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Travel broadens, it is said, but for Soviet travelers who came to the
United States between 1958 and 1988, the experience brought a broadening
of major proportions, changing not only the way they saw their host
country but also, and more importantly, the way they saw their own.
Approximately 50,000 Soviets were guests of the
United States during that period, thanks to a growing array of government-negotiated
exchange programs (an even larger number of Americans visited the Soviet
Union). They came as students and scientists, government officials and
journalists, musicians and athletes. There are some historians who attribute
the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union to America's military
spending or the threat of a Star Wars defense; others point to the pope's
visits to Catholic Poland as a key challenge to Soviet rule. Some western
Sovietologists cite the USSR's unwise intervention in Afghanistan;
and a theory has even been put forward that rock and roll's seduction
of Soviet youth eroded the authority of the Communist Party's
ideologists. There is truth in some of these explanations. But I'd
offer another: The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism
were consequences of Soviet contacts and exchanges with the West—the
United States, in particular—over the 35 years that followed the
death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. These exchanges, moreover, were conducted
at a cost that was minuscule in comparison with U.S. expenditures for
defense and intelligence over the same period.
EXPOSURE to everyday American life was a part of the visits of most
Soviets who came to the United States in those years. Tours of American
cities; visits to homes, schools, and farms; university or small-town
sojourns; and other extracurricular activities were arranged by local
chapters of the National Council for International Visitors, a private
organization founded in 1961, which still mobilizes the services of
volunteers to ensure that foreign visitors see the real America. One
such volunteer has described a visit in the 1970s to a typical Wisconsin
dairy farm by a delegation of high-level Soviet scientists, who were
in Racine to attend a scientific conference: On a free day, the guests
were given a tour of a dairy farm operated by a farmer and his two daughters.
The visitors were astonished by the range of modern equipment, the fact
that the farm grew its own fodder, the extent to which the dairy operation
had been mechanized, the cleanliness of the animals and their stalls,
the very high milk production as compared with Soviet dairy farms, and
the profit made by the family. For Russians, most of whom have a heritage
in agriculture, such a visit exposed the shortcomings of Soviet agriculture
and by extension the Soviet system. "Why do we live as we do?"
was a question many of them ended up asking, according to a veteran
State Department interpreter who has escorted many Russians around the
country:
Their minds were blown by being here. They
could not believe there could be such abundance and comfort. Many of
them would even disparage things here. "Excess, who needs it,"
they would say. However, you could see that they did not believe what
they were saying. When they returned home, in their own minds and in
the privacy of their own trusted little circle of family and friends,
they would tell the truth to themselves or to others.
ACCOUNTS OF Soviets' astonishment on visiting their first American
supermarket are legion, from the first Russian students who came to
the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to the future Russian
president Boris Yeltsin in 1989. The early students often thought they
were being offered the equivalent of a Potemkin village, that the stores
they were shown had been set up especially to impress foreign visitors.
When a Russian delegation came to San Francisco in the early 1960s and
got caught in a traffic jam, one of its members said, "I'll
bet they collected all these cars here to impress us."
Russians thought they were seeing Potemkin villages—the
term derives from Prince Gregory Potemkin, said to have built model
villages to impress Catherine the Great on tours of her overextended
domain—because that is how they prepared to receive important
visitors in their own country: Clean up everything, put undesirable
elements out of sight, show the best, and persuade visitors that what
they were seeing was typical. Such suspicions reached to the highest
levels of the Soviet government. When Soviet president Nikolai Podgorny
visited Austria in 1966 and saw the bounty of Viennese markets, he remarked,
"Look how well they set things up for my visit."
Boris Yeltsin reacted somewhat differently to
a Houston supermarket in 1989. He expressed astonishment at the abundance
and variety of the products he saw, but in his autobiography Against
the Grain he describes the experience as "shattering":
"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans,
cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt
quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially
super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty!
It is terrible to think of it."
After Yeltsin visited that Houston supermarket,
says Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
"he became a reformer." Bill Keller, a former New York
Times Moscow correspondent and now the Times's executive
editor, sees Yeltsin's visit to the United States in even broader perspective:
"The prosperity, the rule of law, the freedom and efficiency [Yeltsin]
witnessed in America, catalyzed his notions about the fraud of communism."
EFFORTS TO give Soviet visitors a slice-of-life view of America could
sometimes backfire, of course, as happened when a Soviet minister of
higher education visited Princeton University in the early 1970s. The
minister was impressed by the buildings and the library, but then his
guide suggested a drop-in visit to a typical dormitory room.
The room was a mess—old peanut butter sandwiches
on the floor, unwashed underwear strewn on chairs and desks, rancid
gym shoes in a corner, and an unkempt student sleeping off a hangover
in his bunk bed. The minister smiled, thinking he had seen the "real"
Princeton beneath its opulent surface. But when he later remarked how
few female students he saw on the campus—women had only recently
been admitted—one of the Americans countered that in the entire
history of Soviet-American student exchanges to that time, his ministry
had nominated not one woman for study in the United States.
Such frictions notwithstanding, Soviets brought
home from their travels to the West a redefinition of the word "normal"—one
that covered the gamut from service with a smile to functioning telephones
to accessible elected representatives. One American tells of a Russian
high up in the Komsomol Soviet youth organization who was silent for
the first two days of a trip they made together across the United States.
Eventually the visitor said, "Now I understand the United States:
It works!"
THE LATE Vladimir Petrov, professor of history and international affairs
at George Washington University, met with many Soviet visitors who passed
through Washington, D.C. The Odessa-born Petrov, with his fluent Russian,
on occasion arranged for high-level visitors to deliver paid lectures.
Through such opportunities, he says, one Soviet scholar "collected
enough to buy a decent apartment in Moscow with his U.S. loot—and
he was a very doctrinaire man, currently advising Zyuganov [the Russian
Communist Party head] on foreign policy issues." Indeed, many
Soviet exchange visitors used their per diems to purchase items for
family and friends or for resale on the black market upon their return
home. Escort interpreters tell of Soviets who arrived in the United
States with suitcases full of food on which they lived for the first
few days in order to save their per diem dollars.
A bluntly honest, as well as irate, reaction
to a visit to the United States comes from Alla Glebova, a Russian journalist:
I would describe Americans as a nation of
sober and even boring professionals. But why do they, without any imagination,
grow flowers in exactly the same places I would choose, while I, the
essence of imagination, ideas, and emotions, live in a garbage bin.
. . . I was very persistent in my desire to understand American life.
Nevertheless, I was not able to find an answer to my main question.
Why do we [Russians], citizens of a great country known for its riches
and brains, live in such deep doodoo [v zadnitse], while they, so simple
and so far from perfect, inhabit such an America?
Among people in Russia who counted, namely, the
intelligentsia, exposure to the West or to Soviets who had been there
created a ripple effect that had an enormous impact on the Soviet Union.
People who had seen the United States had a vision of what a better
society could be, the normal society Russians have always hoped for.
Yale Richmond
Yale Richmond '43 was for 30 years a U.S. foreign service officer,
serving in Germany, Laos, Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union, and Washington,
D.C. His essay is adapted from Cultural Exchange and the Cold War:
Raising the Iron Curtain (2003).
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