CHAPTER ONE

Introduction:
The Principal Themes

The relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States, the two great giants of today’s world, dominate international politics as few other such relationships have in the past. In these complex and direct arrangements, military power and resolution, economic strength, political vitality, and diplomatic skill, in the short run at least, are more significant than ideas and those who deal with them. Nevertheless, as all appreciate who understand the role that political philosophy, music, and art alone have played in twentieth-century politics and international affairs, culture and cultural relations between states are of enormous importance, perhaps more significant than ever before.

One of the central themes of this volume is the role dedicated individuals have played, even in this age of great powers and intercontinental crises. Russian studies in the United States were launched by a handful of outstanding scholars who acquired extraordinary knowledge of Russian history and culture and who devoted their lives to increasing their learning and to training others. The qualities of these men, especially their high standards, objectivity, dedication to teaching, and cooperative spirit, have helped shape the entire field and have given it a different character than, say, Chinese studies have acquired.

The original impulse that led to academic exchanges and to the cultural exchanges agreement came from these individuals and from some of those whom they had taught. Their concern with providing opportunities for young scholars to study in the Soviet Union helped shape the peculiar pattern of the first agreement in 1958. Their initiatives were supported by private institutions, such as American universities and foundations, that helped organize other institutions, such as the Inter-University Committee, to continue work they had started.

Similarly, individuals such as Sol Hurok were mainly responsible for the beginning and rapid expansion of the flood of Soviet artistic performers to this country, as Gabriel Reiner launched the flow of tourists to the Soviet Union and Eugene Rabinowitch the Pugwash Conferences of scientists. In short, individuals took the lead: the universities, the public, and the government followed, a pattern common in American history. The role individuals have played throughout this brief history, and that they continue to perform, reflects our society and also helps explain the vigor and the outward thrust of American intellectual power. Likewise, the absence of such bursts of energy, the apathy, and the defensiveness of the Soviet Union reveal both the overwhelming power of the state in society and the cultural stagnation such state power has produced.

In Eastern Europe individual scholars and administrators played the same kind of role in very difficult circumstances by pressing their governments to end their isolation from the West and to accept the challenge and opportunity of academic exchanges with the United States. The work of these scholars in influencing national policy, in negotiating agreements, and in persuading their universities to arrange direct relations with American and other Western universities helps illuminate the differences that distinguish the countries of Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union.

A central theme that pervades this volume is the relentless American interest in increasing knowledge and understanding of Russia and Eastern Europe, which remain even now quite deficient. This manifests both the inquisitiveness concerning the unknown that has distinguished the Western mind since the Renaissance and the pioneering spirit of this country as well. In addition, this interest reflects the freedoms that grace American life and the way in which universities have accepted their responsibility to study every part of the universe. The absence of a powerful parallel Soviet interest in increasing learning and insight concerning the United States, and the restrictions placed upon all Soviet citizens, serve to highlight the differences between the two societies and this second theme.

Even before the United States burst out of its isolation from the rest of the world and long before the cold war, a growing number of men and women, working closely with colleagues in Germany, France, and Great Britain, began to devote their time and energy to research, teaching, and increasing public knowledge of Russia and Eastern Europe. The quality of American learning and public knowledge has therefore risen sharply. Even so, the fields of study that were neglected two decades ago, such as the arts, education, religion, and sociology, remain feeble, and our knowledge of Marxism-Leninism and its effect on the Soviet mind is slight. Moreover, few of our specialists today possess the language facility and the well-grounded knowledge of Russian history and culture that all of the smaller band of founders commanded before World War II. Indeed, a careful analysis reveals that only about seven percent of our more than two thousand specialists on Russia and Eastern Europe have fluent command of at least one language and also have resided there for more than a year.¹ This awareness of our deficiencies and our determination to overcome them again underline this second theme.

It is unfortunate that the conditions under which American scholars have continued their studies in the Soviet Union since 1958 have not been so free, pleasant, or productive as the founders of Russian studies enjoyed. The actions of various Soviet government agencies toward American participants have clearly increased their insight into the Soviet Union, but they represent a colossal Soviet political blunder because the critical view these personal experiences have produced deeply affects American scholarship on every aspect of Soviet life. In fact, these perceptions and resentments add a special sharpness to views that Stalinism, the concentration camps, the repression of the Hungarian revolt, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia had already influenced. Surely the search for insight that this theme summarizes has deepened public awareness of the character of the Soviet system and will long influence national policy.

The changing nature of relations between the government and universities constitutes the third central theme of this study. The transformation of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s and its general contours, in particular the rapid expansion of the number of students and faculty and the growth in quality of graduate education in every part of the country, have helped destroy the mythical ivory tower. The universities’ acceptance of modernization and of new responsibilities has brought with it additional problems. All of these changes have carried educational institutions and educators directly into public service, politics, and international affairs. The academic exchange programs as a minor part of this process have placed the scholar in the front line. They have above all engaged the university and the government in relationships new to both.

Americans have traditionally emphasized the individual and private organizations. We have had a heritage of suspicion of government and a determination to limit its authority, especially over the mind. However, social and economic changes, the need to organize knowledge for public use, and the world crises of this century have turned our government toward the universities and colleges for advice, research, and training. At the same time, our educational institutions have had to turn more to the government for funding. The new relationship has therefore become a critical theme, one that threatens the independence and freedom of the universities. It has led them to establish cooperative enterprises to coordinate their activities and defend their interests. It has also produced a remarkably successful effort by men and women in both universities and government to ensure the independence of the university and of the scholar, even in delicate affairs involving central principles for the university and relations with a rival state. Whether the various private organizations engaged in cultural exchanges can retain their independence over the long run remains a serious question, in particular because the growing emphasis on science, technology, industry, and agriculture in the exchanges involves both governments ever more deeply.

The fourth theme, one that permeates the entire volume, is the contrast between the two societies and governments which these programs illumine. These diversities contribute to the difficulties the two peoples have in understanding each other. They also contribute to the complications that arise in all their relations.

Soviet-American relations constitute the fifth theme, perhaps the major one. In fact academic exchanges serve as a minor paradigm of these relations, as would also a study of Soviet-American trade in recent years. However, because these exchanges involve the presence of a number of highly trained scholars for several months or an academic year in some of the leading educational institutions of the rival state, they provide a particularly clear illumination of the character of the two societies and of the special problems that their relationships raise. One society is of course authoritarian, unfree, centralized, closed, and incredibly inefficient. The other is open, plural, relaxed, free. Academic exchanges underscore these characteristics as well as others central to our difficulties: the conflict in ideology, purpose, and national interest; the asymmetry in level and goal; the wrangles that seem petty but which reflect principles vital to both; and the styles or methods of operation of the two governments and societies. Their role, and the growing part played by contacts of all kinds between the two societies, indicate that cultural affairs broadly defined should no longer remain a neglected aspect of international politics.

The changes that have occurred during the past two decades within the United States and the Soviet Union and in their relationships are also part of this theme. In this country authority has drifted away from the scholar and the university, and that of the government has grown. As the American programs have become well established, those involved in administrating them have relaxed somewhat their standards and emphases upon maturity and stability. In fact, we have all begun to accept some of the indecencies and indignities of the Soviet system as we have become more accustomed to them.

On the other hand, the Soviet government has become more civil and somewhat more relaxed and efficient. The substantive controls remain, but some of the major causes of friction have been softened. The exchanges therefore outline the stage of Soviet-American relations called detente, to which they may have contributed and from which they benefit. However, the survival of an arrangement that the American scholars, universities, and government accepted most reluctantly in 1958 and which all hoped would be temporary demonstrates the relentless character of Soviet control over the movement of men and ideas. Indeed, the Soviet government has shown the same persistence in maintaining and reinforcing this system as it did in the two years of negotiating spent by 492 diplomats at Geneva to produce the document on European security and cooperation.

The final theme includes the paradoxes of the academic exchange programs and the dilemmas they raise for the American people and for both of the governments, thus revealing in another way the nature of international politics in the final third of the twentieth century. The programs have benefited the United States by increasing our knowledge and understanding, educating the Soviet government and some of the Soviet intellectual elite about our society, and contributing in some way to increasing ties and reducing tension. At the same time, they have enabled Soviet scholars to profit from research opportunities and the opportunity to travel. They have also allowed the Soviet Union to obtain important scientific and technical information from the United States, to use patronage as an instrument of control over Soviet intellectuals, to persuade some in the West that peace is at hand, and to acquire respectability and prestige for a despotic and unloved system.

Academic exchanges raise a dilemma for us because formal exchange agreements undermine free trade in ideas, increase the role of our government over intellectual activity, and grant legitimacy to governments that deny the freedoms essential to civilized life. However, they raise an even more acute dilemma for the Soviet government, desperately eager to obtain advantages from cultural exchanges and economic relations but fearful of the infections these relationships bring into their controlled society and into Eastern Europe as well.

The dilemma, which will continue to grow for the Soviet Union, raises the same questions as our total relationship does. Can a society import a skill or a product from another culture without also introducing other alien elements that produced that skill or product and that carry destructive potentialities? Because of the scientific and technical revolutions, in transportation and communications in particular, can any state isolate itself from the rest of the world? Would such a policy of isolation, if it could be implemented, condemn that state to ever more critical scientific-technical and economic-military backwardness? Does communism bear within itself the seeds of its own decay, ripened into flower by necessary contact with the outside world?

These relations raise questions and dilemmas for us as well. In particular, are Soviet changes in recent years substantial, genuine, and permanent, and are they creating a major shift in Soviet policy; or are they slight, tactical, and temporary? Which side benefits the most? Do these relations enable the Soviet Union both to borrow heavily from the West and to lull it into indifference? Do they contribute toward a new spirit and a “new structure of peace”? Can the Soviet Union tolerate peace?

In addition, can our government give respectability and prestige to the Soviet government, and to other repressive governments, by agreements that are inherently restrictive and counter to our essential traditions without undermining our own freedom? Can we allow our government to assume controls over our cultural and economic relationships with another part of the world without subverting that same freedom? On the other hand, do we have a choice? If we do continue, can our government retain the support of the American people, the confidence of our allies, the faith of those who seek freedom, and the respect of the Soviet leaders if it grants free access to Soviet scholars, scientists, and business leaders but does not insist upon equal rights of interpenetration? Can an open, flexible society maintain close relationships with a closed and secret society without being infected by totalitarian practices? Indeed, has this already happened?

In summary, the themes that run through this study of a minor element in the major confrontation of our times help illuminate the nature of the two competing societies, the fundamental issues at stake, and the changing character of international politics in this unstable era. They suggest, too, that the phase of Soviet-American relations labeled detente will probably remain brief, that the struggle between the Soviet Union and the West will be marked by direct disagreement over every aspect of that relationship, and that academic exchanges are a part of the discord concerning free movement of men and ideas that will continue to serve as a paradigm and a symbol of the nature of the two societies and their conflicts.

¹Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia, 1973), 368-70.