U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986

Who Wins?

Yale Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367212773
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000008821
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The U.S.-USSR Cultural Agreement signed at the Geneva summit in 1985 signalled the resumption of a broad range of cultural exchanges suspended in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Mr. Richmond describes the history of the various areas of exchange—in the performing arts, popular media, academia, public diplomacy, science and technology

1
Overview

Introduction

“Who wins, we or the Russians?” I was often asked when I worked on Soviet-American exchanges at the State Department in the 1970s, the détente years when these exchanges greatly expanded. Some Americans regard cultural exchanges with the Soviets as a competition in which points are scored, tallied and one side or the other wins. And the communists, they argue, would not be promoting cultural exchanges so eagerly unless they had ulterior motives.

Defenders of exchanges point to the need to communicate, to maintain a public dialogue, and for Americans to learn more about the Soviet Union, and Soviets to learn more about the United States, not necessarily to resolve differences but to understand them better and to make more rational decisions on issues dividing the two countries.

Critics cite the built-in disadvantages to a pluralist and open society in attempting to cooperate with a totalitarian and closed society, the unequal conditions for exchanges in the two countries, the freedom of travel and access to Americans for Soviet visitors in the United States and the controls on travel and access to Soviets for Americans in the Soviet Union, the disparity in mutual benefits and, in some exchanges, reciprocity.

Debate over these issues has continued since these exchanges began in 1958, and debate will undoubtedly continue in the future as each U.S. administration considers which exchanges we should have with the Soviets and under what conditions.

This study will explain how these exchanges began, how they have developed over the past twenty-eight years, and how they are conducted in 1986, as the United States begins another chapter in its exchanges with the Soviet Union.

The Cultural Agreement

The first U.S.-USSR exchanges agreement was signed in 1958, the Lacy-Zarubin agreement, named after the two chief negotiators and signatories, William S. B. Lacy, President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant on East-West Exchanges, and Georgy Z. Zarubin, Soviet Ambassador to the United States.¹

Commonly called the cultural agreement, this two-year agreement, and those which followed it periodically, was actually a general agreement which included exchanges in science and technology, agriculture, medicine and public health, radio and television, motion pictures, exhibitions, publications, government, youth, athletics, scholarly research, culture and tourism. Included also was an understanding, in principle, to establish direct air service between the two countries. The agreement was intended to encompass all exchanges between the two countries. As an executive agreement, rather than a treaty, it did not require Senate ratification.

The full title of the agreement was “Agreement between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical and Educational Fields.” The relative importance of science and technology became more evident in the second agreement, signed in 1959, when the word “cooperation” was added, and science and technology were moved ahead of culture and education. The new title read “Agreement between… for Cooperation in Exchanges in the Scientific, Technical, Educational and Cultural Fields in 1960–61.”²

The third agreement, signed in 1962, added the phrase,”… and Other Fields.”³ This remained the pattern until 1973 when the title was further amended to read “General Agreement between … on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and Other Fields.”⁴ This was also the title of the agreement signed at the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in 1985.⁵

Signing such an agreement in 1958 was a new departure for the United States. Many of the activities included in the agreement are, for the most part, the responsibility of the private sector—science and technology, radio and television, motion pictures, publishing, youth activities, education, culture and tourism—and government activity in many of these fields is only peripheral. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, all of these activities are governmental. Here at the start was one of the many difficulties which would emerge as two very different societies attempted to establish contacts and cooperation over a broad range of activities.

There was no precedent on the U.S. side for such an agreement. Thousands of foreign students come to the United States each year without intergovernmental agreements, as well as specialists in industry, science, culture, athletics and other fields covered by the agreement.

Why then was such an agreement signed? How could the federal government agree to regulate, in its relations with another government, the international activities of U.S. universities, industry, and media and our many and varied cultural institutions?

The simple answer is that the Soviets wanted an agreement, and they made it a condition to having exchanges. The Soviets like to put things on paper, signed by their political authorities at an appropriately high level. And in a country where the government and communist party control practically everything, it would be inconceivable to conduct exchanges with another country, particularly the leader of the capitalist West, without a formal agreement which spells out exactly what will be exchanged and under what conditions. Moreover, with their highly centralized government and central planning, the Soviets claim they need an agreement to enable their participating ministries and agencies to budget in advance for exchanges and to make plans for the agreed activities.

The Soviet agencies responsible for exchanges and the officials who direct them also need the protective cover of an agreement to justify their exchanges with the United States. It was only five years after Stalin’s death when the first Soviet-American cultural agreement was signed, and no one in the Soviet Union could say—then or even now—whether Soviet policy might again change. Finally, the Soviets, in general, like bilateral agreements with the United States for these agreements, in their view, lend legitimacy to the Soviet regime and imply equality between the two superpowers.

There was some reluctance on the U.S. side to break precedent and sign an agreement, but there was also high interest in government and private circles in engaging the Soviets in exchanges, in an attempt to break down the barriers separating the two countries and to make a start in normalizing relations.

The United States, during World War II, had proposed a broad program of cultural and information exchanges to the Soviet Union, but without success.⁶ A Rockefeller Foundation offer, in 1944, of fellowships to Soviets for study in the United States went unanswered. After the war, in October 1945, the Department of State offered to exchange performing artists, exhibitions and students, and it invited the Red Army Chorus to tour in the United States. Again, there was no Soviet response. In the 1960s and 1970s by contrast, the Soviets several times proposed to send the Red Army Chorus, but the State Department response in those years was a firm no because of the Red Army’s actions in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The Soviets opened the door slightly in 1955, only two years after Stalin’s death. A U.S. company of “Porgy and Bess,” on tour in Europe, was invited to perform in Moscow and Leningrad, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra the following year. A few exchanges in agriculture, medicine and journalism took place over the next two years. Some members of Congress, religious leaders and American businessmen traveled to the Soviet Union, and American scholars began to visit as tourists, the only way they could go in those years. Soviet pianist Emil Gilels performed in the United States, the first Soviet artist to appear here in the postwar period, and he was followed by violinist David Oistrakh.

At the 1955 Geneva Foreign Ministers Conference, France, the United Kingdom and the United States proposed to the Soviet Union a seventeen-point program to remove barriers to normal exchanges in the information media, culture, education, books and publications, science, sports and tourism.⁷ The initiative was rejected by Foreign Minister Molotov who accused the West of interference in Soviet internal affairs. Actually, the Soviets were interested in some of the proposals, and Molotov indicated that the Soviet Union might be agreeable to concluding bilateral or multilateral agreements which “could reflect what is of particular interest to the countries concerned.”⁸ The Soviets also made it clear that travel abroad, as proposed by the West, was “an instrument of Soviet policy.”⁹

Further developments had to await the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 where Khrushchev attacked Stalin and signaled a change in Soviet policies which included peaceful coexistence and increased contacts with the West.

After the Congress, the Soviets moved swiftly to establish exchanges with the West. Cultural agreements were signed with Belgium and Norway later in 1956, and with France in 1957. Negotiations with the United States began on October 29, 1957, and an exchange agreement was signed on January 28, 1958.

Soviet Objectives

The Soviets don’t talk publicly about their objectives, and there is no Soviet equivalent to our Freedom of Information Act. One can only speculate, therefore, what prompted them to make a radical departure from past practice, to permit their scientists, scholars and cultural personalities to travel and study in the United States, and to open their borders to similar visitors from the West. But after twenty-eight years of exchanges with the Soviet Union and the opportunities they have provided to observe Soviet interests and priorities, their objectives are not so difficult to make out.

Access to U.S. science and technology has been and remains the main Soviet objective. It is easier and quicker to acquire technology through exchanges, or to purchase it through commercial arrangements, than to develop it at home. Russia historically has had a long tradition of acquiring technology and administrative know-how from the West, dating back to Ivan III and Peter the Great. So the first cultural agreement with the United States, and all subsequent agreements until 1972, included up front a section on exchanges of delegations in technology for visits to industrial facilities in the two countries. Most of these science and technology exchanges were spun off, in 1972, 1973 and 1974, to the eleven cooperative agreements which were signed at the three Nixon-Brezhnev summit meetings.

Soviet priorities were also evident in the remarks of Ambassador Zarubin at the opening of the exchange negotiations in 1957. The Soviets, he said, “have in mind an exchange of delegations in the following industries: metallurgical, mining, automobile, chemical, radio, tool engineering, plastic, electric power and others, as well as specialists in the construction of different industrial enterprises, planning and construction of towns, and construction of bridges.” Also mentioned by Zarubin were exchanges in agriculture, including cattle breeding, vegetable growing and other fields.¹⁰

Political objectives were also high among Soviet priorities. Peaceful coexistence was the favored Soviet slogan in the late 1950s, and cooperation was sought with the advanced capitalist countries. Zarubin, in his remarks, also hoped that exchanges would “contribute to the normalization and improvement of relations and the relaxation of international tension” and “the creation of an atmosphere of confidence and mutual understanding” between the two countries.

Another Soviet objective—perhaps not recognized at the time—was the desire to gain recognition for their efforts to change a backward agricultural country into a modern industrial state and for their achievements in the arts, culture and science which they tout as achievements of a communist society.

The foreign travel provided by cultural agreements was also an attraction for a country which had been isolated from the rest of the world since the late 1930s. There was a huge pent-up demand for foreign travel among the Soviet intelligentsia. Professionals in all fields, including party and government officials, wanted to travel to the West, and Khrushchev himself visited the United States in 1959 in a well-publicized tour. Exchange agreements enable the Soviet authorities to carefully vent and control this demand for foreign travel.

Exchanges could also be used to earn foreign currency. The Soviets have a surplus of world class performing artists, and their conservatories and international music competitions produce a new crop each year. The Soviets soon learned that they could receive world class fees for these artists and thus provide the Soviet treasury with another source of much-needed hard currency.

Finally, there is the Soviet fascination with the United States, based on seeming similarities as well as deep differences between the two societies, a fascination which has been intensified by the anti-American propaganda of the Soviet media. Nothing attracts like forbidden fruit.

U.S. Objectives

The main U.S. objective was to open the Soviet Union to Western influences in order to change its foreign and domestic policies.

For the U.S. government, the policy was set forth in NSC 5607, “East-West Exchanges,” a National Security Council statement of policy dated June 29, 1956.¹¹

This document, couched in the Cold War rhetoric of the time, was to serve, without revision, as the basic U.S. government policy statement on East-West exchanges through the 1970s, and perhaps beyond.

It begins with the premise that U.S. policy is to promote evolutionary changes within the Soviet Union “toward a regime which will abandon predatory policies,… seek to promote the aspirations of the Russian people rather than the global ambitions of International Communism, and which will increasingly rest upon the consent of the governed …” As for the satellites, the document states that”… we seek their evolution toward independence of Moscow.”

U.S. objectives, the document continues, are to increase the Soviet bloc’s knowledge of the outer world so that their judgments are based on fact rather than “Communist fiction,” to encourage freedom of thought, to stimulate the demand for greater personal security for bloc citizens, to encourage their desire for more consumer goods and to stimulate nationalism within the satellites in an effort to encourage “defiance of Moscow.”

To achieve these noble objectives, the NSC statement lists the seventeen proposals presented by the three Western powers to the Soviet Union at the 1955 Geneva Foreign Ministers meeting, and suggests that they be used as a general guide, with each proposal being judged on its own merits as to whether it contributes to the agreed objectives.

These proposals include, among others, the freer exchange of information and ideas; the distribution of official...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Overview
• 2 Performing Arts
• 3 Exhibitions
• 4 Scholars and Students
• 5 Public Diplomacy and Other Exchanges
• 6 Information
• 7 Science and Technology
• 8 Sports and Tourism
• 9 Problems in Exchanges
• 10 From Geneva to Geneva
• 11 The Reagan-Gorbachev Summit
• 12 Eastern Europe
• 13 Recommendations
• Appendix A: NSC 5607, “East-West Exchanges”
• Appendix B: U.S.-USSR General Agreement of November 21, 1985 and Program of Cooperation and Exchanges for 1986–1988
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index