By Yale Richmond, Guest Contributor
Yale Richmond, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer and
author of 11 books on intercultural communication, worked on U.S.-Soviet
cultural and other exchanges for more than 20 years. He delivered the following speech at the
Aleksanteri Institute’s 9th Annual Conference “Cold War Interactions
Reconsidered” 29-31 October 2009, University
of Helsinki, Finland.
This is the first of a two part series. The second part will appear on Thursday, December
10.
I want to thank the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki for this opportunity to speak
to you. It is an honor to be asked to address such a well-informed audience.
First a disclaimer. Although I worked for the US Government
for more than 35 years, and many of those years on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I do not speak for the State Department
today. The views I present here today are my own.
There are many theories of why communism collapsed and the
Cold War ended, as you will likely be hearing in this conference.
There are a few grains of truth in some of those
explanations, and more than a few in others, but I will provide today many grains
of another explanation—that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of
communism were consequences of Soviet contacts and cultural exchanges with the
West, and with the United States in particular, over the years that followed
the death of Stalin in 1953.
When cultural exchange with the Soviets is mentioned, most people
think of Soviet dancers, symphony orchestras, ice shows, and circuses that came
to the West and filled our halls with admiring spectators. But cultural
exchange consisted of much more--exhibitions, motion pictures, and most
important, exchanges of people.
The Iron Curtain was almost impenetrable. Information about
the West was closely controlled. There was no free press and no internet.
Foreign travel for Russians was very limited, and few visitors came to the Soviet Union. Moreover, most of Soviet territory was
closed to travel by foreigners, except for a few large cities. Most Russians
thought they were better off than people in the capitalist West.
However, over a 30-year period (1958-1988), more than 50,000
Soviet citizens came to the United States
under various exchanges of the US-Soviet Cultural Agreement, and tens of thousands
more came to countries in Western Europe. And
those are conservative estimates. They came as scholars and students,
scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party leaders,
musicians and athletes, and they were all cleared by the KGB for foreign travel.
But they came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet
Union would never again be the same. Those exchanges changed the Soviet Union and prepared the way for Gorbachev’s
glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War.
I will speak here about United States exchanges with the
Soviet Union because we had the largest exchanges with the Soviets, but much of
what I say can also apply to exchanges other countries had with the Soviet
Union.
What were our objectives?
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