformity, racial and religious intolerance, an internalized collectivist ethos, and subversion of heteronormativity. This representational duality served two overarching purposes: first, it sought to allay unsettling fears of the Cold War escalating into a full-blown nuclear confrontation, and second, it sought to reassure Americans of the inevitable triumph of the American way of life in the global contest for hearts and minds.

Since most Soviet citizens were just as concerned about another global conflagration—this time, however, with the potential to annihilate humanity—as were most Americans, there was a groundswell of popular support for détente between the two superpowers. Given the indisputable advantage that the U.S. market economy enjoyed in the production of durable and nondurable consumer goods, American Cold War travelers

1 Stanley Karnow, “Russia on a Nervous Breakdown a Day,” Los Angeles Times (November 8, 1970), H4.

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deemed it essential for Washington to defuse geopolitical tensions and place the rivalry

between the socialist and capitalist systems on a more stable and peaceful footing. There

was no surer way to undercut the prestige of the world’s first socialist state than to prod

the Communist Party to honor Nikita Khrushchev’s famous pledge to “catch up and

overtake America (dognat’ i peregnat’ Ameriku).” There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Soviets could mass produce battle tanks, ballistic missiles, and automatic rifles, but, as American tourists, diplomats, scholars, and journalists all reported, they lagged hopelessly behind the Western economies in the production of eggs, pantyhose, and television sets, to name just a few consumer goods.

“There is no place like home”

Americans did not just report on their experiences behind the “Iron Curtain,” some of them also took the time to reflect on the time they had spent in the Soviet Union as tourists or scholars. Their reflections demonstrate an abiding appreciation for the incomparable opportunity to meet Soviets face-to-face and observe the inner workings of

Soviet society at first hand. For them, it was a truly rewarding and transformative experience. However, these positive sentiments were coupled with an uncompromising criticism of what Americans took to be defects detrimental to the long-term survival of the socialist experiment. Once more, the same representational duality materializes.

There was no doubt in the minds of American travelers that Ivan and Katya were friendly and peaceful folks, much like Jim and Sally back home, but their social system was rotten to the core, living on borrowed time. Given such circumstances, a policy of détente, or

“peaceful coexistence” (mirnoe sosushchestvovanie) in Soviet parlance, was not only

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feasible but desirable. There would be no winner in a nuclear confrontation between the

two superpowers, that much was clear. But the prolific U.S. market economy was all but

assured a victory in a peaceful competition for hearts and minds with an inefficient and

backward Soviet command economy.

For many Americans, interpersonal contact transformed Soviet men and women

from an undifferentiated mass of docile subjects into a collection of discrete individuals

with unique personalities. The friendships that Francis Bartholomew, a graduate

exchange student, had made in Leningrad not only constituted “[t]he most rewarding

part” of his stay but provided him with “a vital human experience” as well.2 He came

away convinced that “Sasha’s, Kolya’s and Katya’s” he had met were “excellent people,” even if they differed in their “thinking and acting” from Americans, and he lamented “the loss of their companionship.”3 Another graduate student cherished “the several very close

and sincere friendships” which he had formed with Soviet students in Moscow. The

“warmth and depth” of these intimate relationships made it possible for Paul Cocks to

escape the disheartening “coldness, rudeness, indifference, and day-to-day struggle” of

everyday Soviet life.4

When Robert Westbrook heard the incessant harangues against nameless “Reds” on

the radio at the height of the Berlin crisis in August 1961, he could not help but think of

the very real friends he had left behind. The faces of “Michel and Marya and Nadya and

Victor, and even old Sergei Ivanovitch with his raucous voice and his fat belly,”

materialized before his eyes. “The thought of going to war with these people, after we

2 Francis Bartholomew, “Final Report,” 3, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports, Library of Congress. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Paul M. Cocks, “Final Report,” 15, IREX, RC 200, GSEA 1966-7 Final Reports.

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had lived together for eight weeks, seemed inconceivable and tragic,” he wrote

poignantly.5 Lawrence Meacham, a Connecticut high school student, felt obliged to share

an important piece of information with the readers of the Hartford Courant upon

returning from a six-week study tour in the USSR. “The people were really wonderful,” he announced. “They’re just like us.” Whether he knew it or not, it was the greatest compliment he could have paid the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. His classmate,

Pamela Sherwood, expressed much the same sentiment. “I personally feel that people are the same everywhere,” she told an interviewer. “We just don’t realize it until we’re brought face to face.”6 Her words perfectly captured the spirit of grassroots diplomacy.

“Total immersion in Soviet life is an unmatchable experience which no amount of

reading or studying replaces.” That was the conclusion that Arline Keown, a Russian

language instructor at Mundelein College in Chicago, reached after spending nine weeks

in the USSR in the summer of 1967. Only by immersing themselves in Soviet society—

for an extended period of time—could Americans fully grasp and appreciate its inherent

complexity, and “make a sober and perceptive comparison of life within the two

systems.”7 The president of the American Bar Association, Charles R. Rhyne, came to

the same conclusion after spending fifteen days in the USSR. To obtain “an entirely full

and accurate picture” of what he called “that strange land of contradictory contrasts,” it

was imperative to “go there in person.” The written word could not take the place of

“personal observation and acquaintance…with its unique and unusual people.”8

5 Robert Westbrook, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), 157. 6 Stuart Deane, “Students on Tour Find Russian People Genuinely Thrilled by U.S. Moon Landing,” Hartford Courant (August 31, 1969), 11C. 7 Arline Keown, “Report,” August 28, 1967, 3, IREX, RC 200, Final Reports SLT – 1967. 8 Charles S. Rhyne, “The Law, Lawyers, and Courts of Russia,” August 25, 1958, 9-10, RG 84, Classified General Records (hereafter CGR), 1941-1963, Box 232, 363 USSR Laws 1959, National Archives.

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There was a discernible qualitative difference between living in and paying a visit

to the USSR. And, according to George Feifer, a law student from Columbia University,

exchange students like himself were in the best position to “find out how Soviet society

works” from the inside out. “The longer one stays, the longer one really gets the feel” for

the place, he explained.9 That was exactly how Gilbert McArthur, a graduate history student from the University of Rochester, felt at the conclusion of his spell at LGU. The

nine months he had spent in Leningrad transformed the Soviet Union from “a vaguely

unreal, greyish world” into “a living entity,” bringing to light “an infinitely greater

complexity and diversity” than he could have ever imagined. Such a transformative

experience made him highly skeptical of “facile generalization” about the USSR.10

Josephine Hopkins credited “the personal experience of living in the USSR and getting to

really know Russians on an intimate basis,” which the Graduate Student/Young Faculty

exchange program made possible, with helping her “to understand the Soviet psychology,

its good and its less desirable sides, its likenesses and differences from our ways of

being.”11

If the Soviet Union became “a known quantity” for some Americans, familiarity

tended to breed contempt. In 1958, Dr. Fred Warner Neal, professor of international

relations and government at Claremont Graduate School, penned a travel column in the

Los Angeles Times on the timely topic of U.S. tourism to the USSR. Based on his own

observations and conversations with returning American tourists, he was happy to report

9 George Feifer, “Letter to Stephen Viederman,” February 2, 1963, 1, IREX, RC 200, GSE 62-3: Mid-year, final, and travel reports. 10 Gilbert H. McArthur, “Letter to Howard Mehlinger,” November 8, 1965, 1, IREX, RC 200, GSEA End of YR Reports 64/65. 11 Josephine Hopkins, “Terminal Report,” 22, IREX, RC 200, GSEA Reports 65/66.

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that most of them “found nothing at all in the Soviet Union to envy” and much to

criticize.12 The daily encounter with Soviet reality proved to be an “extremely

unpleasant” experience for Charles Moser, a graduate exchange student in Slavic

languages from Columbia University.13 Gerard Ervin’s stint as “a semi-resident” of the

USSR in the summer of 1967 laid bare the challenges, large and small, that ordinary

Soviets had to contend with on a daily basis. Like any other Muscovite, the young

Arizonan stood patiently in endless lines and could not help but “curse the red tape which

seems to entwine every little thing here.”14

The historian Albin T. Anderson likened “the absence of personal freedom” he had

experienced in the USSR to suffocation, which was exactly how he felt at the conclusion

of his 30-day stay there. The glaring contrast between the rosy pronouncements he would

read in Pravda, the official organ of the Community Party, every morning and the

hardscrabble realities of Soviet life he would witness every day with his own two eyes

only made matters worse.15 “They won’t let me out” was the usual response that Anna

Maria Salehar, a high school teacher from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, heard from

despondent Soviet friends and acquaintances whom she would casually invite to the

United States. The forced immobility of Soviet citizens exemplified the true “tragedy of

Soviet society” for her and left her feeling utterly helpless.16

12 Fred Warner Neal, “U.S. Tourists in Soviet Union,” Los Angeles Times (October 2, 1958), B5. 13 Charles A. Moser, “Report,” June 5, 1959, 5, IREX, RC 53, GSE, 58-9 Letters & reports. 14 Gerard L. Ervin, “Participant’s Evaluation,” September 11, 1967, 4, IREX, RC 200, Final Reports SLT – 1967. 15 Albin T. Anderson, “Report on Travel in Eastern Europe,” November 2, 1960, 2, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 16 Anna Maria Salehar, “Summer Evaluation,” August 31, 1966, 1, IREX, RC 200, Final Reports SLT – 1967.

266

“Earthly comfort”

Even if there was no place like home, as far as many Americans were concerned, a

visit behind the “Iron Curtain” was nevertheless well worth the investment of time, effort,

and money. “Seeing the Soviet Union can’t help but make you a better American,”

Kermit Holt, travel editor of the Chicago Tribune, opined.17 A firsthand encounter with

Soviet reality would invariably dramatize “the real nature of the cleavage between the

Communist and free worlds” for ordinary Americans, making them “more effective”

ambassadors and citizens of their nation.18 For the members of the Eastman

Philharmonia, the four-week concert tour of the USSR in 1962 proved doubly rewarding.

Not only did the young musicians win over discerning Soviet audiences at every venue,

they also gained “a much fuller appreciation and understanding of their country” in the

process.19 In 1969, Joseph R. Boucher, a Russian-language teacher at Glastonbury High

School in Connecticut, accompanied a group of eager students on a six-week study tour of the USSR. He had no doubt that “meeting people and seeing what the typical Soviet has to go through in day to day life” was “a worthwhile experience” for the youngsters in his charge because it taught them an important lesson in civics they would not soon forget. “You get a greater appreciation of what we take for granted in this country,” he declared with conviction.20 Even American exhibition guides returned home with a

renewed appreciation for “freedoms and comforts” they once took for granted.21 A Soviet

17 Kermit Holt, “Not For Everybody: The Frustrating, Enlightening Experience of Traveling in the U.S.S.R.” Chicago Tribune (August 16, 1970), H10. 18 Donald R. Lesh, “Final Report,” May 19, 1961, 15, IREX, RC 53, Reports 60/61. 19 Joseph B. Norbury, “Soviet Tour of Eastman Philharmonia: Part II (February 10-21, 1962),” March 2, 1962, 5, RG 84, General Records, 1941-1963, Box 67, 221 Cit A⁕Z 1962. 20 Deane, “Students on Tour,” 11C. 21 Tomas Tolvaisas, “Cold War Communications: The Experience of American Exchange Exhibitions in the Soviet Union, 1959-1991,” in Winter Kept Us Warm: Cold War Interactions Reconsidered, ed. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Brendan Humphreys (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2010), 56.

267

sojourn, it seems, rekindled Americans’ dormant patriotism; they learned much about the

outside world and “even more about America.”22

Besides humanizing the Soviet adversary, exposing the ins and outs of Soviet

society, and accentuating the differences between the two social systems, there was a

belief that personal contact between American and Soviet citizens could have far- reaching geopolitical implications. Some even went so far as to argue that it could spell an end to the Cold War—on America’s terms, of course. At the most basic level, the experience of meeting and interacting with Soviets convinced some Americans that there was “a great potential of friendship and understanding” between the two superpowers,

“despite existing differences” in ideology and policy.23 It was the moral obligation of

political leaders in both countries to realize that potential. “If the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.

fail to establish a workable relationship one to the other, none of our children or

grandchildren can survive the holocaust,” David and Lydia Miller of Greeley, Colorado,

spelled out what was at stake.24

A dazzling musical performance, the placement of a Russian-speaking student at a

Soviet university, an exhibition staffed by Russian-speaking guides, or a friendly basketball game all enabled the United States to reach the “great untouched pockets of

Soviet citizens” most in need of “enlightenment as to U.S. culture and peaceful purposes.”25 Bilateral exchanges were not a zero-sum game, however. As the historian

22 Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 205; Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York: Basic Books), 151. 23 Bartholomew, “Final Report,” 3. 24 David J. and Lydia A. Miller, “The Story of the Visit of Mr. and Mrs. David J. Miller with the Miller Cousins in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, U.S.S.R., July 21, 22, 23, 1967,” October 15, 1967, 10, RG 59, Bilateral Political Relations (hereafter BPR), Box 18, TRV: American Visits to USSR, 1969. 25 Heyward Isham, “Eastman Philharmonia’s Tour of U.S.S.R.,” February 26, 1962, 4, MC 468, Box 229, Folder 15, EDX-39: Jan-June 1962, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections.

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Charles Adler pointed out, the United States and the Soviet Union both benefited from

collaboration. The ongoing exchanges in the fields of culture, education, science,

medicine, and athletics were not “an unmixed source of advantage on either side,” but

occasioned “an erosion of ignorance, confusion and mistrust” on both sides—a “prize of

mutual significance.”26 And, by the same token, people-to-people diplomacy did not favor one side or the other but generated “great goodwill” on both.27

Such noble sentiments did not preclude another American scholar from recognizing

the subversive potential of bilateral cooperation. “A continuous cultural exchange” of

people, ideas, and goods was bound to “make a dent in the thinking of Ivan” sooner or

later, wrote Abraham Katsh, the prominent scholar of Hebrew, upon his return from the

USSR in 1960. After all, he reasoned, the physical and psychological need for “earthly

comfort” could not be satisfied by “mechanical achievement” alone for much longer.28

As if to confirm the prescience of Katsh’s prognosis, the bitterness expressed by a

Moscow cab driver intimated an undercurrent of popular disaffection with official

priorities, such as lunar rockets. “What do we need a rocket for? Who wants it anyway?”

the man asked sarcastically. “What we need is more food and more money, not rockets

that cost millions of rubles each, just to get blown out into space somewhere.”29 Even the

venerable Sputnik, “a source of pride to virtually all Russians,” according to an American

diplomat, came under fire. It was “seen by many as a symbol of that god” of progress “to

26 Charles C. Adler, Jr., “Report on Travel to the Soviet Union in 1960,” November 11, 1960, 5, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 27 Tom Maupin, “American Visitors to the Soviet Union,” May 16, 1960, RG 59, BPR, Box 14, 1640-17: Tom Maupin Tour Associates, 1956-67. 28 Abraham I. Katsh, “Memorandum to the President of the American Council of Learned Societies,” October 24, 1960, 4, IREX, RC 53, Faculty Grant Reports, 1959. 29 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Miscellaneous Notes From Conversations With Soviet Citizens,” January 22, 1959, 2, RG 84, CGR, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959.

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which their everyday welfare [had] been so frequently sacrificed.”30 The question was

how long would ordinary Soviets countenance such sacrifices?

“Stomach capitalism”

Their patience, it seemed, was wearing thin. Muscovites voiced their surging

discontent to American guides at the 1969 “Education: USA” exhibit. “They want

automobiles and apartments now, not in some hazy, pie-in-the-sky future,” USIA’s

Alexander Park reported.31 “After half a century of pleasures postponed, of lives wasting in drab, overcrowded apartments, they are tired of waiting for Utopia.”32 Soviet citizens wanted their hard-earned earthly comforts after decades of Spartan self-sacrifice. As Park found out, the average Soviet worker had little use for, or interest in, abstract political principles. “His demands were for material things—higher pay, lower prices, better housing, more consumer goods,” not necessarily in that order.33 Even Reader’s Digest

insisted that Soviets were “simple people who cared little for ideology and only wanted a

good life for themselves and their families.”34 Given such priorities, it is no wonder that the American composer Joel Spiegelman had to fend off constant pleas for presents from

Soviet relatives during his stay in Moscow.35 Or that Soviets could deride Americans for

30 Robert J. Martens, “Some Observations on Popular Soviet Attitudes,” in “Soviet Attitudes and Public Opinion,” ed. David E. Mark and Edward L. Killham, 7, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 31 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 18-23, 1969 – Visitors’ Reactions,” November 26, 1969, 5, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs + Expositions, 1970. 32 Alexander G. Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow – Summary Report – Visitors’ Reactions,” December 8, 1969, 7, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 30, EDU-8: Fairs + Exhibitions, 1970. 33 Alexander G. Park, “The Soviet People View America,” January 9, 1962, 15, RG 306, Research Reports, 1960-1999, Box 2, R-1-62, National Archives. 34 Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 120. 35 McKinney H. Russell and Thompson R. Buchanan, “Sarah Lawrence ‘Summer School’ in Moscow is surprisingly successful,” August 7, 1970, 4, MC 468, Box 231, Folder 12, EDX 18: U.S. Student Program, 1970.

270 their supposed greed (“You’re only after money”) and question them intently about their personal belongings in the same breath.36

Nikita Khrushchev responded to popular clamor in his lofty Third Party Program, ratified in 1961, pledging to “surpass the US in per capita production by 1970 and build a

Communist society by 1980.”37 In other words, material abundance became one of the preconditions for the transition from socialism to communism and mass consumption became one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War. As American diplomats discovered, however, Khrushchev’s pledge to beat the United States in its own game was met with skepticism on the streets. “Go ahead and overtake the USA, but just let us live there” came the tongue-in-cheek reply.38 Others had a bit more faith. “Sure we’ll catch up to the

United States—only barefoot.”39 It was an understandable, perhaps even an appropriate, response considering the structural problems plaguing the Soviet economy.

Using the American colossus as a point of reference, a benchmark, proved to be a tactical blunder since average Soviet citizens grew accustomed to gauging their nation’s progress and their own material well-being in accordance with American standards.40 It was hard to imagine how the Communist Party would be able to meet the soaring demand

36 Park, “Education USA Exhibit, Moscow, November 18-23, 1969,” 7. 37 Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67. Zdeněk Mlynář, former secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, reflected on Khrushchev’s decisive break with Stalinism: “Stalin never permitted comparisons of socialism or communism with capitalist reality because he argued that an entirely new world was being built here that could not be compared with any preceding system…Our successes could be measured only by our own standards of measurement, which corresponded to our own Communist ideology.” Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36. 38 Edward Hurwitz, “Armenian and Georgian Dissidents,” in “Miscellaneous Notes on the Soviet Union,” ed. Ralph A. Jones, October 6, 1959, 13, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 231, 350 USSR 1959. 39 Vladimir I. Toumanoff, “Miscellaneous Notes From Conversations with Soviet Citizens,” January 22, 1959, 3, RG 84, CGR, 1941-1963, Box 232, 350 USSR Conversations 1959. 40 Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 176.

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for every conceivable consumer good—from housing to eggs—when every improvement

in living standards only seemed to whet the public’s appetite for more and better things.

An American diplomat told of a Soviet acquaintance who complained about the

unavailability of furniture as soon as he set foot in his new apartment.41 Ironically,

therefore, “it was mainly the USSR’s own policies aimed at improving living conditions

that caused consumer expectations to rise—and, with them, consumer dissatisfaction.”42

At a time when young Soviets defined themselves by the goods they consumed

rather than the ideologies they espoused, consumerism proved to be the Soviet Union’s

proverbial Achilles’ heel in a peaceful contest between state socialism and market

capitalism.43 That was precisely the underlying rationale for pursuing a policy of détente:

By shifting the focus of the superpower rivalry from ideology to material existence,

where the consumers’ republic enjoyed a clear-cut advantage, Washington would hasten the demise of the Soviet foe. The Cold War would be won in the shopping cart rather than at the negotiating table.44 After all, if there was one lesson that American Cold War

travelers had learned during their stay behind the “Iron Curtain,” it was that the Soviet

Union did not stand a chance in a peaceful competition with the United States, given a bevy of economic, social, and political issues it had to deal with. Overseas travel had brought the reality of Soviet weakness to light for them in all its sordid details. So, while policymakers worked out the fine points of political détente behind closed doors,

American men and women carried out their own policy of popular détente by traveling to

41 Martens, “Some Observations,” 7. 42 Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 201. 43 Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 44 Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, “East is East and West is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War,” in Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History, ed. Patrick Major and Rana Mitter (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 13.

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the USSR and making contact with ordinary Soviet citizens. Their cheerful manner,

fashionable attire, material possessions, and cultural capital all denoted how far the USSR

still had to go in catching up with, to say nothing of actually overtaking, the American

adversary.

So, we have come to the $64,000 question, did popular détente actually work? It is

a hard question to answer with any degree of certainty, but contemporary public opinion

polls do reveal an incremental improvement in Americans’ attitudes toward the Soviet

Union and its people over the course of the long sixties. In October 1960, only 9 percent

of those polled by Gallup voiced a favorable opinion of the USSR, whereas a

considerable majority (78 percent) had an unfavorable one.45 A marked change in public

sentiment occurred over the next decade. Of those Americans polled by Gallup in

December 1966, 17 percent expressed a favorable opinion of the USSR and 76 percent an

unfavorable one.46 The percentage of Americans with a favorable opinion jumped to 39

percent in a May 1972 Gallup poll, while the percentage of those with an unfavorable one

dropped to 53 percent.47 A remarkable 45 percent of those polled in February 1974 professed a favorable opinion of the USSR and only 50 percent felt strongly predisposed against it.48 But that was only part of the story.

45 Gallup Organization. Gallup Poll (AIPO), October 1960 (survey question). USGALLUP.60-637.Q059H. Gallup Organization (producer). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL (distributor), accessed Feb-11-2018. 46 Gallup Organization. Gallup Poll (AIPO), December 1966 (survey question). USGALLUP.738.Q50A Gallup Organization (producer). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL (distributor), accessed Feb-11-2018. 47 Gallup Organization. Gallup Poll (AIPO), May 1972 (survey question). USGALLUP.852.Q05A Gallup Organization (producer). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL (distributor), accessed Feb-11-2018. 48 National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. General Social Survey 1974, February 1974 (survey question). USNORC.GSS74.R91A. National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago (producer). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL (distributor), accessed Feb-11-2018.

273

The top ten adjectives that Americans chose to describe the Soviets in a 1961

Gallup poll included only three positive qualities (hard-working, intelligent, and

progressive) and seven negative ones (warlike, treacherous, radical, cruel, quick-

tempered, rude, and sly).49 When Gallup researchers repeated the poll five years later,

Americans attributed five positive qualities to the Soviets (hard-working, intelligent,

progressive, ordinary, and practical) and six negatives ones (warlike, treacherous, sly,

cruel, quick-tempered, and radical).50 The Soviet image in the American mind had clearly

become more nuanced and sympathetic, even though mistrust and suspicion of the Cold

War adversary lingered in the public consciousness. It would be foolish to claim that

Cold War travel brought this sea change in public opinion about. But it would just as

foolhardy to dismiss the significance of Cold War travel out of hand, as if it was only a

sideshow to the great drama of high politics.

49 George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971, vol. 3 (New York: Random House, 1972), 1716-1717. 50 Ibid., 2015.

274

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