CHAPTER TWO

The Origins: American Scholarly Interest in Russia and Soviet Policy Shifts after Stalin

Until the 1880s the American people were generally ignorant of and indifferent to developments in other parts of the world. We lived in a kind of splendid isolation, without even limited external interests, and we concentrated almost entirely upon Western Europe, from which had come most of our population, traditions, culture, and values. The first crack in this isolation came in Asia, where China and Japan attracted commercial and missionary activity. Classical Oriental studies of Sanskrit, the Near East, and China were well established more than a half century before a university offered the first course dealing with Russia.

American interest in Russia began in the mid-1880s, when English translations of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky led to something on the order of a “Russian craze.” These works, as well as those of Chekhov, Turgenev, and other Russian novelists and playwrights, were incorporated into general literature courses before World War I and helped to establish Russian literature as an essential part of the intellectual background of educated Americans. The great writers also helped break the path for other representatives of Russian culture, such as Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky, Diaghilev and Chaliapin, Repin and Stanislavsky, whose influence then made simple our universities’ absorption of the distinguished “Huguenot” exiles from the Soviet Union who enriched our faculties after 1920. In the 1920s alone, outstanding historians such as Michael Karpovich at Harvard University, George Vernadsky and Michael Rostovtzeff at Yale University, and Alexander A. Vasiliev at the University of Wisconsin began to increase our knowledge and understanding of Russia and the Soviet Union.

An important new force began to influence the United States when massive numbers of Jews and Poles reached these shores, beginning in the 1890s. The critical view of the Russian political system that they brought supplemented those of Russian liberals and radicals who began to reach the United States at about the same time, somewhat later than they had affected Western Europe.

The study of Russia by Americans was launched not by universities or by the government but by gifted amateur scholars, diplomats, and journalists. The intellectual qualities of these men, their mastery of Russian and of other languages, their thorough knowledge of the culture and geography from long residence and travel, and the scholarly and literary qualities of their publications have had a profound formative influence on our scholarship and on our view of Russia. The first of these men was George Kennan, whose book Tent Life (1870), describing his travel from San Francisco to northern and eastern Siberia to investigate the problems involved in laying a telegraph line from Alaska to Europe, was published in more than one hundred printings. His two-volume Siberia and the Exile System (1891) and the articles he wrote at that time, brilliant exposes of the Russian political system and of its treatment of political prisoners, had a significant impact precisely at the time our interest was beginning to grow.

Jeremiah Curtin’s contribution was of the same high quality. An extraordinary polyglot, Curtin was in the American ministry in St. Petersburg from 1864 until 1870. This experience and his travels, particularly into Central Asia, enabled him to write fascinating and influential books concerning Turkestan and the Mongols, to translate some of the important novels of Gogol and Zagoskin, and to become the first American specialist on the folklore of Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. His translations of some of the novels of Sienkiewicz also helped to make that great Polish author known throughout the Englishspeaking world.

Curtin’s contemporary, Eugene Schuyler, spent almost ten years in the diplomatic and consular service in Reval, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. He was the first to translate Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons into English, and he also translated Tolstoy’s The Cossacks. However, Schuyler is most important for his volumes on Central Asia and his biography of Peter the Great. Like Curtin, Schuyler was fascinated by Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans, where he served for a number of years and about which he wrote important books, in particular on the Balkan wars.

The formal history of Russian studies in the United States began in 1894 when Archibald Cary Coolidge introduced the first course in Russian history at Harvard University. This was approximately five decades later than in France and Germany and three decades later than in England. Coolidge was appointed assistant professor in 1893 in a Department of History whose sole instructional concerns were ancient, West European, and American history. Fresh from six-year’s study abroad, including a year’s travel throughout Russia and a trip around the world, he received permission in his second year to introduce a course on northern Europe, that is, Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia. The following year he taught a new course on the Eastern Question, or the Balkans and the Near East. In December 1895, in Washington, he presented the first paper on Russia given at an annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In it he urged that we cease neglect of “Northern Europe” and of Russia, “for everything connected with the development and conditions of such a mighty Empire is obviously worth our attention.” Since Harvard was unwilling to increase its attention to Russia, Coolidge discovered and for several years paid the salaries of specialists, such as Leo Wiener, who in 1896 began instruction in Russian language and literature. Coolidge provided financial assistance for graduate students to travel to Russia for research, even if it was not central to their concerns. He attracted into Russian studies and helped train a number of other early leaders, such as Robert H. Lord, who taught at Harvard after 1910; Robert J. Kerner, who played a prominent role at the University of California in Berkeley from 1928 until 1956; Frank Golder, who helped begin the great Russian collection and who was the first director of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; and Philip E. Mosely. In 1927 Coolidge brought to Harvard Michael Karpovich, who has trained more Americans in the field of Russian history than anyone else. His own books and articles, like those of the men he helped train, also served to increase knowledge and understanding of the Slavic world. Finally, through large gifts of Slavic materials to the Harvard Library and his service as Director of the Library from 1910 until his death in 1928, Coolidge helped make Widener Library one of the largest and best storehouses of materials on Russia, Eastern Europe, and other areas of the world.

Charles Crane demonstrated in a different way the significant role individuals played. A wealthy industrialist who sold his firm in 1914 to concentrate on travel and world affairs, Crane became interested in Russia from reading Tolstoy’s novels. He made twenty-five trips to and through Russia between 1890 and 1937. He played the role of an aggressive private foundation. He persuaded President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago to travel with him to Russia in 1900. He then paid the salary of his son, Samuel, at Chicago from 1906 through 1909 and from 1914 through 1917 in an effort to begin instruction there in Russian language and studies. Crane gave funds to the library and financed publication of Russian-language textbooks. In addition, he stimulated and provided funds for lectures at the university by distinguished statesmen. In the 1920s he provided travel fellowships for graduate students at Harvard University and established the Institute of Current World Affairs in New York, which enabled Bruce Hopper in the 1920s and John Hazard in the 1930s to enjoy prolonged periods of study in the Soviet Union.

President Herbert Hoover’s contribution was of a still different character. He became interested in Russia from his numerous trips between 1909 and 1915 as an “industrial doctor” and through his service in directing the American Relief Administration after World War I. During the early 1920s he began the collection that became the great library of the Hoover Institution by employing men such as Golder to purchase historical materials in Russia.

One should note that these men, and others like them—such as Professors Samuel Cross, George R. Noyes, Philip E. Mosely, Geroid T. Robinson, and S. Harrison Thomson, and great journalists such as William Henry Chamberlin—were not of Slavic origin and that the base of Russian and East European studies was not influenced significantly by men and women of Slavic origin or by those who came from Russia or Eastern Europe. Immigrants played a significant role later, but even early immigrants such as Professors Wiener, Alexander Kaun, George Patrick, and Henry Lanz were not among the most important founders. One should note, too, that our government played no role in launching Slavic studies. Perhaps the best indication of its lack of interest in this part of the world is that in 1901 the Library of Congress had only 569 volumes in its collection on Russia and 97 on Poland. The Foreign Service began training specialists on the Soviet Union only in 1928, when Robert F. Kelley established a program in which George Kennan and Charles Bohlen received training in Berlin and Paris, respectively, and then in Riga.

The next generation of founders had the same high qualities. They also enjoyed living freely and traveling widely in Russia and had close relations with Russians of all classes. For example, Geroid T. Robinson, the founder of the Russian Institute at Columbia University, received a Dunning Fellowship and spent thirty months between 1924 and 1927 in Moscow and on travels throughout European Russia. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1937 for more than four months. Hopper, a special protégé of Coolidge, spent 1926-27 in research and travel in Russia and returned in 1930 for an extensive stay. Ernest J. Simmons, on a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard, lived fifteen months in a three-room Moscow basement apartment with several Russians in 1928 and 1929, while Philip E. Mosely enjoyed two years in similar circumstances from 1930 to 1932. Calvin Hoover, supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which made its first research grant to a scholar interested in Russia in 1924, lived from August 1928 until May 1930 in a small apartment with a Moscow family and made six later visits to the Soviet Union.

Russian studies have benefited enormously from the high intellectual quality of their founders, who were attracted by the vastness, the distinctive history, and the exciting culture of Russia. Their careers at a time when study of Russia was not significant or prestigious are themselves tributes to their capabilities, as are their published volumes, still honored and studied. None was, or considered himself, a specialist or expert on a self-contained area of the world. They had a genuine and deep knowledge of the societies in which they were interested that extended far beyond history and politics. Indeed, they possessed the kind of information and insight our universities now try, generally unsuccessfully, to instill through multidisciplinary area programs. These men were also interested in the states and peoples of Eastern Europe, which they saw as part of Europe. Perhaps because their knowledge emphasized economic development, the zadruga, and Kossuth, while ours is based on Katyn, the Berlin blockade, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, they approached Eastern Europe from Western Europe. Today, we often view it from Moscow and as part of a Soviet empire.

The founders of Russian studies started the practice of living and working in Russia and Eastern Europe at a time when knowledge of other languages and cultures was rare among Americans. They were not only outstanding and remarkably objective and unpolitical scholars but dedicated teachers, almost missionary in their activities to expand knowledge and understanding. They sought to educate and inform their fellow Americans by a steady flow of articles in newspapers and journals that were widely read, such as The Nation and Foreign Affairs. Finally, they devoted enormous energy and skill to creating the library collections that are at the base of our studies today. The selfless contributions of Kerner at Berkeley, Mosely at Columbia, and Golder and H. H. Fisher at the Hoover Institution resemble those of Coolidge in their significance.

They also established professional friendships with scholars in Germany, France, and especially Britain. The works of Aylmer Maude, Mackenzie Wallace, Maurice Baring, and Sir Bernard Pares were widely used in the United States. Coolidge, Harper, and Crane were members of the Anglo-Russian Literary Society, founded in January 1893, that had four hundred members, largely scholars and social leaders, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Coolidge, Kerner, and Lord were among the specialists on Russia and Eastern Europe at Versailles in 1919. Their close cooperation with British scholars, such as Robert W. Seton-Watson and Harold W. Temperley, and their general agreement on boundaries and other problems helped strengthen these connections. Harper taught at the University of Liverpool from 1911 through 1913, and he retained especially close English ties throughout his life. When the Slavonic Review was established in London in 1922, Harper, Kerner, and Noyes served as co-editors, making the journal in a sense Anglo-American.

In December 1924, Pares, Seton-Watson, and Temperley participated in a large session devoted entirely to Russian studies at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Richmond, Virginia. Seton-Watson spoke on “The Future of Slavonic Studies” at a luncheon attended by almost 150, and he later lectured at seven universities and five other organizations in the East and Midwest. Pares taught one summer at Berkeley and spent the last eight years of his life in the United States.

Late in the 1930s England served as a kind of staging area for a new flow to the United States of specialists on Russia and Eastern Europe from newly darkened Eastern and Central Europe. Thus, scholars such as Gleb Struve, Father Francis Dvornik, René Wellek, Fritz Epstein, Sergius Yakobson, and Otokar Odložilík earned important academic and library positions here after they had taught or worked in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. The relationship with British scholars was so close that the December 1940 cable from Pares asking the Americans to delay founding their own journal and assume responsibility instead for the Slavonic Review brought quick and unanimous acceptance. In fact, relations between scholars in the Eastern part of the United States and British scholars were probably closer than with scholars from the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. These relations were important for many reasons, in particular because of the foundation they established for close cooperation after the war in research and instruction and in the administration of the exchange programs when they began in the late 1950s.

By the end of the 1930s, about twelve native Americans were engaged in the scholarly study of Russia. They were of high intellectual quality, were thoroughly dedicated to their craft, represented no special interests, remained aloof from the political controversies concerning the Soviet Union, and were unaffected by financial considerations, since neither foundations nor the government had begun to devote funds to this field. All had lived and studied for prolonged periods in the Soviet Union. All were devoted scholarteachers convinced that any prospective academician, particularly those whom they trained, should also live and work in the country of their special interest. However, these were rare and isolated apostles. In 1914 only three universities, Harvard, Columbia, and California in Berkeley, had professorships in Russian language and literature, only five taught the Russian language, and only two, Harvard and Berkeley, offered courses in Russian history. After the war, in 1920, only thirteen institutions offered Russian and even fewer the other Slavic languages. Moreover, efforts in the early 1920s to establish a journal, a research center, and professional organizations of scholars and language teachers all failed.

Even in 1936 only fifty-three institutions offered a total of 320 courses dealing with Russia or Eastern Europe. Thirty-three institutions offered courses in Russian history and eighteen in Russian language. Twenty-nine offered courses on the Balkans and the Near East, and nine on Slavic history and literature. Russian and East European studies were still concentrated at Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley. Only one other institution even had a Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1939. Berkeley, which had the largest, most complete, and best-organized program, produced only twenty Ph.D.’s in all disciplines between 1920 and 1947.

The international crisis that began after 1933 and the threat of war in Europe persuaded many Russian scholars who had earlier emigrated to Eastern and Western Europe, and many East European scholars, to come to the United States, thus enormously enriching our national resources for the study of these areas. At the same time, the tightening of Soviet controls closed the Soviet Union to opportunities for research there. After 1933, few and, after 1936, no American scholars were able to study in the Soviet Union until 1956. This denial of access heavily influenced the system of instruction and research just when it began to expand most rapidly. Thus, the ACLS in 1938 urged establishment of multidisciplinary programs or area studies in part because the Soviet Union denied scholars the opportunity to acquire understanding of Russian history and culture from living there.

In summary, Russian studies was not a thriving or dynamic field before World War II. Scholars in the field did not form an organization until 1938, when Mortimer Graves of the ACLS helped establish the Committee on Slavic Studies, which brought together a number from different disciplines, but almost all in language and literature. There was very little student interest, even in the major centers, despite the fact that the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. Yale University, which had the largest library on Russia in 1906, began Russian instruction in 1910 but abandoned it in the 1920s. The universities were conservative and lacked funds to develop such fields of study. The atmosphere was not conducive to expansion because of ignorance and disinterest. Isolation reigned supreme.

In the twentieth century the role of Russia as a European and then as a world power has no doubt been the principal influence upon popular interest in that country. This began with the surprising Japanese triumph over Russia in 1904-05 and the Revolution of 1905. Russia’s role in World War I naturally increased our attention, which surged with the revolutions in 1917, the civil war, American intervention in that war, and the Bolshevik triumph in full authority by 1921. However, in spite of the extraordinary developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, interest remained low until the crisis in the late 1930s increased our concern with the affairs of other countries. The unfavorable impression created by the Soviet role from 1939 until the invasion in 1941 was quickly overcome by the savage resistance that the Soviet population offered as soon as it understood Nazi policies. This admiration expanded enormously when we became allies, and our bright hopes for the democratization of the Soviet Union, continued cooperation after the war, and establishment of a true United Nations that would promise peace and some kind of stability concentrated popular interest upon the Soviet Union.

The war and our new relationship with the Soviet Union drew hundreds into language and area programs established by the armed services, persuaded many colleges and universities to establish courses for teaching languages of value to the war effort, and helped the universities understand more clearly the level of our ignorance and the nature of their educational responsibilities. In addition, some institutions established special schools for the armed services, of which nineteen were devoted to various Slavic countries.

In September 1941, when Thomas P. Whitney reported to Geroid T. Robinson in the Ethnographic Board of the Smithsonian Institution for work that he learned involved research on the Soviet Union, the government employed less than twenty men and women (including secretaries) to study the Soviet Union. By 1943 Robinson directed a staff of forty specialists in the USSR Division of the Office of Strategic Services. The needs of government departments, in particular the Department of State, the Lend-Lease Office, the Office of Economic Warfare, and the military services, grew so rapidly that the Navy Language School in Boulder in 1944 employed fifty Russian-language instructors, almost as many as had been teaching Russian throughout the United States five years earlier.

At the end of the war, popular interest in things Russian and in Eastern Europe remained vigorous, especially because Stalin demolished our high hopes concerning transformation of the Soviet system and cooperation in creating a peaceful world, and instead intensified controls against all contact with the West, expanded Soviet authority over Eastern Europe, and was intransigent in all relations. However, until after sputnik in 1957, our government’s role in expanding Russian studies was limited largely to improving the resources of the Library of Congress and to providing opportunities for employment.

Expansion of research and instruction on Russia and Eastern Europe was by no means an automatic development, nor was it caused entirely by our new role in world politics or the cold war. The main thrust came from a handful of committed scholar-teachers, interested in expanding knowledge and understanding and aided now by their universities, by learned societies, and by private foundations. Study of other so-called non-Western areas also increased, but not as rapidly, because the leadership was not so dedicated or able. Moreover, other countries as deeply affected by the transformation of world politics did not react as we did.

Many universities disbanded the faculties they had collected during the war for the special defense programs and returned to the traditional curriculum. Others, especially the major institutions that were to serve as the important centers, decided to maintain and expand their resources, creating the foundation on which improvement of research and instruction has been built. In addition, the ACLS and the SSRC, the two organizations that link professional groups of scholars by discipline in the humanities and social sciences, helped to provide national long-term planning, served as an intellectual bank for those interested in all foreign areas, and brought scholars together from competing institutions for a common effort. The ACLS and SSRC Joint Committee on Slavic Studies was enormously influential as a coordinating agency and as a source of ideas and information. The SSRC’s Committee on World Area Research established principles for the study of foreign areas that had enormous national influence. In 1948 it also created an Area Research Fellows Program that in five years distributed $700,000 from the Carnegie Corporation for research and travel and enabled 214 established young scholars to “reconvert” by acquiring knowledge of another part of the world.

The third element in this massive increase was provided by three large philanthropic foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation, which contributed the funds necessary for enlarging faculties, expanding and improving libraries, and providing graduate students with fellowships.

The fourth factor, by far the most important, was the small group of dedicated and far-sighted scholar-teachers. They recognized the need to produce a number of specialists on the Soviet Union for education, government, business, and journalism and to raise the general level of public information. They decided to sacrifice their careers as scholars to meet this new need. This group, which included the three men to whom this book is dedicated, and others, including Clyde Kluckhohn at Harvard and Kerner at Berkeley, provided the crucial leadership, imagination, and energy.

The personal and professional qualities of those who founded Russian and East European studies and who later directed the postwar explosion were as important as the dedicated training they provided, and they helped to make the cooperative university effort of the exchange program both possible and effective. These men worked well within their institutions and cooperated closely in interuniversity ventures and in programs sponsored by the ACLS and the foundations. Because of their good sense, these programs avoided the feuds between traditionalists and modernists, the generational conflicts, and the bitter wrangling and suicidal conflicts that afflicted Chinese studies. Instead, scholars and universities cooperated at every level, so that the Inter-University Committee was a natural and logical development. Another impressive demonstration of university cooperation in this field was the $287,000 contribution that thirty-seven institutions made between 1964 and 1970 to support the Current Digest of the Soviet Press and the Slavic Review, and the agreement of a larger number of institutions to cooperate in maintaining these national tools or instruments after 1970, when all universities faced financial difficulties.

These joint efforts helped transform the character of American higher education with regard to the rest of the world; spread the multidisciplinary approach throughout the university world; trained the scholar-teachers who have increased our knowledge and understanding through teaching and writing; and, of course, created a core of men and women who were eager to live and work within the Soviet Union, but who were denied that opportunity until 1958.

The most significant step was the opening of the Russian Institute at Columbia University in 1946. This Institute, the Russian Research Center at Harvard, and the simultaneous expansion of Russian studies at Berkeley and other institutions were planned during a period of close cooperation between the Soviet and American governments and preceded the cold war. All five members of the Institute’s faculty were prominent research scholars, native Americans who had lived extensively in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. Two, Robinson and Abram Bergson, had worked in the Office of Strategic Services during the war; the third, Mosely, had been a high official in the Department of State; the fourth, Hazard, had served in the Office of Economic Warfare and in Lend-Lease; and the fifth member, Simmons, had created the first Russian area program in 1943 at Cornell University.

The government played no role in this explosion of interest. In fact, Robinson’s work as head of the USSR Division of OSS persuaded him that the United States needed bases for independent study of the Soviet Union outside government. He wrote to Dean Schuyler Wallace at Columbia University on October 11, 1943, urging him to consider establishing a coordinated multidisciplinary program to train scholar-teachers on Russia at the graduate level. His views were shared by Wallace, who was influenced by his work within the university in administering interdisciplinary training programs for the government, in particular the Naval School of Military Government and Administration. Even before the war ended, Wallace began discussions with officials of the Rockefeller Foundation, some of whom had reached similar conclusions from their broad review of international affairs and of likely developments within the academic world. In April 1945 Columbia University established a School of International Affairs, and in 1946, the Russian Institute, with a grant of $250,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation.

This Institute was of central importance because university administrators, scholars, and foundation officers throughout the country adopted the principles on which it was built. Its example not only affected procedures within universities, but it also established principles concerning relations between the universities and the government that significantly influenced the academic exchange programs. Thus, when the cultural exchange agreement with the Soviet Union was signed in 1958 and when federal funds began to pour into Russian and other foreign area programs through the National Defense Education Act later that year, the crucial principles that Robinson had identified were already well established throughout the country.

First, Robinson was persuaded by his experience at Columbia since 1924, as well as by his work in government, that Russian studies constituted a university responsibility, should be incorporated into the academic structure, and should be utterly free from government influence. His knowledge of organized Russian studies in other countries strengthened this conviction. Therefore, even though he was widely admired in Washington and could have readily acquired funds there, he turned his back to government relationships. The university provided all funds for the faculty appointments, the administration, and the library; the Rockefeller Foundation made available the money necessary for fellowships and later for faculty research, travel, and publishing. Robinson also devoted the Institute program almost entirely to Russia, and to just five disciplines, on the ground that resources were scarce and that providing effective instruction on that vast country would itself be a considerable achievement.

Robinson had been a member of the SSRC Committee on World Area Research since its establishment in 1941. This experience and his service during the war convinced him of “the great value of the regional approach” and of “the need for some form of organization which will break down the isolation between disciplines, that will foster some kind of cross-fertilization, and that will not so blatantly violate the unity of knowledge as does most of our present structure.” In the words of Robert B. Hall, chairman of that committee, Robinson saw that “the vertical pillars of knowledge,” the traditional disciplines, leave twilight zones and vales between them. An integrated curriculum would overcome this fragmentation and specialization. In short, Robinson saw that study of another society was like that of a human ailment: a number of disciplines were involved, and they should be closely related in the scholar’s mind and approach because of the nature of the body.

The Institute’s pattern was especially important because it brought together into a coherent group a number of individuals who would have otherwise been scattered, isolated, and powerless in their departments. It provided consistent and effective intellectual and administrative leadership. It created a power base within the university and a compelling magnet for funds from outside the institution. It was so successful in meeting a recognized need that its graduates everywhere served as disciples. Fifteen years later, when the Hayter Commission in the United Kingdom reviewed research and instructional programs on all the so-called non-Western areas, it identified Robinson’s emphasis upon a center that provided “unity, driving force, and direction” as a principal reason for America’s remarkable advance in Russian studies.

The role of philanthropic foundations in the expansion of Russian studies has been most important. Indeed, the original grants to Columbia and Harvard by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation in 1946 and 1947 were crucial, as were the Carnegie grant to the SSRC in 1948 and other smaller Rockefeller awards then to other institutions. Above all, the foundations provided the fellowships that supported graduate students during the required extra years of study of language and of courses outside the major discipline. Finally, the foundations, interested in but not directly involved in education and free to direct funds to new ideas, provided support for venturesome and innovative arrangements that university administrators could not recognize or assist.

The Ford Foundation, the largest and wealthiest of all foundations, played the most important role after 1951, when it established the Board of Overseas Training and Research to help support American graduate students and young scholars studying other parts of the world. Between 1951 and 1969, the Foundation devoted $294,000,000 to expanding international studies in the United States and abroad. Of this, American universities received $155,000,000. The International Training and Research Program (later Division) under this Board from 1952 through 1962 played an absolutely decisive role in the expansion of foreign studies, in particular that of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Above all, it provided graduate fellowships, in some cases for several years, to 430 young men and women interested in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The Russian Institute’s opening announcement in 1946 indicated that study in the Soviet Union would be a major part of the work, that Soviet scholars would be invited to lecture, and that the faculty “planned to continue their pre-war practice” of research there at frequent intervals. However, since the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were closed to Western scholars until 1958, American training was restricted to work in libraries and classrooms here and in Western Europe. This offered some advantages. It prevented a flood of young men and women to the Soviet Union before they were able to make effective use of the opportunity: fewer than one-half of those entering the Harvard and Columbia graduate programs in 1948 had studied Russian, and only one-quarter had had courses of any kind on Russia. Moreover, it forced our scholars to develop special skills in the search for and analysis of published information.

The principal achievement of this postwar expansion was the establishment of a number of graduate centers with significant library collections and research and instructional programs of high quality. The responsibilities accepted originally only by Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley were thus distributed among a large number of institutions throughout the nation, a tribute to the original centers as well as to the administrators and scholars in the “newer” institutions. While in 1939-40, for example, 18 and in 1942 only 20 colleges and universities taught Russian, 128 taught the language in 1946, 211 in 1953, and 600 in 1965. The first Russian area program was established in 1946; by 1951 the United States had five and by 1971, fifty-eight.¹

Between 1946 and 1956, more than 500 received M.A.’s in Russian studies, 235 from Columbia alone and about 100 from Harvard. During the same period, about 50 who had received multidisciplinary area training also achieved doctorates, and about 30 received Ph.D.’s without the benefit of full area training. In all fields of Russian studies between 1950 and 1959, sixty-eight universities awarded approximately 600 doctorates, 275 of them in history. In the next five years, 400 more young men and women obtained doctorates, 130 of them in history. In the 1960s, 610 received Ph.D.’s in Russian and East European history, three-quarters as many as had been produced in all fields on Russia before 1960.

The expansion of East European studies has been just as impressive, with 375 M.A. degrees awarded (276 of these at Columbia) between 1945 and 1965. During the same years, 184 received Ph.D.’s, seventy-five percent of these at Columbia. Seventy-six percent of these young men and women entered teaching.

Membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), founded in 1948, reflects this growth, which was much more rapid than that of groups in other foreign areas or in professional disciplines. In 1960 the AAASS had 633 members; in 1968, 2,200 members, an increase of 310 percent; in 1971, 2,844 members. The organization for language teachers, the American Association of the Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, founded in Indianapolis in 1941, had 350 members in late 1953 and 1,500 in 1966.

In the first decade after 1946, slightly more than one-third of the graduates of the Russian area programs entered government service, while about one-third, including almost all who obtained doctorates, became scholars and teachers. After that period, approximately three-quarters entered the academic profession, and only a few went into government service. Even a suspicious Soviet scholar in 1966 noted that only nineteen percent of our historians in the Russian field had had any military, diplomatic, or other government service.²

The handful of scholars who studied in Russia before and after World War I reflected accurately the low level of American interest in the Soviet Union and in any kind of commercial or intellectual contacts. The new Soviet state began to attract American visitors only in the late 1920s, especially when the first five-year plan began in 1927-28. Soviet success in persuading the Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and Calder, McKee, and Company to assist in industrializing the Soviet Union brought as many as a thousand engineers in 1930. In 1932, six hundred American engineers were working in Soviet automobile and tractor plants alone. In the late 1930s social workers, such as Jane Addams, labor leaders, such as Sidney Hillman and Walter Reuther, progressives, such as Senator Robert M. LaFollette and Rexford Tugwell, and leaders of ethnic minorities, such as W. E. B. DuBois, visited Moscow and Leningrad. From 1929 through 1937, Intourist assisted two thousand and sometimes ten thousand tourists each year, and tourists wrote seventeen of the twenty-one books published about Russia in the United States in 1928 and 1929.

The Rockefeller Foundation in 1927 and again in 1937 sought to aid medical research and instruction in the Soviet Union, as in Bulgaria, China, and other countries, but it encountered such fear and anxiety that it provided only a few fellowships and minor laboratory equipment. W. Horsley Gantt spent five years in the 1920s in the laboratory of Academician I. P. Pavlov, and a few scientists attended national and international conferences in Moscow, but these contacts did not create important relationships. George R. Havens and Norman L. Torrey each used the Diderot and Voltaire archives in Leningrad for two summers with full satisfaction, but their studies of eighteenthcentury French literature from materials Catherine the Great had purchased had little effect on Russian studies or on Soviet-American relations. Stephen P. Duggan, director of the International Institute of Education (IIE), also had little impact when he investigated educational exchanges in 1925, although Duggan through Lunacharsky and Trotsky was later able to arrange some student tours, with Mosely, Maurice Hindus, Henry Shapiro, and Louis Fischer serving as tour leaders.

In 1933, VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries that was established in 1925 to assist prominent foreign visitors, and Intourist together attracted only twenty-five American teachers and students to the Anglo-American Summer Institute at Moscow State University. Duggan, because of his earlier interest and because of the successful IIE seminars he and Edward R. Murrow had arranged in Western Europe, was suddenly invited in the winter of 1934 to help attract American professors, teachers, and students to another such institute. The following summer, more than two hundred Americans from about sixty colleges and universities, plus about thirty Englishmen, therefore enjoyed two weeks of travel and six weeks of courses given by Soviet professors in English on education, literature, art, sociology, and psychology. However, when two hundred American and English students arrived in June 1935, they learned that the summer school had been canceled. Duggan’s inquiries to the Soviet embassies in Washington and London and to VOKS brought no response, and IIE was later denounced as “the center of international propaganda for American reaction.”³

Over the Christmas holiday in 1935 Pares sought to persuade Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to accept an exchange of students between Great Britain and the Soviet Union and to allow Soviet scholars to lecture at the School of Slavonic Studies. This effort failed, as did another in 1937 to establish a dormitory for British and American students. In short, Western efforts for study opportunities and exchange programs before World War II led nowhere.

However, American admiration for the Soviet war effort, desire to help overcome Soviet suspicions, and enthusiasm for working together led to a flood of proposals for close intellectual and scholarly cooperation during the last years of the war and the immediate postwar period. After the Moscow Conference in October 1943, Ambassador Averell Harriman requested Soviet approval from Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov for distribution of two bimonthly magazines on the American war effort and American life, direct contact between Soviet and American news editors to exchange information, publication by the Embassy of a daily news bulletin for diplomatic missions, distribution of films to the American-Soviet Film Committee, and permission to discuss cultural exchanges with VOKS. Molotov’s reply on December 13, 1943, was extremely cold, and it only permitted distribution of the daily issue of the Department of State’s Radio Bulletin to a limited number of Soviet institutions and distribution of Amerika in Russian. In 1944, when the Rockefeller Foundation offered a number of fellowships in agriculture, forestry, public health, and library service, the Soviet government did not even reply. In January 1945, John Parker, a member of the House of Commons, thought Stalin and Moscow State University administrators and faculty had welcomed his proposal for a program like the Rhodes fellowship. But again, the Soviet government took no action.

American interest in expanding cultural relations with all parts of the world exploded after World War II. In the academic field, private institutions and the splendid legislative achievement of the Fulbright program brought thousands of foreign students here and enabled similar numbers of Americans to study and teach abroad. As part of this changed interest, a flood of invitations from the United States reached the Soviet Union. The Department of State in October 1945 invited the Red Army Chorus to tour, and the Department urged the exchange of ballet dancers, theater groups, orchestras, and exhibits of art and handicrafts. Ambassador Harriman on November 13, 1945, told Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky that the United States wanted to exchange students, beginning in 1946-47. There was no response, as there was none to invitations from groups such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. Princeton and other universities offered fellowship and research opportunities for Soviet scholars and students, and Cornell sought Soviet teachers of Russian—to no avail. The Soviet Ministry of Health did not even respond to an August 1946 offer of a complete penicillin plant. Those veterans who sought to use the G.I. Bill for study in the Soviet Union were unable to obtain entry. Scholars in fields as diverse as geology, clinical pathology, Russian art, and diabetes were denied visas. Admittedly, Soviet universities were crowded, and living conditions were Spartan. However, in the academic year 1946-47, more than five hundred students from Eastern Europe, including fifty from tiny Albania, were studying in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov.

However, these initiatives failed miserably because they occurred just as the Soviet government was establishing firm control over Eastern Europe and assisting the Greek communists in the Greek Civil War. Above all, they collided with the Zhdanovshchina, the Soviet drive launched early in 1946 as a “gigantic ideological reconversion operation” to restore cultural purity and eliminate Western influences produced by cooperation with the United States and Great Britain during the war. Thus, Dr. Vasili V. Parin of the Soviet Ministry of Health and the Academy of Medical Sciences, who had been most cooperative with Western colleagues, in December 1946 was dismissed from the Ministry and sentenced to a forced labor camp for six years when he returned from an official trip to this country that had been arranged by the Public Health Service.⁴ Attacks on “servility before the rotten West,” “rootless cosmopolitanism,” “kowtowing to bourgeois culture,” and “survivals of capitalism in the consciousness of the people” helped isolate the Soviet peoples and were accompanied by efforts to glorify Soviet achievements, particularly scientific discoveries. A February 15, 1947, law forbade the marriage of Soviet citizens to foreigners. The State Secrets Act of June 1947, which established severe penalties for divulging information to foreign citizens, was amended in December 1947 to provide that no individual or organization could have relations with foreigners except through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Foreign Trade. In April 1949, massive jamming of foreign radio broadcasts began. In that same year, Metropolitan Nikolai called Pope Pius XII an “agent of American imperialism.”

Consequently, the efforts of the Department of State in 1947 to establish cultural exchanges were doomed. Ambassador Walter B. Smith’s message to Molotov in February 1947, summarizing the proposals for cultural exchanges that various organizations had made, received no reply. In April 1947, when Smith informed Vyshinsky that the United States would welcome some fifty Soviet scholars “to confer with American scholars in the same fields on matters of mutual professional interest” and would appreciate similar invitations, the Soviet response was negative.

The final American endeavor was also a failure. However, both the principles on which this was made and the proposals themselves foreshadow later initiatives that launched the academic exchange programs. First, these proposals were the product of a cooperative effort among a group of dedicated individuals who had long experience in Russian studies; a university that had special interest; agreement of a group of universities to have one institution and one man speak for all; aid from the ACLS in collecting and culling proposals; financial support for travel from the Rockefeller Foundation; and the assistance of the American Embassy, when requested, in trying to open doors in Moscow.

After careful preparation, Columbia’s Russian Institute confidently sent Ernest J. Simmons to present its proposals for academic exchanges. Simmons spent the period from July 15 through August 14, 1947, in Moscow. He was unable even to talk with most of the administrators and scholars whom he wished to invite to the United States, and his reception from those he did meet was cold. The Lenin Library responded that Soviet librarians were too heavily engaged to work on a combined bibliography and that it did not wish to accept the entire Yudin collection of eighty thousand volumes, but only the volumes that Lenin had used. With this failure and a subsequent vicious attack on Simmons in the Soviet press, American initiatives to surmount or bypass the Iron Curtain ended until after the death of Stalin, when the thaw began in the Soviet Union.⁵

Arrangements under which our scholars ultimately were able to study in the Soviet Union came slowly and gradually. The Soviet government after Stalin’s death continued its policy of maintaining positions of strength in dealing with foreign cultures, but its tactics became more subtle, flexible, and skillful as smiles and bouquets for Western leaders replaced the wintry blasts of the Stalin period. Some observers likened the process to opening “the massive groaning gate of a medieval castle.” Others noted that the thaw affected only the visible surface and that the deep permafrost of the system remained solid and unbroken.

The new turn no doubt reflected a number of pressures and ambitions, beginning with the desire of the new rulers to win the favor of the Soviet public, especially the intellectuals. They also wanted increased access to the latest scientific and technical discoveries of the West. They recognized, too, the new situation created by the failure of communist forces in Greece, the Soviet disasters in Berlin and Yugoslavia, the defeat and stalemate in Korea, and the extraordinary recovery of Europe, spurred by the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the move toward West European unity. The policy of the new collective leadership toward slightly increased freedoms within the Soviet Union, for less-tense dealings with the West and for controlled cultural relations, was reflected in the Austrian State Treaty in May 1955, the “visit to Canossa” by Khrushchev and Bulganin when they went to Yugoslavia that June, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany in September.

The beginnings of a more relaxed policy in cultural relations appeared as early as 1953, when Western music began to appear occasionally on Soviet programs and Western art in Soviet exhibits. Allowing Soviet women who had married foreigners during World War II to leave the country represented another step. In late 1953 delegations of high party officials began to travel abroad, followed soon by delegations that included scientists. Then the Soviet government encouraged groups of tourists, particularly from countries that communists ruled. In April 1954 the Comédie française played for three weeks to large and enthusiastic audiences in Moscow and Leningrad, as well as on television. That same month, the Soviet Union joined UNESCO. In February 1955, it joined the Inter-Parliamentary Union. In July of that year it resumed its membership in the World Health Organization.

The Soviet government in September 1954 allowed two Soviet specialists to attend the Second World Congress of Cardiologists in Washington, D.C., and to tour the United States.⁶ This led to invitations to American cardiologists and other doctors, notably Paul Dudley White, to visit the Soviet Union, and in January and February 1955 to reciprocal visits by groups of medical doctors. In fact, following an epidemic of polio in Moscow in 1955, the assistance from the Salk vaccine that the Soviet Union obtained from the exchange of specialists demonstrated most vividly to Soviet leaders the value of increased contacts.

The number of Western news correspondents in Moscow rose in 1955 to twelve, of whom nine were American, two British, and one French. Approximately two thousand Soviet citizens were allowed to travel to Poland or to Finland on holidays, a great step forward from the years in which no Soviet citizen was allowed to visit even another state that communists ruled. In December 1955 the Soviet government allowed the American producers of Porgy and Bess to present this opera in Moscow and in Leningrad, stunning Soviet audiences. It also allowed its most distinguished pianist, Emil Gilels, to perform with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first time an important Soviet artist had played in the United States since the Prokofiev tour in 1938. Here the initiative of Sol Hurok, the celebrated American impresario, was of particular importance because he persuaded the Soviet leaders that Gilels, David Oistrakh, and other artists would have a significant impact on world opinion. Hurok thus released a flood of Soviet entertainers.

This slow but visible change led Americans to renew direct and vigorous efforts to expand relations. At the official level, the Department of State supported invitations to Soviet individuals and groups and encouraged travel to the Soviet Union. President Dwight Eisenhower’s speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1953 on the peaceful uses of atomic energy led to the conference on that subject in Geneva in August 1955, which produced scientific cooperation on a most sensitive subject. At the Geneva Conference of the four Great Powers in July 1955, the United States pressed for “lowering the barriers,” and the Soviet leaders warmly agreed. At the Foreign Ministers’ conference in October, our government made seventeen specific proposals for increasing contacts. However, the Soviet Union vetoed our suggestions that all curbs on the press be removed, that jamming of radio broadcasts end, and that information offices be established.

The turning point in Soviet policy apparently came at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956. This congress launched the attack on Stalin, agreed that peaceful means could be used to achieve socialism and that there were several roads to socialism, and justified increased contacts with the West. Khrushchev himself supported study of “the best of the West,” and the program of the Sixth Five-Year Plan urged “maximum use of the achievements of Soviet and foreign science and technology by design and planning organizations.” The National Security Council on June 29, 1956, concluded that a “vast possibility for peaceful change” existed within the Soviet Union and urged a vigorous policy toward increasing contacts.

While the federal government was acting with imagination and vigor, but not in such a way as to alarm Soviet leaders, growing numbers of individual Americans demonstrated interest in visiting Russia and establishing personal contacts. Only forty-three had visited the Soviet Union in 1953, but the dribble grew to a trickle in 1955 when numbers of churchmen, businessmen, journalists, farmers, congressmen, veterans, and tourists began to visit, creating contacts and discussing their experiences back home.

Gabriel Reiner of the Cosmos Travel Agency in New York in 1955 again demonstrated the role enterprising individuals played by accompanying a chess team to Moscow. There he met the Soviet leaders at the American ambassador’s July 4 reception and obtained improved opportunities for tourists. Two thousand American tourists then visited the Soviet Union in 1956, accompanied by Intourist guides and traveling in tightly restricted areas.

Hopes were raised so absurdly high that the New York Times Moscow correspondent in 1955 suggested that we invite one hundred thousand Soviet young men and women to live in our homes and study in our schools. Chester Bowles in August 1957 suggested a more modest exchange of five hundred students. His friend William Benton proposed that ten thousand Soviet college graduates be invited to live with American families and travel freely around the country, with our government providing the $30,000,000 he thought necessary and with the program reciprocal if Khrushchev agreed. President Eisenhower talked of exchanging ten thousand Soviet and American students. C. Wright Mills urged that the American government adopt a target of fifty thousand students as a suitable goal.

The new “crack in the Kremlin wall” naturally attracted close attention among those engaged in Russian studies. Harvard University as early as 1955 invited the Soviet Academy of Sciences to send a Soviet medievalist to lecture. After the Soviet national bibliography, the Knizhnaia Letopis’, had again become available in the West, American universities persuaded leading Soviet libraries to resume book exchanges. The few scholars who had visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s wished to test what they might see against the knowledge they had acquired from reading and from talks with refugees. However, fearful because of their experience with abrupt shifts in Soviet policy that any new opportunity might be a brief one, and deeply committed to improving the training of their graduate students, they preferred that our young scholars benefit first. One hundred twenty-six young Americans had received fellowships for study of the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe from the Ford Foundation alone between 1953 and 1955; these men and women and their colleagues who had continued their studies under other auspices naturally were eager to visit the country on which their professional concerns concentrated. Individual scholars began to suggest as early as the spring of 1955, before the Geneva summit conference, that the Ford Foundation “give serious thought to the quick establishment of a fund for travel to the Soviet Union for qualified American scholars and teachers.” A group that became the nucleus of the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants then made a formal application early in October that year for such a fund.

As the apparent “thaw” developed within the Soviet Union and as our scholar-teachers reviewed prospects for travel and the financial and other questions such ventures would raise, they recognized the need for cooperation. Their traditional multidisciplinary instruments that also served to mute university rivalries, the ACLS and the SSRC, both declined to administer a program that provided for thirty-day trips, because they considered it a “crash” affair and one devoted to increasing understanding, not research, which was their principal function. In consequence, some other organization was considered essential. Twelve scholars representing ten universities—those most interested then in Russian and East European studies—at a meeting in New York on February 22, 1956, therefore established the Inter-University Committee. They agreed that it should be a temporary organization and that its functions should be transferred whenever the specialists could safely surrender their responsibilities to another qualified organization.

Those who created the Committee came largely from the East. Of the twelve, one, Charles Jelavich, then at the University of California in Berkeley, was from the Far West, and one, Chauncy Harris of the University of Chicago, from the Midwest. The others were all from the East: Frederick C. Barghoorn of Yale; Abram Bergson and Marshall Shulman of Harvard; Cyril E. Black of Princeton; M. Gardner Clark of Cornell; Evsey Domar of Johns Hopkins; William B. Edgerton of Pennsylvania State; Henry L. Roberts and Schuyler C. Wallace of Columbia; and Oscar Halecki of Fordham. Of the twelve, five had received their Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and three from Columbia.

Columbia University, which then had the largest and most important center for Russian studies, contributed those most responsible for creating the Committee. Wallace, the first chairman, was the first Dean of the School of International Affairs at Columbia. The deputy chairman was David Munford, a graduate of the Russian Institute, one of the first SSRC Fellows for study of foreign areas, and after 1953 an executive associate in the Ford Foundation. His work there had acquainted him with the interests of scholars throughout the country and had provided him a national view that few members of the academic community possessed. Thus, in 1953 and 1954 alone, Munford and his colleagues visited almost one hundred campuses.

The second meeting of the Inter-University Committee in March 1956 added seven others to the policy committee. Of these, five were from the East, one from the Midwest, and one from the Northwest. All spoke as individuals but had university support. Informal meetings in the summer and early fall of 1955 and the more formal meetings in 1956 proved extraordinarily important for the history and development of Russian and East European studies and of academic exchanges. One should note that the scholars participating in these meetings were interested solely in opportunities for Americans to study for a short time in the Soviet Union. They also established a program for Eastern Europe and encouraged those especially interested in the Soviet Union to visit Eastern Europe as well. Above all, they had no interest in an exchange program. This became necessary later, when the Soviet government would allow Americans to study in the Soviet Union for prolonged periods only if the two governments concluded an agreement that ensured Soviet scholars opportunities to study in the United States.

The numbers involved in the original program were relatively small. Forty-one scholars traveled to the USSR in 1956, fifty-eight in 1957, and thirty-eight in 1958, at a total cost of somewhat more than $300,000. When the cultural exchanges agreement signed in January 1958 provided opportunities for study throughout the academic year, those grants became less significant. Even so, especially after the Soviet government announced in 1959 that one could travel for up to seventy-five days for only $16.00 per day, the Committee renewed the faculty grants program and made additional awards for 1959 and 1960. Between 1956 and 1960, the Committee thus enabled somewhat more than two hundred scholars from fifteen disciplines and seventy-five academic institutions to visit the Soviet Union as tourists, generally for thirty days. The program was thus far more successful than anyone had dreamed. In fact, in its first year the Committee had expected perhaps 25 or 30 qualified applications; it received 109.

These awards had a significant influence upon the participants, of whom I was one, and upon Russian and East European studies. Without exception, the trips enormously stimulated the interest and ambition of the participants. They also led to increased emphasis upon improving Russian language instruction and upon greater use of Russian sources in both teaching and research. Above all, however, these visits persuaded everyone involved to seek extended opportunities for study.

The changes in Soviet leadership and policy that occurred after the death of Stalin in March 1953 launched the process which led more than four years later to the Soviet decision to negotiate the 1958 cultural exchanges agreement with the United States. Presumably, the artists, medical doctors, and others who met American colleagues on their return provided information and insights to Soviet leaders who were reviewing long-term policies. In 1956 the Soviet government concluded cultural exchange agreements with Belgium and Norway, although neither treaty was implemented until 1960. In October 1957, it signed a similar agreement with France. Finally, in the same month, the Soviet Union launched the first sputnik, so that it entered negotiations in a strong position.

The negotiations in Washington began on October 29, 1957, and ended on January 28, 1958. They were conducted by Ambassador William S. B. Lacy, President Eisenhower’s special assistant for East-West exchanges, and by the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Georgi Zarubin. Ambassador Lacy indicated that our government disliked the concept of a cultural exchange agreement and had never signed one. He described our goals as “removing barriers currently obstructing the free flow of information and ideas” and enabling both peoples to obtain the benefit of “free discussion, criticism, and debate on the vital issues of the day.” He advocated establishment of normal intellectual relations and urged the Soviet Union to end censorship, jamming radio broadcasts, and all controls over access to information and travel. As far as education was concerned, he hoped that individuals and universities themselves would be able to arrange regular periods of study, with their wives and families accompanying the scholars.

Ambassador Zarubin described the purpose of the agreement as “the normalization of Soviet-American relations and the relaxation of international tensions.” He then proposed the exchange of fifty-six delegations, each for short tours, in fields such as metallurgy, mining, automobile manufacture, chemicals, electronics, machine tools, plastics, various forms of energy, cattle-breeding, and horticulture.

The ultimate agreement had fourteen sections, only one of which dealt with higher education. Perhaps the most important section from the Department of State’s point of view then was the first, which provided for an exchange of radio and television broadcasts. Other sections provided for carefully regulated, reciprocal visits of artists, dancers, athletes, scientists, doctors, youth groups, and agricultural specialists. Another section provided for the exchange of large national traveling exhibits. An agreement “in principle” provided for direct air flight between the two countries; this was signed eight years later, in the fall of 1966. Both sides agreed to encourage tourism. In short, neither government achieved its purposes through this agreement, or its later versions. Both compromised in order to obtain a compact and to open prospects for closer contacts and for other larger long-term goals. In the words of then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the agreement was “the beginning of a beginning.”

As far as higher education was concerned, the first paragraph dealt with exchanges in the fields of natural science and engineering, which were not completed. The second provided for exchanges of professors and instructors between Columbia University and Moscow State University and between Harvard University and Leningrad State University. The third section, the most important, provided for the exchange of twenty graduate students and young scholars between the two countries in the academic year 1958-59 and of thirty in 1959-60. The Soviet government sought an exchange of senior scientists between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, but the Department of State, pressed by Russian specialists through the Committee, preferred instead an exchange of junior scholars, with all of the American participants in the first year to be Russian specialists. The organized concern of the American scholars in the Committee with providing their younger colleagues their first opportunity to visit the Soviet Union explains the exchange program for these juniors, rather than one for senior scientists with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. This had a powerful effect upon the history of academic exchanges with the Soviet Union, determined the Committee’s basic policies, and froze it into a relationship with the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education that proved unsatisfactory, but which the Committee could not revise or escape. In short, if the Inter-University Committee had reached the same decision as the Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People’s Republic of China, which in 1973 decided to choose only those who already had a Ph.D., this history would have been greatly different.

After this basic decision had been made, the Soviet government proposed an exchange of ten graduate students each year between Moscow and Leningrad, on one hand, and Columbia and Harvard, on the other. The Department of State succeeded in raising the figures and in obtaining agreement that half of the participants would come from and go to the four universities named, but that the other ten Soviet scholars the first year would be placed in five other universities and that scholars from other American institutions could participate.

As soon as the agreement was signed, the Department of State asked the Committee to become the administrative agent for the exchange of “graduate students and young scholars.” It turned to the Committee because it was so active and because the Department lacked the financial means and administrative resources to direct the various programs that constituted the agreement. Moreover, Department officials recognized that the administrators and members of this league of concerned institutions and of responsible scholars understood many of the problems that might arise, had had experience in the Soviet Union, and had directed a travel program there for three years.

The Committee quickly accepted the invitation. In a series of week-end meetings it established policies, obtained $200,000 from the Ford Foundation, and accepted $10,500 from the Department of State to cover expenses of the Soviet participants for travel in the United States. It thus set out upon a far different role than its founders had envisaged.

¹The most complete survey of the growth of foreign area studies in the United States is Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia, 1973), pp. 490.

²B. P. Kanevskii, “K kharakteristike amerikanskogo ‘sovetovedeniia’” [Concerning the Character of Anmeican “Sovietology”], Voprosy istorii, 5 (May 1966), 185. A 1971 study concluded that between seventy-five and one hundred university-trained specialists on Russia and Eastern Europe worked in Anmeican government agencies (John M. H. Lindbeck, Understanding China. An Assessment of Ammeican Scholarly Resources [New York, 1971], 47, 62, “74).

³Senator Joseph McCarthy later attacked Edward R. Murrow for his role in the 1934 summer school (Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time. The Life of Edward R. Murrow [Boston, 1969], 67).

⁴ Prominent Personalities in the USSR. A Biographic Dictionary... Compiled by the Institute for the Study of the USSR (Metuchen, New Jersey, 1968), 468-69.

⁵After this trip Izvestiia denounced Simmons as a spy. At the same time, the New York World Telegram accused him of being a Soviet agent.

⁶One of the two was Dr. Boris V. Petrovsky, who became Soviet Minister of Health in 1965, played an important part in expanding medical exchanges, and signed the Agreement on Health Cooperation in Moscow in May 1972.