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Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: How the West Won (Part II)

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 second of a two part series.  The first part appeared on Thursday, December 3.

Exhibits:  Better to See Once . . .

And now to exhibitions. As an old Russian proverb tells us, it is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.  The Cultural Agreement also provided for month-long showings of exhibitions in the two countries to show the latest developments in various fields. Prepared by the U.S. Information Agency, the American exhibitions were on such subjects as medicine, architecture, hand tools, education, outdoor recreation, technology for the home, and agriculture. Each exhibition had some 20 Russian-speaking American guides who responded to questions from the Soviet visitors. For most Russians who saw the exhibitions, it was their first and only opportunity to talk with an American. 

Despite harassment by the KGB, the exhibitions drew huge crowds with long lines awaiting admittance, and they were seen, on average, by some 250,000 visitors in each city. All together, more than 20 million Soviet citizens saw the 23 U.S. exhibitions over a 32-year period.

Those exhibits brought a whole generation of Soviets into contact with the West. They were one of the best investments we made. And the Soviet authorities would probably agree with that. In every renegotiation of the Cultural Agreement, the Soviets sought to eliminate the exhibitions, or failing in that, to reduce the number of cities in which the exhibitions were shown. In one renegotiation of the cultural agreement in the early 1970s, when the Soviet negotiators held firm on completely deleting the exhibitions, our Ambassador in Moscow, acting on instructions from Washington, informed Foreign Minister Gromyko that without the exhibitions there would be no Cultural Agreement. The Soviets understood that, and the exhibitions continued. 

The Very Visible Performing Arts

The performing arts were one of the most visible of U.S.-Soviet exchanges. In the United States, few of the cognoscenti (those who know) failed to see the Soviet dance groups, symphony orchestras, operas, ice shows, circuses, as well as the many outstanding individual artists who visited the United States each year, often on extensive coast-to-coast tours. American ensembles and soloists that went to the Soviet Union in exchange invariably played to full houses and were likewise appreciated by both the intelligentsia and the general public. For Duke Ellington’s Moscow performances in 1971, tickets were sold on the black market for as much as 80 rubles, when the usual price for a theater ticket was seldom higher than four.

Pianist Emil Gilels was the first Soviet artist to appear in the United States in decades when he performed to rave reviews on a month-long tour in 1955. Violinist David Oistrakh followed with a similarly successful tour that same year, as did renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in 1956.
Under the US-Soviet cultural agreement, performing-arts exchanges became a recurring feature in U.S.-Soviet relations. Soviet favorites in the United States included the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble and the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets whose repeated tours received glowing press reviews as well as handsome fees. Tours across the United States were also an eye opener for Soviet artists. As described by Galina Ulanova, star of the Bolshoi Ballet and one of the greatest Russian ballerinas of modern times, after her first visit to the United States in 1959:

First They Razed the Minarets—

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 Can you believe it? A bunch of foreign fanatics wants to desecrate our traditional skyline with toothpick towers they call minarets from which they’ll yodel I don't know how many times a day, and we’re supposed to sit by, mum as mice, while Switzerland becomes Switzerlost.  Minarets!  Impaling clouds!  Making a Swiss cheese of the heavens.  No way! No new minarets! As for those built already, down with every one of them!   If these terrorists-in-the-making don’t like it, well! we’ll sic the Swiss Guard on them.  A good Swiss pike can repel any raghead—and aren’t those puffy pants cute?

Wouldn't you know it!  The United Nations is in a snit, as if we were discriminating, not merely asserting our right to be Swiss.  So we’ll have to level the playing ground, it seems.  All steeples and bell towers will also have to go, which may be just as well.  Their upkeep, so to speak, is murder.  What’s sauce for the Muslim goose is sauce for the Christian gander, it seems.  Of course, the carillons and bell ringing are done for, too, which may not be so bad.  We’ll be able to sleep in on Sundays.  Anyhow no one needs bells or calls to prayer, for that matter, in the modern world.  We have watches.  Swiss watches.

Speaking of watches, the clock towers are doomed.  The economic levelers say it’s not fair to put timepieces on a pedestal if you can’t erect Swiss Army knife towers and that won’t do, according to the environmentalists.  A tall, sleek, gleaming blade, evidently, would have a genocidal impact on migrating geese and ganders.  Ditto the scissors and the corkscrew.  I’m tempted to use the tweezers to tweak certain noses, but there we are.

Ah, skyscrapers!  With all other towers razed, they make a grand silhouette against the sky.  But the Jungians are whining about the baleful psychological impact of all those Freudian phallic symbols.  Either we en-womb Basel, Geneva, Zürich and every cow-ridden village geodesically or they’ll be googling explosive formulas from Islamist websites.  Once upon a time—sigh!—we’d have dome-sticated fast.  But the U.S. has declared war on tax evaders, kleptocracy is under attack and the banks can’t mint money in the good old Swiss way. So ker-boom!  It’s cheaper to destroy than to build.

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: How the West Won

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 9^th 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?

The Greek "Master" and His Mariza for the Weekend

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Who is Mariza you might well wonder? And why would WorldView feature an animated cartoon about a curmudgeonly Greek fisherman and Mariza, his charmingly expressive but reluctant donkey, anyway?

As we've written earlier, we save our lighter fare for the weekends. This less than five minute cartoon by a talented young animator named Constantine Krystallis who studied animation at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia is just plain good fun. At least that's how it struck me when I saw it earlier this week and I wanted to share it with you. The film has been screened at a number of recent Greek film festivals including New York and also London where it received the Visitor's Choice Award from online viewers.

Mariza is one of 30 short animated films in the finals for its class at the 2009 Nickelodeon International Animation Festival. The contest ends November 30 and there is an audience award where online viewers can vote for the animation of their choice. Mariza, by the way, has already garnered five star ratings on YouTube.

I hope you enjoy Mariza and her "master" as much as I did.

The Soviets, The Sinatra Doctrine and the Beginning of the Cold War’s End

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Twenty years ago on November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.  Just 16 days before, Mikhail Gorbachev’s press spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov referred in passing to the “Sinatra Doctrine” in a press conference during Gorbachev’s state visit to Finland.  Whether or not this was the very first time Frank Sinatra had metamorphosed from an aging pop singer with a raspy voice and a raft of questionable Mafiosi friends into a Soviet national security doctrine, it was certainly the first time the “Sinatra Doctrine” ever came to my attention.

 In any event, the term coined by Gerasimov was not a throw-away.  In essence, it meant that the Soviet leadership had decided to let all countries including its Warsaw Pact allies determine their own form of government.  The reference to the Sinatra Doctrine came from the words in the song (written for Sinatra by Paul Anka) “I did it my way” which had hit American pop charts in early 1969 – twenty years before.  But when we, in Helsinki, first heard Gerasimov use it, it was not at all clear what he meant or its impending ramifications.  

 As it turned out, this nearing-the-end-of-life song was prescient in more ways than Gerasimov or others ever conceived at the time.  As I understand it the Soviet leadership then never dreamed that their former allies would abandon all forms of Communism – Russian style or the softer Euro version – en masse almost immediately after the threat of a Soviet military crackdown evaporated. 

Crooning the Soviet death knell without even knowing it

In fact, the Sinatra Doctrine signaled the death knoll of the Soviet Union at the relatively tender age of 74 - seven years before crooner Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack at 82 in 1998. But even before the Soviet Union expired, Moscow’s decision to stop propping up flailing Communist governments from Warsaw to Sofia altered the national security playing field in Eastern Europe. Whether or not the Sinatra Doctrine’s ripple effect alone caused the downfall of the Soviet Union less than two years later is questionable but the rhetoric certainly took on a catalytic role.

As the haze surrounding the Sinatra Doctrine cleared, it became obvious that the Soviet leaders did not expect its East European dominoes to forgo Communism immediately or in such dramatic fashion as they did over the next few months.   But that’s what happened.  Most just crumbled – like the Berlin Wall.  The bloodiest, however, occurred Christmas time in Bucharest when and where the Ceaucescus did not go quietly. 

A country unraveling

The Sinatra Doctrine was likely fashioned from economic necessity.  The Soviet economy was in tatters from over-militarization, a clumsy and incompetent economic system and the bottoming of the market price for oil and gas – its chief exports.  Then there were the continuing wars in Afghanistan and the Caucasus. Growing labor problems and spiraling inflation were also part of the picture. Simply put the social contract and the country unraveled.

But growing unrest among minorities coupled with the rise of independent, non-Communist nationalist political “fronts” begun by the tiny Baltic Republics also made a major difference.  From the Baltic perspective, the incorporation of the previously independent Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union had always been illegal. The US and many other western countries agreed.  The Baltic independence leaders thought that the Sinatra Doctrine should, therefore, apply to them as well. 

OK for the Poles but not the Lithuanians

Moscow did not see that the Sinatra Doctrine should likewise apply to the Baltics whether because the Russians did not understand the intensity and longevity of Baltic sentiment or whether they were afraid that if the Baltic Republics were allowed to “do it their way” their way would lead out the door followed by a stampede of other republics.  I don’t know.  My guess is probably both.  I never thought the Russians – including Gorbachev - understood the Baltic Republics, the peoples or their aspirations well. But its clear the Kremlin feared the break up of the Soviet Union if the Baltics succeeded in their secession bids.

In any event, the fact that the Sinatra Doctrine applied to neighboring Poland as well as to East Germany but not Lithuania did not sit well there.  On March 11, 1990, the Lithuanian parliament declared outright independence.  January 12-13, 1991 Soviet Ministry of Interior troops stormed the television station in Vilnius and murdered 14 young demonstrators.  They became instant martyrs.  In the short run, the use of force paid off.  It gained the Soviet Union eight more months of an increasingly creaky existence.  But that was it.  In the end, Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” may have helped usher in the Soviet Union’s final curtain call or even bring down the house.  It's hard to can say.        

Looks Like We’ve Given Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For decades now the US has been closing its cultural centers and trying to whip up enthusiasiam for cheap substitutes which surveys have shown to be ineffectual.  The rationale for the cost cutting jag?  That old end of history canard.  Once the Cold War was over, there’d be no need to promote the American brand.  We’d won.  The future was us—the U.S.

The Greeks were so right about the need for self-knowledge and the dangers of hubris.  Our joy and relief when the Berlin Wall came down were so extreme that we thought the U.S. would be on top for ever—well, there were some level headed sorts who considered such thinking to be absurd, but they were pooh-poohed.  We cut back on our public diplomacy programs, and within ten years our public diplomacy agency went poof!  Gone.  In all fairness, I need to add that the Brits were cutting back on British Council expenditures, the French were less generous to their Alliance Française operations and the Germans were closing Goethe Centers, too.  The West, in general, was pretty smug about winning the Cold War and was determined to reap financial dividends.

But history, as it will, moved on.  Islam exploded, Russia refused to play the role of deferential poor provincial cousin, and if the 20st century was the American century, the competition for which country will dominate the 21st century seems to be constrained only by the never properly appreciated or understood efforts of India to deny the honor to the Chinese.  However, the Chinese are looking so good that the Russians, evidently, have decided to follow the Sino one-party-capitalism model to prosperity.

Turkey and Armenia: Settling Differences not Scores

By Patricia H. Kushlis

When all is said and done, it took less than six weeks of tough quiet negotiations under the watchful eyes and steady hands of experienced Swiss mediators for the Turkish and Armenian governments to sit down and hammer out certain differences that had been festering for years between the two contentious neighbors.  Some would argue the antagonisms had been poisoning Black Sea waters for nearly a century.

Will it be smooth sailing from here on in?  No.  Certainly not. This is already evident.   But the agreement between the two protagonists signed on October 10, 2009 in Zurich is an important first step.

 Sometime last year each government must have decided that it was in its own self-interest to try to settle outstanding differences with the other rather than continue the feud ad infinitum ala Hatfields and McCoys to their mutual disadvantage. 

 The accord which the two parties signed at the University of Zurich establishes diplomatic relations between the two countries for the first time in nearly 100 years - with the hope of reopening the border that the Turks closed in 1993 and ending a century of acrimony over a bloody past.

In concrete terms, the agreement confirms the border established in 1921 between Turkey and Russia as the border between today’s Turkey and Armenia and sets up regular political consultations between the foreign ministries of Turkey and Armenia.

The agreement also has the support of the major international parties interested in seeing that a rapprochement works.

In fact, the way the signing ceremony transpired, the event itself seemed almost like a shot-gun wedding with the outside “guarantor” powers present to ensure the ceremony actually took place. Foreign Ministers from the US, Russia, France and the EU were all in attendance.  For the agreement to become legal, however, it still needs the approval of both Turkish and Armenian parliaments.

And despite the noise on the streets from the ultra-nationalists on both sides intent upon derailing it, this minimalist framework is expected – fingers crossed - to obtain the necessary parliamentary approvals.  This is mandatory for it to become legal.

Tit-for-tat diplomacy

Yes, there’s lots more that needs to happen.  At the top of the list are the thorny issues of Armenian troops still stationed in neighboring Azerbaijan near Nagorno-Karabakh – an Armenian enclave in the middle of this Turkic speaking, oil-rich, Muslim Caucasian neighbor and the opening of the border between Turkey and Armenia which the Turks closed in retaliation for the Armenian invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1993.  The resolution of these two contentious issues – the Turks say – is inseparable.  This is known as tit-for-tat diplomacy.

The US, the P+5 and the Iranians: From Prelude to First Movement

By Patricia H. Kushlis

As I watched the ever higher leaps and increasingly complex pirouettes taking place over the past few weeks leading up to the P5+1 (The Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and Germany) talks with the Iranians that began October 1 in Geneva, Switzerland it seemed to me that much of the rhetoric, the last minute “revelations” over a previously secret/not-so secret nuclear site near Qom and the bombast – ending with an Iranian pyrotechnic display of mid-range missile prowess – were, in fact, part of a complex prelude, or overture leading up to the real event: the opening of serious negotiations between the US and Iran for this first time since 1979.

These actions were scene-setters, as it were, with the US and Iran jockeying for position before the serious stuff of which negotiations are made began.

Whether or not September’s 2009 overture was a 21^st century sequel to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 is another question – but in any event – everyone played his or her part to the hilt. This included Iranian “canon volleys” in the finale.

Now, would the US right and left wings and the Israeli "bomb-Iran-now" lobby please sit down, open ears and stuff cotton in mouths – because the Obama administration orchestrated this introduction to what portends to be difficult and complex negotiations - likely complete with starts, stops, sputters and carpet trading - masterfully. The Iranians clearly took note.