“Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958-1975”
The relationships between the Committee and IREX and the Soviet government inevitably reflect the fact that the American and Soviet governments are rivals, in competition or collision at almost every level of human endeavor in almost every part of the world. In fact, they constitute a deadly conflict between the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson and those of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin over the way a society should organize, or should be organized, and over the character of relations among states. A special sharpness therefore occurs because the United States is a political and social democracy, while the Soviet Union is authoritarian. One country has a pluralistic, open political system and is relaxed and free, while the other is centralized and closed and treats all foreigners as suspect agents of a hostile power. One, at the moment the most advanced country in the world, struggles with the problems of social change in an industrial society and also serves as the unprepared leader of a part of the world in a new and confusing era. The other, still fettered by the Stalinist system, struggles to catch up in economic power and at the same time to extend its influence beyond its frontiers and those of neighboring states that it dominates. In addition, the capabilities of the two countries for exchanges are not equal, which raises problems on both sides because sharing resources and opportunities among unequals is complicated, in trade as in scholarship, even when the two sides share a common culture and have similar goals. Both governments are naturally interested in advancing their own interests and are dynamic in different ways, and they find measuring success in academic exchanges difficult; the benefits are often invisible, and each side perceives its own and the other’s advantages in a different way. Above all, academic exchanges are especially sensitive for the Soviet Union because the free movement of people and ideas strikes at the very heart of the Soviet system.
In these relationships the two countries therefore tend to be critical of each other, rather than affectionate or appreciative, because “freedom and the application of freedom” separate them the most. The exchanges are thus not a cooperative process but a competitive one. Both sides try to take advantage of, not assist, the other. The process of negotiation is therefore especially tense.
Relations with the Soviet government and with its controlled universities involve our institutions in highly organized exchange arrangements with a totalitarian government, which takes advantage of the great discrepancies in power and authority. While Soviet policies and practices have become more relaxed and flexible in the 1970s than they were in the 1960s, each agreement still tends to fix views and patterns on both sides. One of the dangers is that we accept this primitive system of barter as a permanent practice (in 1975 it is already seventeen years old), in violation of the ways in which we live and believe scholars ought to work, and we accommodate ourselves to the oppressive Soviet negotiating position. Thus, in June 1975 IREX urged those junior scholars accepted by the Soviet Union for 1975-76 to swallow their disappointment on assignment and access to archives in the following words:
Needless to say, there are a few cases in which political considerations their have been of primary importance in the Soviet placement of individual American students. In such cases it is important to weigh the imperfections of the placement resulting from such a situation against the overall potential benefits which the student would still be able to obtain from exchange participation, even under what may be unsatisfactory conditions.
The intrusion of political issues illustrates another difficulty facing American universities, which try to isolate research and teaching from politics. For example, in the summer of 1960, during the trial of Captain Francis Powers, the pilot of the U-2 plane shot down over Sverdlovsk, the Soviet government expelled two Americans, three British, and one French exchange participant. The Ministry delayed the placement of American and British participants for that fall semester, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences postponed the visits of Americans in its program. Professor Seymour Slive, who arrived in Leningrad then as a participant in the brief exchange between Harvard and Leningrad State University, never set foot in the university.
Similarly, in 1967-68, when the Soviet government was visibly upset by the “Czechoslovak Spring,” it allowed the exchange with the Atomic Energy Commission to lapse for two years. In January 1971 the Ministry canceled its small exchange program with the University of Toronto and recalled its participants when Toronto maintained the nonacademic appointment of a Soviet physicist who had defected from the Soviet Union in 1966. In 1973 the Ministry delayed discussion of placement for twelve weeks because of the visit of Brezhnev to the United States. Thus, Ministry officials were due in New York on May 12, but IREX and the American Embassy in Moscow received no information concerning their arrival until July 9. Assignments were then settled in mid-August, very late indeed for scholars scheduled to leave that month.
The primacy of our scholars' interests in the program for junior scholars rather than for research and travel for senior scholars who had already lived and studied in the Soviet Union helped shape the framework for the academic exchange program, since Soviet representatives have simply responded to our proposals. This emphasis, the founders' understandable ignorance of Soviet institutions and practices, and the circumstances in which the negotiations took place led to a most unfortunate arrangement for the junior exchange, one that became permanent, as well as to supplementary procedures for senior scholars that have always been complicated.
During the 1957-58 negotiations, both governments were determined that prospects for agreement not be spoiled by premature disclosures. Consequently, the Department of State did not fully inform the universities and private organizations ultimately involved, although they did provide some information. It even proposed an exchange of one hundred junior scholars each year, without asking the universities whether this was feasible. The Committee, for example, assumed that the agreement would engage Moscow and Leningrad State Universities and seven or ten American universities. In fact, the agreement asserted that “both parties will provide for an exchange of students between Moscow and Leningrad Universities, on the one hand, and the United States universities on the other hand.” The records of the Committee’s meetings in the winter of 1957-58 show that its members assumed that the major American and Soviet universities would arrange their own exchange programs and that the Committee would have only two functions, providing a clearing house for information and assisting small institutions whose faculty members had had no experience in the Soviet Union.
However, the Committee learned, too late, that American universities would not be directly involved and that the Committee would deal with the Ministry of Higher and Specialized Secondary Education. It then learned that this Ministry has very little authority in the Soviet government, that it controls all Soviet universities and many other institutions of higher education in a highly centralized system, that these institutions are primarily concerned with teaching, and that the Ministry has no influence with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in whose institutes most Soviet academic research is concentrated. Since the Soviet government has refused to revise the 1958 arrangements, the exchange of junior scholars has always operated under inequitable conditions; Soviet junior scholars enjoy access to our universities, in which most research is undertaken, while American participants are denied access to the institutes that could best serve their research interests.
It is curious that none of the Americans involved in founding the academic exchange program suggested that the Soviet Academy of Sciences be engaged. They learned only as the second year began that the Academy of Sciences should participate if our junior scholars were to have opportunities equivalent to those Soviet junior scholars received in this country. Indeed, only in the fourth year did the Committee appreciate that its proper correspondent was the Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, then often called the Romanovsky Committee. Until December 1967, when the Cultural Affairs Division of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs assumed responsibility, this institution coordinated all Soviet cultural exchange activities and controlled access to all institutions of higher learning, including the universities, the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Medicine, the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and all the institutes of the Ministry of Culture.
The weakness of the Ministry of Higher and Specialized Education may explain some of its inefficiency and casuistry. Thus, on four occasions, after the Ministry had accepted an American for study, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied him a visa. In one of these instances the Ministry explained that the equipment which the American expected to use was being overhauled. Then it informed the Committee that a scholar from the People’s Republic of China was working in the same laboratory. It then proposed assigning the American to another institution. Finally, it abandoned explanations and simply did not answer inquiries. In 1966 the Ministry of Agriculture withdrew three participants from the United States without the knowledge or consent of the Ministry of Higher Education. In the fall of 1967 the Ministry was not even able to provide housing for American participants in the Moscow State University dormitories to which they had always been assigned because they had been commandeered for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the November Revolution. In addition, the Ministry had no influence with the Main Archival Administration, which was under the KGB until 1960 and then was placed under the Council of Ministers.
However, the Committee and IREX were especially concerned because the Ministry has little influence with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Thus, while the institutes of the Academy could arrange that the Ministry nominate their scholars for research in American universities, the Ministry rarely was able, or perhaps did not attempt, to persuade them to accept our junior scholars. When American universities invited senior Soviet scholars who had appointments in an Academy institute as well as in a university to lecture, the Ministry usually rejected the invitation, without informing the scholars, on the grounds that they were doing “fundamental work in the Academy of Sciences” and therefore were not eligible.
After the Ministry refused in 1959 to assign a young American geographer to the Academy institute he requested, the Committee arranged the insertion of an appendix to the November 1959 exchanges agreement declaring that each participant’s study plan “can, where appropriate and possible, include work in research institutes which are outside the system of higher education establishments.” However, its efforts to use this declaration were unavailing.
The Deputy Minister of Higher Education, S. A. Yudachev, in Bloomington, Indiana, in March 1961 agreed that the Ministry “will take measures necessary to expand the number of institutions of higher learning” open to Committee scholars. However, after he had returned to Moscow he forwarded a translation that indicated instead that the Ministry “will consider measures necessary to expand the number of institutions of higher learning.” In subsequent biannual negotiations, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continually rejected American efforts to incorporate in the agreement phrases such as “opening the whole range of scholarly institutions” of both sides to all junior participants. Unfortunately, American universities would not endorse a 1962 proposal to resolve this issue by denying access to our universities to scholars from Academy institutes closed to American junior scholars.
The establishment of IREX in 1968 to administer the ACLS and Ford Foundation programs, and those of the Committee as well in 1969, has strengthened the American bargaining position by creating one instrument to deal with both the Ministry and the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the humanities and social sciences. Persistent pressure and imaginative IREX policies have contributed to some relaxation of restrictive Soviet policies but little substantive progress. Thus, IREX in the 1970s has encouraged and supported colloquia bringing together small groups of American and Soviet social scientists and historians from our universities and from Soviet universities and Academy institutes. It has established direct connections with important institutes, particularly the Institute of the USA. It has financed invitations from Soviet institutes to American university scholars in fields in which the Soviet Union is especially interested, such as Chinese studies, and it has supported visits to our universities and to international conferences by Soviet scholars from both universities and institutes. In 1973 it proposed to the Ministry and the Academy of Sciences the establishment of an American coordinating office in Moscow and of a Soviet coordinating office in New York. If such offices should be established and if our National Academy of Sciences should agree to participate, IREX might succeed in further blurring the distinction between the Ministry and the Academy. In September 1974 IREX and the Soviet Academy established a Commission on the Social Sciences and Humanities to facilitate joint research projects on problems of mutual interest. Its first meeting, in New York in the spring of 1975, planned cooperation by Soviet and American research institutes in the application of quantitative methods to historical studies and symposia on subjects such as editorial principles in editing classics, Soviet and American foreign trade laws, and local government. This agreement enlarges our universities' ties with Soviet Academy institutes, but years will no doubt pass before it produces substantive cooperative work and aids the junior scholar.
For whatever reasons, of the thirty-eight young scholars whom the Ministry accepted for 1973-74, it placed one in the Academy of Sciences, one in the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and one in the Uzbek Academy of Sciences. The following year, when it accepted fifty, it placed two in institutes of the Academy of Sciences, one in an institute of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and three others in other institutes outside its jurisdiction. However, when it accepted fifty-two for 1975-76, it placed only one in an Academy institute, so the problem remains.
Before reviewing the specific difficulties of negotiating with the Ministry of Higher Education, and other Soviet agencies, one must recognize that the Committee inadvertently created problems for Soviet officials. Its character must have baffled them because it was an organization of private and state universities, united for this purpose only and cooperating with the Department of State, but at the same time quite independent of it and on occasion in disagreement with it. An organization utterly unthinkable in the Soviet Union, it also differed from the British Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, public corporations established by the British and German governments to administer their cultural programs abroad.
Our cultural habits, particularly our interest in efficiency, neatness, and dispatch, also created problems. Committee requests for detailed information concerning Soviet applicants, including transcripts, confused them, as did its sending quantities of materials concerning American scholars. In May 1960 the Committee forwarded a hundred pages of materials concerning twenty-eight nominees, in addition to their academic transcripts. One especially long letter in 1963 that complained about a number of Soviet actions was ten pages in length, single-spaced.
The independence of American universities puzzles Soviet officials. They simply cannot comprehend the inability of the Committee and IREX to assign a Soviet scholar to a particular university or to move him freely from one to another. American insistence on university principles, even such an elementary one that a university select Soviet scholars to lecture on its campus rather than have the Ministry appoint them, constantly puzzles them.
Finally, the quality and character of our participants no doubt worries Soviet officials because most are different from others with whom they deal. Only ten percent of the American participants from 1958 through 1975 have been scientists. Most have been particularly interested in history, government, and literature, all quite sensitive subjects in the Soviet Union. They usually speak Russian well and have had excellent training concerning Russian history and culture. These young scholars are eager to work in archives, which Soviet scholars ordinarily do not enter until they are in their mid-thirties. Their purposefulness, individualism, tempo, and casual behavior clearly make Soviet officials uncomfortable, particularly those in organizations such as Intourist, which generally deal only with groups or delegations.
Finally, many Soviet professors who have not had knowledgeable foreign students in their seminars or working under their direction are wary because of the danger that close contact with foreigners may one day create. While some professors “radiated intelligence, modesty, good-will, and humanity” and won the admiration and affection of the American participants, others remained frightened, reluctant to establish close relationships, and devious.
Traditional Soviet negotiating practices constitute the most obvious difficulties. Soviet officials have a clear and narrow definition of Soviet interests. They have little concern for the goals of othe other party or for the long-term relationship. They see every issue as a battle, and they are practical and tough in seeking their goals. They try to take advantage of every strength and opportunity, especially our concern with reducing international tension and our efforts to persuade the Soviet government to relax its policies. In their relations with Americans they rely on our giving full consideration to legitimate Soviet interests and to larger permanent international concerns and on our reluctance to risk ending relationships. Thus, for every step toward a wider and freer exchange, they insist upon a specific Soviet advantage. In short, Soviet officials represent a very intractable government that has a parochial view of the world and that is not generous or understanding in its relations with others.
Claiming virtuous triumphs in negotiations with Soviet authorities is a silly practice and often conceals basic failures. The Committee and IREX have both made errors and suffered defeats. These reflect basically the nature of negotiations, especially with the Soviet Union, as well as our own shortcomings. Thus, the Committee’s founders were well-informed specialists with considerable insight into the Soviet political system and the difficulties involved in negotiations with Soviet officials. They recognized that no community of aims existed, and they made few “fatuous gestures of good will.” At the same time, especially in the early years, Committee officers lacked experience, and were perhaps too anxious to reach agreement. Soviet officials took advantage of this.
The relationship is far more complicated than it appears because our powers for dealing with the Soviet government are so limited. We cannot force it to allow American scholars the freedoms necessary or to treat our scholars as we treat theirs. At the same time, we cannot inflict similar restrictions on Soviet scholars whom our universities have admitted, because this would be a violation of our own values and would in the long run harm us even more than it would the offending country.
The Committee kept the program under continual review and remained prepared to close exchanges whenever Soviet performance was irresponsible or vicious and whenever no sign of progress was visible. The Committee and IREX have sought to be firm and fair in advancing American interests, while at the same time giving full attention to those of the Ministry and seeking to understand and remove Soviet misconceptions. They have sought reasonable equity, not mathematical equality. In dealing with the Soviet government, they have attempted to advance our interests vigorously, while remaining courteous and candid. They have been persistent and forthright in providing information and views and in executing policies, and they have pressed the Soviets to act as responsibly. Appalled by the time and energy required by minor issues that seemed settled but are forever revived, they have sought to move our relationships into productive channels. In fact, the American actions that have most impressed Soviet representatives have almost certainly been the flood of proposals for new kinds of exchanges and new ways of ending squabbles over issues in themselves trivial but important to both sides as matters of principle.
At the same time, the Committee issued warnings and vigorous protests against unjustified actions by the Ministry, the KGB, or the Soviet press. In November 1963, when the Committee learned that the KGB had without justification arrested and detained Professor Frederick Barghoorn of Yale University, it was prepared to recall its scholars from the Soviet Union and to close its universities' campuses to Soviet scholars when Barghoorn was released. It ended the bilateral arrangements between four sets of universities after two years had revealed their futility, and it terminated the exchange of lecturers in 1966 when efforts to make it effective proved unsuccessful. It reduced the number from fifty to forty in the main program in the 1964 negotiations because the Ministry denied admission without persuasive reasons to many nominees and restricted our participants so tightly to Moscow and Leningrad. It gave a moratorium to the summer language teachers' program in 1968 when the Ministry would not confirm its participation by an agreed date. Similarly, when extraordinary Soviet tardiness in responding to nominations of senior scholars reduced American nominations over a three-year period from sixty-nine to forty-four to thirty-seven, IREX indicated it would terminate that exchange unless the Ministry was more, efficient. The Soviets responded by “reasonably prompt acceptance of all of our 1974-1975 nominees.” In January 1975, when the Ministry announced that American married couples would have to pay an additional thirty rubles a month for their rooms, IREX declared it would deduct these costs from those available for Soviet participants in the United States, and the Ministry retreated.
The Ministry’s refusal to grant admission to 1 of every 7 junior nominees and 1 of every 9 senior nominees of the Committee and IREX from 1958 through 1974 has been a fundamental issue because it involves the central purpose of the program. The 1958 agreement noted that each side was responsible for choosing its participants. The Department of State apparently believed that nomination would guarantee a candidate’s admission to the other country. However, from 1958 through 1969 the Soviet government denied admission to 55 of the 390 Americans nominated in the program for junior scholars, an average of 5 each year for the entire period and of 8 for the years after 1965. The number of rejections after 1969, when IREX assumed responsibility, averaged 4 per year until 1974-75, when the Ministry for the first time since 1962 accepted all junior nominees.
The Soviets have rejected nominations from other American organizations in the same fashion. Thus, between 1961 and 1975, the Soviet Academy of Sciences rejected twenty-four ACLS nominations, while the ACLS rejected only two Academy nominations. The Soviet Academy rejected three of fifteen ACLS nominations in 1969-70 and six of nineteen in 1972-73. It rejected one ACLS nominee, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied a visa to another of the eight nominees in 1974-75, when two senior IREX nominees were also rejected. Some of the Soviet actions were especially annoying because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without explanation simply denied visas to scholars whom the Ministry of Higher Education or the Academy had accepted.
About as many Soviet nominees have been denied the opportunity to study in the United States, but for different reasons and in different ways. From 1958 to 1969 American universities were unable to accept 39 Soviet nominees, almost all because none was capable of directing the proposed research projects, such as construction of railroad engines. However, most denials were the responsibility of the Department of State, which, under the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, as amended, has to recommend a waiver of “inadmissability” before it can authorize a visa enabling a Soviet citizen to enter this country. From 1958 to 1969 the Department of State denied admission to 47 scholars of the 457 nominated. Since 1969 the Department has denied admission to 17 of the approximately 250 nominated, all because they wished to study in scientific fields closely associated with national security.
The Department of State consults with the Department of Defense before it concludes that granting a visa is in the national interest. On occasion the Department of State has then rejected Soviet scholars in fields of study critical to national security or in which the United States had achieved significant advances of a breakthrough nature beyond those of Soviet science and technology. In many of these cases even an American scholar interested would have needed a security clearance. The Department has also denied admission when the Soviet government sought to use the academic exchange to obtain entrance in fields in which it was failing to honor obligations under other agreements. For example, the Soviet government allowed the nuclear energy exchange agreement to lapse and then tried to place a scholar in nuclear energy through the academic exchange program. Similarly, the Department rejected a Soviet participant interested in metallurgy, in which the exchanges agreement provided for an exchange of delegations that the Soviets were delaying and preventing. The Committee and the universities reviewed each of the Department’s actions carefully to make certain the decisions were sound and on occasion persuaded the Department to reverse its position. The Soviet government never protested these decisions, presumably because it understood them fully.
The reasons for which the Soviet government has denied admission to American scholars clearly illuminate the differences between the two systems, their levels of development, and their definitions of “security” and “sensitivity.” Basically, the Soviet government has denied admission to nominees who wished to study subjects it considered politically sensitive: modern history and politics; Russian and Soviet foreign policy and Russia’s relations with other states, even in the nineteenth century; the Soviet economy; various religious sects, even long before 1917; and relations between Russians and Poles or between Russians and any national minority. For example, no American has been admitted to study the organization and operation of the Soviet central government, the Soviet Communist Party, or relations between the government and the Party. The Ministry denied an application to study the international communist youth organization from 1919 to 1943 because it was a “non-state organization.” It rejected the various applications to study Russian foreign policy in the nineteenth century because these involved “relations with other countries.” In 1964 it informed an American who wished to study “differential land rent and related questions of price formation in the collective farm sector” that he could not study in the Soviet Union and instead “should read carefully the speeches of Premier Khrushchev in order to understand differential rent.” Between 1958 and 1969 five of the twelve Americans who wished to study the Soviet economy were denied admission; this particularly annoyed the Committee, which placed all twenty-six Soviet economists interested in similar subjects in the United States.
On occasion Soviet rejections simply baffled the Committee. For example, the Ministry in 1964 denied admission to a scholar to study the work of Victor Shklovsky on the grounds that Shklovsky was a “second-rate writer” who did not deserve scholarly attention and that “the American side did not have enough time to spare in the exchange program to devote to study of second-rate topics.” On another occasion the Ministry refused to accept a nominee who wished to study Russian political theory in the sixteenth century because it was a religious subject and therefore unworthy of study. It rejected an application to study the Revolution of 1905 because so much research had been published that nothing new could be discovered.
The Committee and IREX considered these rejections of crucial significance because they violated the foundation on which the exchange program is based as well as the principles essential for research. Moreover, we placed Soviet scholars in every field of research, including those that dealt with our most painful social problems, in those institutions best qualified to serve them. Indeed, the Committee and IREX have placed every Soviet scholar nominated in the social sciences and humanities.
American institutions and scholars also protest because this Soviet practice exerts an important influence upon the direction of American scholarship and, in the long run therefore, on the way in which we look at the Soviet Union. It also helps to create an imbalance among the fields of study within our universities that may become permanent, since scholar-teachers tend to reproduce themselves. American research concerning the Soviet Communist Party, foreign policy, economic development, and political dissent will no doubt remain of high quality. On the other hand, those who will publish and teach about these important subjects would surely have acquired greater knowledge and insight if they had been allowed to study in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the number of scholars engaged in research on these central subjects would clearly be greater if opportunity for research in the Soviet Union were assured.
Thus, in the first seven years of the junior exchange program the Committee sent eighty-three historians to study those aspects of Russian history acceptable to the Soviet government (the Ministry sent only seventeen in American history), but it sent none to study issues that were recent or sensitive. Similarly, it nominated a number to study local government, but none (even now) to analyze Soviet foreign policy or relations between the Party and the government. Because of known Soviet restrictions, no American has even applied for research on the lives of Soviet leaders; the purges; critical Soviet political and social problems, such as anti-Semitism; the place of religion in Soviet life; or agricultural or industrial productivity. In 1971-72 none of the thirty-five IREX participants was in political science or government, and only four had projects that dealt with the twentieth century. In 1972-73 only thirteen of the thirty-nine were engaged in projects involving the twentieth century, while nine were working in periods before the nineteenth century. In 1973-74 twenty-four of the thirty-eight accepted were interested in the history of Russia before 1917.
Committee scholars and university representatives discussed these rejections and their effects frequently, and IREX officials also continually review the issues. The problems they pose and the response of the Committee, IREX, and our universities constitute a splendid sample of the difficulties involved in negotiating with the Russians and of the limited number of alternative actions open.
Each year the universities at the Committee’s annual meeting considered these rejections and other abuses before deciding to continue, while pressing hard for substantial improvement. They did not even consider the adoption of reciprocal practices, such as denying Soviet scholars the right to study recent American history. They also agreed that they should not penalize Soviet scholars in this country for actions their government took.
A third option, which the Committee and the Ministry used in the first two years, was providing alternate nominees for those who might be denied admission for one reason or another. The Committee in the 1960s allowed the Ministry to nominate alternates by receiving and seeking to assign a larger number of Soviet nominees than the number the agreement then provided. IREX followed this policy in 1974. In 1961, for example, the Ministry nominated sixty-three candidates, and in 1962 fifty-eight, for fifty places. The Committee sought to place all these nominees, and it did place fortyseven for 1961-62 and forty-six for 1962-63. In addition, the Committee, after long consideration, proposed in 1965 that each side nominate five or ten more candidates than the agreement provided. Curiously, the Ministry rejected the proposal.
American scholars are of course accustomed to selecting alternates for fellowships and positions. However, the Committee and IREX were extremely reluctant to accept a system that included alternates because they and the universities are determined to retain control of selection. Giving the Ministry a list of fifty names for forty places in effect would give it a role in selecting our candidates, a power neither the Committee nor IREX would grant the Department of State. Second, the Committee was convinced that the Ministry would continue to reject those interested in Soviet affairs and would use the system to eliminate others who would be bothersome or those who the Ministry thought might benefit the most.
In short, the Committee and IREX have responded by insisting on reasonable equity of opportunity, pressing for admission for all qualified scholars, and informing the Ministry we would place approximately the same number of Soviet scholars as the number of Americans the Ministry was willing to admit “on a rational placement basis.” Thus, in June 1961, after the Ministry had denied admission to an American nuclear physicist, it nominated two Soviet nuclear physicists. The Committee, with the approval of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of State, indicated it would accept the two Soviet nominees if the Ministry would accept an American the following year. The Ministry did not respond, so the Committee denied admission to the two Soviet scholars. The following year the Ministry placed all of our nominees.
In June 1963, when the Ministry denied admission to three nominees for clearly untenable reasons, the Committee refused to admit three Soviet nominees in similar fields unless the Ministry changed its position. The Ministry stood firm, so none of the six was able to enjoy a year of study in the other country. In 1965 the Committee offered to admit a Soviet specialist in mathematical economics if the Ministry would accept an American nominated in the same field. The Ministry accepted this proposal but rejected a similar one in 1969. In 1966, when the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late August denied a visa to an American whom the Ministry had accepted, the Committee denied admission to a Soviet scholar already accepted in a field that would have required large expenses for research materials. It adhered to this position, even after the Ministry withdrew another Soviet nominee and sought to replace him with the denied Soviet scholar.
In its response to Soviet rejections of American nominees, and to Soviet policies that hampered our participants in any way, IREX since 1969 has followed basically the same negotiating practices as did the Committee. However, it has been less firm in its defense of principles and rights than was the Committee and has used more “la douce parole” of Philip the Fair in its negotiations with Soviet officials and in its other actions. Thus, the 1969 report referred to the invasion of Czechoslovakia as “distressing developments” and “the difficulties of 1968.” Annoyed in 1971-72 by Soviet rejection of five junior and two senior nominees, in particular for the first time of some “whose writings on the Soviet Union have been judged by the Soviet authorities to contain unacceptable interpretations,” IREX rejected a Soviet nominee, only to reverse the decision at the request of American scholars. In the spring of 1975, when the Soviet government denied a visa to a scholar whom the Academy of Sciences had accepted, it took the same two steps and finally became more firm, until the Soviet government reversed its position. Thus, it first declined to request a visa for a Soviet scholar on the same program, only to admit him upon the urgent request of his Soviet institution. It then chose to decline to receive a Soviet scholar whose behavior on a previous visit had destroyed his prospective hosts' willingness to receive him again. The Soviet Academy then rejected two more senior American scholars, leading IREX to suspend that program. Finally, the Soviet Academy accepted the two Americans and the program was reinstated.
In 1973-74 the Soviet government quite dramatically began to relax its restrictions against admitting Americans interested in some subjects it previously considered most sensitive. Thus, the Ministry, while rejecting a sociologist who wanted to study the impact of new workers from the countryside and a specialist in Lithuanian folklore, accepted subjects similar to those it had systematically rejected in the past: the province of Erevan under Persian and Russian administration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Social Revolutionaries from 1901 to 1917, the role of the police before World War I, and several subjects dealing with Soviet life, hitherto sacrosanct—the impact of sociological research upon urban planning, ideology and technological innovation, the attitudes of Soviet and American youth toward work, and Soviet and American day care centers. For 1974-75 the Ministry accepted five specialists in Soviet literature, a historian interested in change in Soviet Central Asia, eight political scientists, three sociologists, and even two economists. Many of these young scholars failed to obtain the materials they requested, and the economists in particular were restricted, but they were at least admitted. For 1975-76 it placed historians and political scientists interested in subjects such as nationalism in Galicia, which previously would have received no consideration. However, it did not grant access to essential archival materials. Moreover, a young American scholar on his arrival in August 1975 learned that he had been assigned to Leningrad, not Lvov, the central city in Galicia for his research in which the Ministry had assured IREX he would be placed.
Another series of problems involved restrictions placed on American participants admitted to the Soviet Union, which disturbed many so deeply that they urged ferocious retaliation upon Soviet scholars here. The continual dissatisfactions and frustrations these exercised deeply affected the view of everyone who dealt with Soviet officials and therefore influenced all policies.
Most participants were not especially bothered by the living conditions, which are those that Soviet citizens experience. Thus, the quality of the food, the size of dormitory rooms, the rare availability of hot water in Leningrad and other cities except Moscow, the long waits for elevators and for all services, the hazards and annoyances raised by the KGB, and all of the other discomforts associated with Soviet life were not significantly disturbing. In fact, most reveled in overcoming the challenges and have described the semester or year in the Soviet Union as an immensely valuable and stimulating period. Many returned full of admiration and respect for the Soviet scholars with whom they had worked. Some lived and worked in Moscow and Leningrad as they would have in an American institution, and many were untouched by police activities.
However, other handicaps and restrictions bothered almost all. The first involved the status the Ministry gives American junior participants. The Committee in the winter of 1957-58 had decided to send young scholars at the postdoctoral level, but the exchanges agreement restricted the program in the first year to graduate students, which produced permanent unfortunate consequences. In general, rank and status are more important in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Practices once established there also become fixed, because Soviet officials are reluctant to change or even to challenge accepted principles or procedures. Moreover, the Ministry of Higher Education and Soviet universities are principally interested in instruction rather than in research, and they are more accustomed to deal with students and graduate students than with research scholars. Consequently, since all American participants during the first year were graduate students, as were most in the second year, the Ministry has always defined each of our junior participants as aspirant stazhër, which can probably be translated best as special graduate student. The junior participants have thus been subject to the direction and controls customary for foreign graduate students, even if they were established young scholars with impressive publications. In this status, each has had to submit a detailed study plan to the Soviet professor to whom he had been assigned, although his principal responsibility remained to the professor in the United States directing his thesis. Above all, he has had to obtain the Soviet professor’s support to gain access to libraries and archives and permission to travel, even for study-related purposes. This has often been difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain, even for the most innocent topics. Most Soviet professors are reluctant to recommend or support access to archives, which were under the administration of the Ministry of the Interior from 1939 until 1960 and which, in their minds, remain a province of the KGB. The Ministry of the Interior also controls travel.1
The participants' status and the genuine shortage of housing in the Soviet Union contributed to another strain, the Ministry’s reluctance in the first decade to allow American wives to accompany their husbands.2 The Committee insisted spouses be encouraged to accompany their mates so that they would share their professional experiences. Moreover, the Ministry’s policy and its refusal to allow children on the program for young scholars until 1972 significantly reduced the number of Americans interested, because a high percentage of our graduate students are married and have families. The Committee pressed constantly on this, always assuring the Ministry that it would pay all costs and even that it might pay the expenses of Soviet wives the first year. It later invited the Ministry to send both wives and children (almost no Soviet participants have been women). Beginning in January 1967, it urged that the Ministry allow four married couples to bring their children.3
At first the Ministry refused to allow any wives, but it finally agreed in the early fall of 1958 to permit four of the twelve wives to accompany their husbands, only to reverse its position on two. It then raised obstacles for those wives who sought visas for a month in the spring. For the second academic year the Ministry agreed that it would accept up to ten wives. In 1961 the Committee and the Ministry reached an informal agreement that the Ministry would allow approximately ten wives each year to accompany their husbands, but in 1964 the Ministry sought to restrict each wife to only four months. Moreover, Leningrad State University would not accept married couples until 1964-65, and it resisted even later accepting a participant and his wife. However, Soviet acceptance of spouses was complete by the end of the first decade of this program.
Persuading the Ministry to admit children was also a long struggle, but the Soviet government finally yielded in 1972-73 when it placed in Moscow or Leningrad one couple with one child, three couples with two children, and one couple with three children. The Ministry in addition accepted a couple with two children who withdrew. It rejected a family with four children. For 1973-74 it accepted sixteen wives of participants and three husbands of participants. It placed two couples with two children each in Moscow (each family in one room), and one with one child in Tashkent. In 1974-75 it accepted twelve husbands with wives, two wives with husbands, four husbands with their wives and children, and three wives with their husbands and children. The 1975-76 record reveals even more clearly that the old restrictions have been destroyed: participants include sixteen husbands with wives, one wife with her husband, four wives with seven children, and a total of eighteen children.
No Soviet spouses have accompanied their wives or husbands on Committee or IREX programs. However, in December 1968 a Soviet participant in the exchange between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the National Academy brought his wife for a few months. Seven high energy physicists were accompanied by their wives when they arrived at the National Accelerator in January 1972 for several months of experiments arranged by the Atomic Energy Commission and the State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy. By the fall of 1975, wives of three senior Soviet participants in the exchange between the ACLS and the Soviet Academy of Sciences had accompanied their husbands for the entire period of their stays. In 1972-73, five; in 1973-74, seventeen; and in 1974-75, thirty-two Soviet wives paid visits of one or two months to their husbands on the junior scholar exchange. In short, Soviet policy on this important human aspect of the academic exchange program may be mellowing in a most significant way.
The Ministry’s decision to assign almost all our participants to just two universities, those in Moscow and Leningrad, has constituted another annoying restriction, especially because the Committee and IREX have assigned Soviet participants to universities throughout the United States. In the first five years the Ministry placed only one American outside of Moscow and Leningrad. Two hundred ninety-five of our first three hundred participants were assigned to those two cities. Between 1958 and 1969 the Committee placed Soviet participants in sixty-two institutions in thirty-four cities, while the Ministry placed all but eleven Americans in Moscow and Leningrad. In 1974-75 IREX placed Soviet participants in thirty universities, while ours were concentrated in five Soviet universities.4
The Committee was naturally interested in the organization and operation of that part of the Ministry responsible for placing American participants in Soviet institutions. So far as the Committee could learn, the Ministry controls all information, assigns the American participants, and also defines the system for choosing Soviet participants. In the first few years the Ministry simply assigned the Committee’s nominees to Moscow State and Leningrad State Universities. It now distributes a few to other cities. The Ministry ordinarily completes these placements without discussion; it simply informs university officials, sometimes several months after it has reached its decision and has informed the Committee or IREX. The defects of this system, both for American participants and for the Soviet institutions and their faculty, are obvious. Thus, in May 1969 the Ministry was unable to name the advisors of American participants for the next academic year, even after it had assigned them all to Moscow and Leningrad State Universities. Some participants learned even in 1975 that the Ministry had not informed their advisors of their coming. An eminent Soviet scientist who has directed the work of several junior scholars told an American colleague in 1975 that he had never been asked or informed of a participant’s coming to work with him; the American simply appeared at the opening of the semester.
Substantial reasons did and do exist for assigning most American participants to Moscow and Leningrad. The original agreement identified Moscow State University and Leningrad State University as the Soviet institutions to which American participants would be assigned. Most Americans have requested Moscow and Leningrad. In fact, our fifty nominees in 1961-62 requested only Moscow and Leningrad. Even in 1973-74 more than forty of our fifty nominees proposed Moscow or Leningrad, and forty-six of fifty requested one of these two cities in 1974-75.
These two universities presumably have the most distinguished Soviet faculties. Moscow and Leningrad contain the most important libraries and archives. In 1962, only four universities, those in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Tashkent, had foreign student offices and experience in dealing with foreign students. Most other universities have primitive dormitory facilities, and all are overcrowded. Indeed, the first participant assigned to Kiev was placed five miles from the campus, shared a room with five other men in a building that had one telephone for 460 students, and deeply resented the Committee’s success in getting him to Kiev, which he had requested.
Moreover, some Soviet universities are in areas closed to all foreigners. While the Committee and IREX have placed Soviet participants in universities located in areas closed to Soviet diplomats, the Soviet government has resolutely denied our participants access or even travel to closed areas in the Soviet Union. Finally, the Soviet police would naturally prefer to have a group of educated Americans who know Russian concentrated in the two cities where they have the most experience in observing foreign visitors.
At the same time, other universities have eminent scholars, who are in some cases better known to foreigners than those at Moscow and Leningrad. Moreover, Kiev naturally is a better base for the study of Ukrainian literature, Tbilisi for studying Georgian history, and Tashkent for studying Uzbek than either Moscow or Leningrad. Finally, the majority of our participants are preparing to be Soviet specialists. They know that Moscow and Leningrad do not constitute the Soviet Union, and some seek to live in other areas of that vast and varied country in order to increase their understanding of Soviet culture and Soviet society.
However, the Ministry remains most reluctant to allow Americans to study in institutions outside of the two principal cities. In fact, it has been slow to permit Committee and IREX representatives to measure the quality of other university faculties and facilities. Thus, in spite of sustained efforts, no one from the Committee or IREX was ever able to visit Saratov, which is known to have a strong faculty in Russian literature. The Ministry granted Committee representatives permission to visit the university in the academic city near Novosibirsk after five years of requests, and even then it gave less than twenty-four hours notice. Americans interested in studying in cities such as Irkutsk and Alma Ata have been denied those opportunities. Similarly, our Public Health Service administrators have noted that the groups of American doctors traveling to the Soviet Union have generally visited the same institutions in just a few cities. By 1964 twenty-eight delegations had visited the Institute of Experimental Pathology at Sukhumi.
Increasing pressure finally led to placement of an American interested in Ukrainian literature at Kiev in 1961 and a mathematician in the same institution in 1965. Erevan was opened to a scholar interested in Armenian history in 1965, when two other Americans studied in Kiev. In 1967 the Ministry placed a specialist in Lithuanian history in Vilna and a physicist in Novosibirsk, the first year the Soviet Academy of Sciences placed a National Academy of Sciences nominee there. In 1968 a student of Uzbek was placed at Tashkent, and in 1969 the Ministry on its own initiative placed two Americans at Rostov and three at Voronezh, both particularly suitable because of the nominees' research interests. In 1973-74 the Ministry placed only twenty-nine of the thirtyseven IREX nominees in Moscow and Leningrad State Universities. In 1974-75 it placed individuals in Erevan, Kiev, Kharkov, Tashkent, Tbilisi, and Voronezh. In 1975-76 it assured placement of three in Tashkent, Lvov, and Dushanbe, only to revise the promise on Lvov when fall came. However, much remains to be done to achieve the access to institutions throughout the Soviet Union that Soviet scholars have always received in the United States. Thus, in 1972-73 the thirty-eight Soviet nominees came from nineteen different institutions. The Ministry had placed Americans in only nine of the nineteen and had denied access to many of the others.
Everyone in the exchange program has learned the truth of the observation Adam Olearius made in 1634: “Foreigners are allowed to travel in Russia only with extreme difficulties and are carefully watched during these travels. Because of this reticence and general suspicion, foreigners in Moscow can see only each other.” American participants have learned that it is easier to obtain permission to go abroad for a holiday than to travel from Moscow to Leningrad, even though they are entitled to an annual komandirovka, that is, one study-related trip, with expenses paid. The Committee and IREX, and above all our participants, have been thoroughly annoyed not only by the strict control over travel, but also by the arbitrary manner in which restrictive measures are administered.
In an effort to provide participants from both countries an opportunity to see substantial parts of the host country, the Committee and Ministry in the first year arranged for end-of-the-year group tours of two or three weeks' duration. A private organization, the Committee on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students, administered this for the Soviet participants, and Intourist managed, or mismanaged, that in the Soviet Union. Even these tours raised annoying problems. For example, in 1958-59 the Committee paid the tour expenses of both the Soviet and the American participants. In 1962 and 1963 the Ministry sought to eliminate Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Erevan. In 1964, after the Committee and the Ministry had agreed on a fixed limit to their contributions toward tour expense, the Ministry insisted that our participants pay the balance for their expenses in American currency. Finally, our participants were not allowed to travel by themselves. In 1964 the group in Leningrad even had to delay its trip for two weeks until the professor assigned was able to leave. After that year, at our insistence, the annual tour was abandoned.
The Ministry of Higher Education has not only refused to recognize the principle of travel for recreation, but it insists that American participants follow a four-step procedure for even study-related travel. The participant first has to obtain approval from his academic advisor, then of the foreign student office in the university, then of the Office of Visas and Registration, a police organization that processes internal passports, and, finally, of Intourist, which controls tickets for public transportation and hotel reservations. The Ministry requires a minimum of ten days’ notice for obtaining permission even for overnight travel.
A few participants have traveled with remarkable ease, perhaps because their academic advisors were interested and powerful, perhaps because they were more enterprising and energetic than their colleagues, perhaps because the foreign student offices and Intourist happened to be particularly efficient in their cases. However, travel in general is tightly restricted. Thus, a Canadian scholar writing about Sholokhov was not allowed to meet him or even to visit the Don country during his year in the Soviet Union. One participant who documented his difficulties spent more than forty hours obtaining the permission necessary to make a study-related visit from Moscow to Leningrad, even though the Ministry had expressly approved that trip when it accepted him. I know of only two Americans who were able to spend weekends with classmates and of a very few who were able to enjoy the kind of relaxed informal travel that we take for granted in the United States. Even in 1974-75, American participants found it very difficult to transfer from Moscow to Leningrad, or vice-versa, for two or three months of study. Married couples had to organize exchanges of rooms with couples in the other city, or to separate during the travel period. More than half of the short tours to historical centers near Moscow and Leningrad were cancelled that year, and participants could visit Central Asia only when they organized a group of twenty-five foreigners. Even so, travel is generally easier than in the past.
Another problem involves access to archives open to Soviet scholars, but closed to ours. For most American participants, especially those in history and literature, research in government documents and the papers of important officials or intellectuals is a principal purpose of their trips. Being denied the opportunity to use essential sources is therefore a bitter disappointment. In fact, these denials led to the Committee chairman’s annual January visit, a tradition that the British Council and IREX have followed. In the late 1960s the Soviets opened some archives just before the chairman arrived in January or just before the American participants had to leave in June.
The KGB administered these archives until 1960, when they were transferred to the Main Archival Administration of the Council of Ministers, but presumably with the same men and women responsible and with similar policies and procedures. The archives for the period after 1917 have always been closed, and access to many archives for periods before that, even for Russian medieval history, is often denied. The Ministry informs some before they arrive that they may not use pertinent archives, and it denies others permission to come to the Soviet Union on the grounds essential archives would be closed to them. Many Soviet academic advisors have refused to support applications for access to these source materials. On the other hand, others have been extraordinarily helpful and have even arranged for use of provincial archives and for the transfer of materials from closed archives to institutions in which our scholars were able to work. In 1958-59, only one of six who sought archival material was successful, and he only very late in the academic year. Two years later, only six of ten succeeded, and the following year none obtained access. Very often, when our scholars have been allowed admission, Soviet authorities have withheld the inventories of the collections in which they were interested. Even in 1973-74 those in Leningrad did not obtain archival materials until late in March.
The Ministry has responded to complaints by suggesting that few Americans were qualified to use archives and that some had not used the archival materials to which they had been given access. On occasion it has declared that a Soviet scholar was using the materials sought or that the papers were being reorganized or edited. Ordinarily, American participants simply received flat refusals.
In an effort to resolve this thorny problem, IREX and the Ministry in 1973 arranged to crossreference and forward requests for archives to the archival authorities at the same time IREX forwarded nominations to Moscow. They also reached “an understanding that guarantees of archival access would accompany each placement decision.” Experience in the following year demonstrated that this effort produced some progress, but some scholars who fought vigorously to obtain the collections were still unsuccessful. By the spring of 1975 IREX had established direct contact with the Main Archival Administration; this may lead to further progress. In June 1975 the Ministry informed IREX that six applications for archives the following year had been denied, four were under review, and twenty-seven would be honored in whole or in part. However, IREX officials were frankly not confident that American participants in 1975-76 would be significantly more successful than their predecessors. Moreover, requests made after participants have arrived and discovered new sources will no doubt require enormous effort and produce the usual delays and refusals.
Using microfilming equipment raises the same issues, intensified because Americans have become so accustomed to various systems of reproducing materials for later study, plus that of discriminatory prices. Soviet reproduction and microfilming equipment is much inferior to ours, and Soviet libraries have much less equipment than ours ordinarily have. Although some participants have succeeded in having quantities of materials microfilmed, most have encountered difficulties, delays, and often utter failure. Soviet librarians and archivists often insist on placing restrictions upon the amount and quality of material that may be reproduced. For example, the Director of the Central State Archive of Ancient Acts has insisted on reading all pages requested by some participants before they could be reproduced. Moreover, after 1962 in many cases and after 1964 in all cases but one, Americans and other foreigners could obtain microfilmed material only if they paid in foreign currency or were able to provide microfilm from their own archives in return. For several years the rates Americans paid were three times as high as those listed for Soviet citizens. This discriminatory payment issue was resolved in May 1969, when the Ministry consented to establish a fund of 150 rubles (approximately $125 at the official rate of exchange then) for each participant for microfilming material, in return for the Committee’s agreeing to meet all special research costs of Soviet participants here.
The Soviet government continues price discrimination against foreign scholars, presumably because of its great thirst for dollars. Thus, American summer language teachers in 1967 had to pay fifty-five rubles for a hotel room for two in Kiev, almost three times the tariff for Soviet citizens, and they had to pay for the twenty-four hours before arrival, while the rooms were being prepared. Similarly, Western scholars at the International Conference on Magnetism in Moscow in August 1973 paid eighteen rubles a day at conference exchange rates for rooms for which Soviet scientists paid three rubles.5
The Soviet participants in general have been a credit to their society and have raised few problems. From 1958 through 1969 the average age in the program for junior scholars was thirty-four, just a year higher than that in the British Council exchange; the average age of our participants has been twenty-six. Indeed, between 1967 and 1970 only one Soviet participant in all the Committee and IREX programs was under thirty years of age.
The Ministry’s system for selecting Soviet participants remains a puzzle, although the Ministry, rather than the universities, clearly is in control. Several Soviet participants informed me that they had not applied but were nominated without their knowledge. Apparently, after the first year or two, the Ministry requested nominations from faculties in those fields of research on which the government had chosen to concentrate and then made the selection decisions.
We do know from conversations with Soviet university administrators and scholars that the Ministry did not consult them when our universities invited scholars to serve as visiting lecturers. Indeed, some Soviet scholars have informed American friends that the Ministry had not told them of Committee invitations and had provided utterly artificial and false reasons why they could not accept, apparently a common practice throughout the Soviet system of higher education. In 1965 the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences and the Ministry of Health declined the invitation extended to Zhores Medvedev to the Seventh International Congress on Gerontology in Vienna in 1966 on the grounds of “extreme over-pressure of work.” In 1966, after Medvedev had refused the Ministry of Health’s request that he decline an invitation to give a prestigious lecture in London, the director of his institute rejected it for him “because of a great press of work.” When the London invitation was renewed through Academician V. A. Kirillin, the head of the State Committee on Science and Technology, Kirillin denounced Medvedev for “intercourse with foreign firms.” Kirillin then went himself to the United Kingdom, where he received an honorary degree from Oxford and urged the British government to increase cultural and scientific links with the Soviet Union. According to Medvedev, only twenty percent of the invitations made to Soviet scholars from abroad reach their institutions. Moreover, of every twenty Soviet applications to attend international congresses, the authorities grant only one or two. Most permissions go to senior scientific administrators, not to creative scholars.6
A few Soviet participants have been hacks, rewarded the opportunity for research and travel in the United States for services not related to scholarship. A few had no serious scholarly interests, and two or three clearly were KGB agents who were sent to review and control their fellows and perhaps to undertake other activities as well. Several engaged in activities not tolerated on campuses in any society, but more Americans misbehaved in the Soviet Union. One Soviet scholar, apparently upset by the freedoms he enjoyed and fearful of reports he believed other Soviet scholars were sending home about him, in December 1963 decided to defect, attempted then to commit suicide, and suffered a nervous breakdown before he freely chose in April 1964 to return to the Soviet Union. Two others had some sort of nervous breakdown and returned home early.
Soviet participants have raised some special problems for American universities. Approximately eighty percent of the Soviet nominees are interested in science or technology (only ten percent have been humanists) and require scarce and expensive laboratory space and equipment. Soviet graduate training is in general far more narrow and specialized than ours, so that the interests of our professors and graduate students often are vastly different from those of Soviet participants. This often forced the university to purchase special equipment and materials. In 1965, for example, these costs amounted to $35,000.
In the early years, many Soviet participants had inadequate command of English, and the Ministry was unwilling to accept any of our remedial proposals. Thus, a Committee review of the Soviet participants in 1962-63 revealed that only twelve of the thirty-nine had an easy command of English and that more than half had required additional work to enable them to benefit from their opportunity. This problem later on became substantially less important, particularly when the Ministry in 1967 after eight years accepted the Committee’s proposal for an intensive language program for a month before the fall semester began.
Most of the difficulties involved in negotiating with the Russians derive from the basic differences between the Soviet and American political systems, their asymmetries in approach and in goals, and particular Soviet policies and practices that denied qualified Americans the opportunities to study in the Soviet Union, shortened their visits there, and restricted their travel and access to materials. A good many other difficulties hampered and annoyed participants on both sides, because research and instruction are organized in different ways, ranks and schedules vary, and dedicated scholars in the two systems simply have different working habits. In addition, however, some characteristics of Soviet administration significantly affect relations and negotiations.
Perhaps the most striking features of Soviet negotiating teams are their remarkable rigidity, maintenance of accepted patterns, and inability to reach decisions even on proposals of great benefit to the Soviet Union. In the annual negotiations for placement of participants, Soviet officials have had only a limited capability to move from their initial positions. Transferring an American from Moscow to Leningrad even in 1975 is a long and tortuous process. The Committee proposed a summer program for language teachers from high schools, colleges, and universities in 1958. This was formally included in the agreement signed by the two governments in November 1959, but it became a reality because of Ministry delays only in 1963. Similarly, the proposal that each side establish funds for the participants' purchase of research materials and microfilm was made first in 1965 and accepted only in May 1969. NASA made twentyseven proposals in the 1960s to the Soviet counterpart organization before any agreements concerning joint research in space were reached.
The record of our relationships is littered by Soviet refusals to accept, and in some cases even to consider, proposals the Committee regarded as mutually beneficial, but of especial advantage to the Ministry. For example, it was clear after the first year that some Americans would prefer one month rather than a semester or an academic year and that others would prefer eighteen months. Similarly, the Soviet participants studying American agricultural techniques preferred twelve months to the regular academic year. We therefore proposed measuring participation in total months, rather than in academic years, allowing participants to study for periods ranging from three months to eighteen months. In fact, the second cultural exchanges agreement, signed on November 21, 1959, allowed participants to spend from five to fifteen months in the host country. However, the Ministry still has not accepted this practice.
Soviet inability to meet agreed deadlines remains another dominant and depressing characteristic. The Committee had anticipated this for the first year or two, and Munford made six trips to Moscow between March 1958 and September 1959 to assist the Ministry to meet target dates. Soviet performance, however, was wretched in the first two years and only in recent years has become adequate. Thus, on August 2, 1958, the Committee received only very scanty data concerning the junior scholars who were due in this country five weeks later. The next communication arrived on November 23, giving seventy-two hours' notice for the first fifteen participants, who then arrived on a plane different from that which the Ministry had indicated. None of the fifteen matched the descriptions provided earlier. The Ministry requested their visas only on September 19, after classes had begun. The visas were available at the American Embassy on October 20, but the Ministry did not collect them until November 3, still three weeks before the Soviet group left Moscow. Even so, the Ministry blamed the Embassy for the late arrival.
The second year provided some improvement, but not much. The Ministry had agreed to place American nominees by May 15; seven of the thirty-two withdrew on July 10 to accept academic positions or other fellowships because they could wait no longer. Twenty-seven Soviet nominees then arrived in New York on September 29, in most cases two weeks after their classes had begun.
Between 1958 and 1969 the Soviet nominations never arrived on the date that the Ministry had agreed to observe. On occasion they were two or three months late. Only once in eleven years did negotiations for placement begin on schedule. The Ministry was even tardy with its nominations for the summer programs for language teachers. Soviet applications for visas were made ordinarily just a few days before the participant was due in the United States, and most Americans had to wait for their visas until a few days or even hours before they departed from this country.
The program that has suffered most from Soviet tardiness was that for senior scholars, which was begun in 1962. In the first five years of this venture, the Committee nominated eighty-three scholars. The Ministry accepted fewer than half and provided no replies concerning twenty-five. On March 20, 1964, the Committee nominated a number of senior scholars for research. The Soviet reply, due on June 15, 1964, arrived on March 11, 1965, when the nominees had long abandoned their plans for leave from their university functions. Soviet nominations for this program have also been extraordinarily late. For example, the Committee received on February 18, 1965, a set of nominations mailed in Moscow on February 10 for Soviet scholars who wished to spend the second semester in our universities. IREX reported in April 1973 that some Soviet responses to nominations were ten months late.
The experience of other programs has been substantially similar. For example, the ACLS noted in 1966 that it responded to Soviet nominations on the average in two and one-half months, while the Soviet Academy of Sciences required six and one-half months. After fifteen years of experience, the Public Health Service reported that the minimum period of time for Soviet response to correspondence was thirty days and that three or four months was more common. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft has reported that the Ministry ordinarily took twelve months to reply to German nominations. Similarly, a museum director whom the British Council invited in 1960 arrived only in 1964. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in April 1971 made sixty-four nominations, but not one response had been received more than a year later.
The Committee abandoned the lecturers' exchange in the 1966 agreement because of the Ministry’s long delays in communication. For example, on July 17, 1963, the Committee forwarded eight nominations. It had received no reply on January 14, 1965—eighteen months later—even though it had pressed on several occasions.
The incompetence of Ministry officials no doubt reflects general inefficiency that Soviet citizens accept uncomplainingly, but it also discloses the status of the Ministry of Higher Education in the Soviet government. The problems our National Academy of Sciences has encountered in its exchanges with the Soviet Academy of Sciences are much like those the Committee and IREX have encountered. However, the Soviet Academy has more authority, more competent personnel, and fewer restrictions than the Ministry, and its administrative performance has been significantly more prompt and efficient.
The Ministry’s shabby and crowded quarters on 12 Zhdanov Street in Moscow illustrate the Ministry’s standing, as do the quality of the staff and the equipment. Only two or three of the Soviet officials engaged with the Committee’s program between 1958 and 1969 had any knowledge of English, and the office had no translators. After the first year, the Committee forwarded nomination documents both in Russian and English, but our correspondence was generally in English. Ministry officials told us that they sometimes had to wait six or eight weeks to locate a translator for an essential letter.
Anyone who has read about Soviet administrative procedures and about the Russian bureaucracy since Gogol would have sympathetic understanding for the men and women in the Ministry, and for those who had to work with them. The Soviet officials are badly overworked. They are remarkably ignorant of Soviet education and its needs, and even more of American education. Moreover, perhaps like typical Russian bureaucrats, they are generally apathetic concerning their functions, which are generally temporary assignments and not permanent career interests.7
The offices of the Chief of the Foreign Affairs Administration in the Ministry, responsible for exchanges with all countries, before 1969 had only two telephones. On one occasion in 1964 neither telephone worked for several weeks. The office had so few secretaries that the phones were left unattended throughout the entire day when the staff was engaged in discussions or negotiations with foreign representatives. The Ministry made no international telephone calls to the Committee or IREX until March 4, 1974, perhaps because of budget constraints, perhaps because of language deficiencies in the Ministry staff. Establishment of direct communications between IREX and the American Embassy and the Soviet Academy of Sciences as well via telex has helped enormously, but the problem does not reside in the instruments of communication.
Ministry officials had little authority on even routine matters. Party control from an important level was assured by men such as K. N. Kulikov, who was identified in his obituary in Izyestiia on September 27, 1969, as “an official in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for fifteen years.” Kulikov rose through the ranks of the Komsomol and the Party, and he was Chief of the Foreign Affairs Administration in the Ministry from 1961 until his death in 1969. He was an intelligent, shrewd man, but his knowledge of Soviet education was greatly limited, and his knowledge of education in the United States was minimal. His role in negotiations, evidence provided by carbon copies of letters that were mistakenly forwarded, and discussions with Ministry officials revealed that no actions, even of the most rudimentary nature, could be completed without, his approval. In addition, the Deputy Minister of Higher Education apparently reviewed and approved all correspondence with the Committee before it could leave the office. On occasion the Committee received an extra carbon copy that revealed that a letter had received several approvals after being signed. The Moscow post office stamp was at least four days later than the date on which the letter had been written.
Some of the inefficiency was ludicrous. For example, the Ministry and the Committee agreed in March 1961 that the Committee would arrange an intensive language and orientation program at Princeton University for the forty-six Soviet participants in the program that fall. Previous experience had already demonstrated that the Committee would need to nudge the Ministry to ensure prompt arrival of Soviet participants. Numerous letters and cables flew from Bloomington to Moscow, and the Committee late in July asked the American Embassy to prod the Ministry to request visa applications. The Embassy received twenty-six applications on August 14, a week before the Soviet participants were due at Princeton. The Ministry discovered four days later that it had forgotten to make airplane reservations and that all air lines were solidly booked because an international biochemistry congress in Moscow was just ending. After the Committee had disbanded the faculty and had urged the Soviets not to dispatch the Soviet participants until September 10, the Ministry on August 23 bundled twenty-three scholars to the United States, where of course none of their host universities was prepared to receive them.
The data the Ministry has provided the Committee and IREX concerning Soviet nominations have always handicapped those eager to place Soviet men and women in the institutions best suited to serve them. The Committee sought to assist in every way it could: it provided forms that indicated the kinds of information American universities needed to make sensible decisions; it sent sets of application blanks and catalogs from our major institutions; it even assisted a Ministry official in visiting twenty-one American institutions and their graduate admissions offices. However, the problem persists. Thus, since 1963 the Ministry has often provided an English translation for each Soviet application. Unfortunately, the original often does not correspond to the translation. For example, an original of one application listed five publications, but the translation identified four completely different ones. In both cases the citations were incomplete and difficult to locate. IREX has noted some improvement, but not a great deal.8
Consequently, in spite of the imaginative efforts made by the Committee, IREX, and the participating universities, we placed a number of Soviet students in institutions not competent to assist them. No one example can provide an accurate illustration of the problem that Ministry misinformation created, but two illustrations, taken from 1967 and December 1968 will present the flavor. In the first, none of the four scholars with whom the Soviet participant wished to work had been at the institutions listed for more than ten years. One, the first choice, had left seventeen years earlier. In the second, the Ministry nominated a Soviet historian who wished to work at Columbia University with Professor Henry Steele Commager, who left Columbia in 1956; at Harvard University with Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, who retired in 1956; and in the Library of Congress, which he placed in New York City.
Soviet administrative inefficiency was annoying and frustrating, but unjustified Soviet newspaper attacks on American scholars and organizations constituted a more fundamental concern. These attacks, in which the Ministry of Higher Education played no role, so far as the Committee could determine, were directed against more than twenty scholars, Harvard and Columbia Universities in particular and the universities en masse, and the Committee and IREX. They were designed primarily to dissuade Soviet scholars and intellectuals from close contact with foreigners. The charges made have usually included conducting anti-Soviet propaganda or being “ideological saboteurs.” They often incorporated as well that of being in close contact with the Embassy and even employed by the CIA. They have ordinarily been directed at younger Americans. The percentage of Jews among those assailed has been noticeably high, apparently to take advantage of traditional Russian antisemitism and to relate the attacks to those on Israel and “Zionism.”
I believe that there may have been some substance for some charges made, though not for their wild and scurrilous nature. For example, one of the participants denounced for black market activities may have been guilty. Three of the participants criticized for their publications were critical of the Soviet Union or of the Ministry of Higher Education, but in a responsible fashion. Six participants accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda did make comments critical of the Soviet system or of Soviet leaders in conversations with Soviet scholars and graduate students, but again they were responsible. Two participants accused of being Zionist agents were Jews, were and are friendly to Israel, and could, I suppose, be called Zionists under the loose definition used in the Soviet Union. So far as I know, the other charges made had no justification or foundation.
The Soviet press accused three participants in the program of being spies and made vague charges that six others were. Three were charged with seeking to persuade Soviet scholars to defect. The newspapers provided no evidence to support these charges, and the Committee found none. Two of the attacks were particularly irresponsible and indecent. Thus, Izvestiia on October 30, 1966, accused Marshall Shulman, then at Harvard University, of censoring the correspondence of Soviet participants at Harvard and of seeking to persuade a participant to remain in the United States. He was completely innocent of the “odious, unfounded, and unwarranted” charges. On May 7, 1968, Pravda accused Jeremy Azrael of the University of Chicago of informing the American Embassy on a fellow participant in the program, gathering intelligence information in the Soviet Union, particularly through interviewing intellectuals for the CIA, carrying on anti-Soviet propaganda, and collecting data concerning Soviet participants in the United States.
The most serious press attack, one that threatened the continuation of the program, was a long, rambling assault in Pravda on March 1, 1967, which skillfully took advantage of the revelations the American press was then making concerning the CIA’s financing of other private organizations, such as the National Student Association. The article reflected considerable knowledge of Committee working methods. For example, the authors had read some correspondence between the Committee and its participants and between the Committee and the universities. They had also acquired personal information concerning an individual participant, known only to him and to two members of the Committee staff. This essay praised the Committee for its positive contribution toward more friendly relations with the Soviet Union and indicated that “not all” participants had served the CIA, which it alleged was trying to prevent or hinder academic exchange programs. It denounced the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and it accused the CIA of financing organizations such as the Committee. It charged that the CIA and the FBI reviewed each candidate before he went to the Soviet Union and that two alumni participants who took part in the language and orientation program were CIA representatives. The article did not accuse me directly of being a spy, but it declared that I was not “a pure scholar,” perhaps because I have freely revealed that I served in intelligence organizations during World War II and the Korean War. In short, by taking advantage of unrelated revelations in the American press and by skillful use of a handful of facts, it wove a narrative that suggested through guilt by association that the Committee, other private organizations, and individual scholars were in fact engaged in espionage and other covert activities.
The Committee and the universities should perhaps have ignored this article, even though, perhaps because, it appeared in the official daily organ of the Soviet Communist Party. However, this false and irresponsible series of charges led the universities engaged in the Committee’s work to consider abandoning the program, as they had before Professor Frederick Barghoorn was released in 1963. The Committee, the presidents of the member universities, and other organizations, such as the ACLS and the National Academy of Sciences, made very vigorous protests pointing out the falseness of the charges and the hazards they raised.
It is of course impossible to prove that one is not a spy or a communist. The Ministry in effect exonerated the Committee because it continued the exchange programs. One of its senior officials even apologized in a discreet way for the attacks. Ministry officials were especially cordial in the May 1967 discussions concerning placement of participants for 1967-68. Many Americans demolished the bases of the charges made against them by returning to the Soviet Union for research. The falseness of the charges in my case was exposed in the summer of 1967 when I went to Moscow and traveled through Eastern Europe; again in 1969 when I visited the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; and in three later trips through Eastern Europe, actions I would not have undertaken if I had ever been a spy and one that the governments of these countries would not have tolerated if the charges had had any foundation.
The attack was renewed in the spring of 1970 with the publication in Leningrad of a seventy-page pamphlet entitled “Scientific Exchange or Ideological Diversion,” praised immediately by Yuri Zhukov in Leningradskaia Pravda on May 17. In fact, Zhukov added that an IREX participant that year had sought to persuade Soviet Jews to leave for the United States. The essay was especially significant because it devoted several pages to a critique of Allen Kassof, executive director of IREX, and it cited conversations Kassof had had with Soviet scholars, who either volunteered the information to the author or whose conversations with foreigners some Soviet agency recorded and gave to him. It summarized and was typical of the charges often made against Western visitors. It lumped American, Belgian, English, Danish, and Swedish participants, accusing them of immoral activities, visiting closed cities, taking unauthorized photographs, serving as agents for intelligence organizations, recruiting defectors, and engaging in the black market, anti-Soviet political propaganda, activities on behalf of Zionism, and unscholarly criticism of the Soviet Union. As an elementary review of the “problem of the contemporary history of ideological struggle,” it was clearly designed to warn Soviet intellectuals against contacts with Westerners. Its failure to include German or French scholars in the attacks, because the Soviet Union was then wooing the Federal Republic and France, revealed its political motivation.
Kassof in his 1970 report on continuing problems cited “groundless accusations of wrongdoing by the Soviet press and publications and personal indignities addressed to some of our participants,” and he stated that he hoped they would not be renewed. However, Literaturnaia Gazeta on May 5, 1971, charged that three scientists, two on the National Academy of Sciences program and the other a senior scientist on the Committee exchange, had assisted our Embassy’s cultural attaché, “actively used by American intelligence,” in trying to recruit a Soviet scientist for espionage.
The history of academic exchanges, especially before 1972, is full of incidents involving KGB harassment, seduction, and blackmailing of junior and senior scholars from all countries that have exchange agreements with the Soviet Union. In fact, the reports of Von Herberstein in the sixteenth century, Olearius in the seventeenth century, Custine in the nineteenth century, or accounts written in any age by foreign visitors reveal that such police activities are a constant factor in Russian history. Adam Olearius’s statement in 1634 that “the Russians in Moscow greatly distrust foreigners, who are constantly watched by the secret police. Each of their movements is noted and signaled to the central administration,” applies still today and will no doubt apply as well in 1984. Indeed, one Soviet scholar remarked, “Poverty may be eternal in your society, but in our country it is the secret police we will always have with us'.”
Because of the KGB, all American participants have returned home with a deeply increased understanding of the totalitarian aspects of Soviet life. They came to consider the Soviet postal system as the “opened mail” and to realize that any diaries would have official readers. They were never certain who their Soviet friends were and who were, or were forced to become, involuntary informers or agents provocateurs. Some had close friends regretfully discontinue relationships because they were frightened by police interrogation, and others severed ties in order to protect Soviet acquaintances. All learned never to mention one Soviet friend to another. Some were followed frequently, particularly just before they left the Soviet Union or during trips outside of Moscow and Leningrad, although the Soviet shadows involved must have found the ordinary tour from dormitory room to cafeteria, library, archive, or theater very dull indeed. Others had their rooms entered and skillfully searched in their absence. All of them, as well as their Soviet friends, came to believe that the rooms in which they lived, which usually were rooms in which other Americans had lived in previous years, had listening devices installed in the walls and that their telephone conversations were monitored. A few even found these devices.
Most participants learned that some officials in the Ministry of Higher Education and in the university foreign student offices, generally the most amiable, attractive, and efficient, were KGB officers or had responsibilities to the KGB as well as to the university. All came to appreciate that all organizations or institutions dealing with foreigners had “foreign departments” responsible to the KGB. In addition, a small percentage had direct and unpleasant experiences with the secret police. Fortunately, none thus far has learned, as some of their predecessors did in the late 1930s, that Soviet authorities had cited entirely professional and innocent conversations when they arrested and executed Soviet scholars.9
Of the 320 participants in the Committee’s program for junior scholars between 1958 and 1969, the Soviet government expelled 7 without cause and without consultation or advance notice to them, their university, or the Committee. In two of the seven cases, it provided no information, even in the form of attacks in the press. In every case the KGB had kept the Americans under careful surveillance and in most cases had staged incidents. In one case the KGB cleverly lured an American into “immoral behavior.” In two instances, the expulsions followed bungled and unsuccessful provocation efforts, in one of which the foreign student offices of both Moscow State and Leningrad State Universities played important roles. In others, the Soviets fabricated or grotesquely twisted “evidence” in an effort to “justify” the expulsion. Thus, one was expelled for alleged participation in narcotics traffic, another for “penetration in areas possessing military objectives” a year earlier, and the last two for distributing anti-Soviet literature. So far as the Committee could determine, these individuals were innocent of the charges. With two exceptions, the Ministry of Higher Education failed even to respond to our complaints about the injustice and the procedures used.
So far as we can tell, these expulsions were designed primarily to frighten Soviet citizens from contact with foreigners, to discourage Americans from participating, and to demonstrate Soviet “political” displeasure over particular incidents. Thus, two expulsions occurred in June 1960 after the U-2 flight and the break-up of the Paris summit conference. Another followed the Department of State’s expelling two Soviet participants who had traveled extensively in the United States without informing the Department.10
Since 1968 the Soviet government has not expelled any participants in the main academic exchange program. However, two participants in the National Academy of Sciences exchange were expelled in 1971, one for “collecting slanderous information” from “Zionists,” and the other for “violating the hospitality of the Soviet Union” by talking with Academician Andrei Sakharov and by visiting laboratories and lectures at Moscow State University without requesting permission.
Eighteen other junior scholars left early because they were frightened by the intense interest the KGB had demonstrated in them, or after the American Embassy had urged them to leave because of the vivid way in which KGB interest had been expressed. One, for example, received splendid gifts for members of his family, accepted funds for travel alone throughout a good part of the Soviet Union and for a trip abroad, and was offered a Soviet academic position at an attractive salary. Another was offered a manuscript for delivery to a publisher abroad, and a third was offered drawings of a new missile. The KGB heavily grilled a fourth after his notes of professional discussions with Soviet scholars in his field had been stolen; a Soviet officer even used the diary and displayed detailed knowledge of the scholars during the interrogation. Another American, after the university foreign student office had lured away his fellow students, was “interviewed” while at work in a Soviet archive and charged by a member of the KGB as being a spy and a homosexual. He was assured no charges would be pressed if he would provide information concerning his fellow students and Embassy officials. Another, away from his university on a brief trip, awoke to find three members of the KGB and a photographer in his room. They charged him with homosexual activities and made the customary threats and offers. Another had the same kind of experience, even more unpleasant in his case because he had been born in the Soviet Union and was told that his relatives would suffer if he did not provide information concerning Embassy officials. Another was lured by a “friend” into a restricted area, where he was arrested and urged to provide information. Another took a drink in a restaurant with a group of Soviet friends and woke to discover that he was charged with assaulting a Soviet policeman. He was informed that the charge would be dropped if he would provide information to Soviet officials. One was pressed for information concerning the “progressive left.” Finally, another was skillfully seduced and quizzed concerning the activities and views of the American participants, his Soviet friends, Soviet faculty members whom he knew, and Embassy officials.
Participants in the Committee program were of course not the only Americans in the Soviet Union subject to this, because the smaller programs administered by the ACLS, the National Academy of Sciences, and other institutions endured similar incidents. IREX has reported no police incidents since 1969. However, some participants are still followed and harassed, especially when traveling, and their Soviet friends are sometimes questioned and threatened. Both Soviet and Western newspapers reveal that scholars, businessmen, tourists, and visitors of all kinds from Western countries still suffer from such incidents, which apparently are fewer in number than in recent years.
One can only speculate concerning why particular individuals fell prey to the KGB, and whether any have concealed KGB approaches made to them. It is apparent that the KGB was more likely to select men and women from the Russian Research Center at Harvard University and the Russian Institute at Columbia University, on occasion attacked in the Soviet press as “spy centers,” than graduate students from other institutions. In general, it obviously chose those whose knowledge of Russian was particularly fluent and who were able to make friends most easily. Those who had a Russian family background, particularly those who were born in the Soviet Union, were especially likely targets. The number of Jews selected for attack by the KGB and by the press as well seems high.11 It is clear also that several police interventions were retaliations for the expulsion of Soviet agents (not Soviet students) from the United States, and a number were directly related to the high degree of tension then current between the two countries. At least one intervention occurred each year through the 1960s. Slightly more than half of the known police actions occurred between 1966 and 1969. 1967 was a particularly ominous period. Most language teachers that summer had encounters with the KGB, and known KGB activities were greater than in the previous five years combined, perhaps because of the situation in Czechoslovakia, perhaps because of the celebration of the 1917 Revolution, perhaps because the Soviet police were then especially annoyed by and active against native critics, such as Sinyavsky, Daniel, and Litvinov.
The most important part of the explanation is the character of the Soviet political system, especially the emphasis on political monopoly, absolute control, and carefully monitored relationships with other parts of the world. The system rests not only on Soviet communist suspicion of others, and of each other, but also on the suspicion that Custine and others noted earlier. The government of Brezhnev very much resembles that of Nicholas I or Pobedonostsev in the suspicion with which it views other states, other peoples, and its own people, and in the plot mentality that corrodes its approach toward everyone, native or foreign, in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the treatment given Pasternak and Sakharov is similar to that given Chaadaiev in the 1830s and Tolstoy seventy years ago. As one participant expressed it, “We are propaganda, simply because of our presence here.”
Security police systems in all countries tend to be more infected with fear and hostility than other parts of even the most conservative establishment, but the KGB considers even requesting a telephone book espionage. In the “great debate” within the Soviet ruling group about the advantages and the hazards of continuing exchange programs, it is likely that many KGB leaders and many of the other most conservative elements in Soviet society are critical of exchanges, with the suspicion waxing and waning as relationships within the Soviet Union and in international politics change and as apparent benefits and costs rise and fall. This no doubt accounts for some KGB interventions against our participants and for the constant vigilance campaigns and the press attacks upon Soviet intellectuals.
The principal purpose of the KGB actions against foreign scholars in the Soviet Union is to frighten Soviet intellectuals and to isolate them as much as possible from contacts with Westerners. In addition, they are designed to deny access to information, to discourage serious interest in studying in the Soviet Union, and to encourage caution among foreigners in their actions in the Soviet Union and in their writing. The KGB’s efforts clearly have been successful in frightening many specialists from studying there. Some American scholars discourage their graduate students from going to the Soviet Union. One, a forthright activist in the United States, even sought to remove his name from the papers of one of his students before they were forwarded in nomination to the Ministry.
The KGB also operates on the assumption that a little fear is salutary. Occasional frights will, they believe, ensure that all Western participants will be careful in their contacts with Soviet intellectuals, whose continued isolation is their prime target. The KGB may believe that such a campaign will encourage prudent reporting upon return. Thus, even the assumption that rooms are “bugged” or the fact that ordinary conversations on scholarly problems or the exchange of scholarly publications can jeopardize the position and even the life of a Soviet scholar will, they believe, intimidate Americans and therefore assist the KGB in maintaining a kind of intellectual and spiritual apartheid.
In addition, certain special professional KGB interests may have some influence. The secret police, for example, seek to acquire information about officials in the American Embassy, about whom participants constitute a potential source. Some KGB activities may simply constitute practice or serve to maintain professional morale and a proper sense of vigilance among their Gletkins. KGB officials may also believe that one day, after dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of efforts to trap and frighten foreign visitors or scholars, they may find one recruit to the Soviet intelligence apparatus for work in his home country.
1The Ministry does grant one important special privilege: it allows young Aneeican scholars in the Lenin Library in Moscow to use Reading Room number 1, which is reserved for senior scholars and is more quiet, comfortable, and efficient than the other reading rooms.
2The Ministry was also most reluctant to allow wives from other Western countries. For example, although it had agreed to accept the wives of Canadian participants, the first five and their wives in 1964 had to wait in Wessern Europe for everal weeks before they were admitted.
3The National Academy of Sciences in its small exchange program for senior scholars does not encounter this problem because few of its participants remain more than a month. Moreover, the Soviet Academy of Sciences has apartments, and now a hotel of its own, for visiting scholars and their families.
4The British Council administered its placement system under the same principles as we. In the first year of its exchange program, it placed the twenty Soviet participants in eleven British universities. Similarly, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in its first year placed Soviet scholars in eight German cities, from which they traveled freely throughout the Federal Republic. All German and British participants were also limited then to Moscow and Leningrad.
5Eari Callen, “Moscow. Notes on a Scientific Conference,” The Atlantic, CCXXXIII, Number 5 (May, 1974), 18.
6Zhores A. Medvedev, The Medvedev Papers. (London, 1971), 26, 54-69, 114, 130-31.
7Not all the inefficiency was in the Ministry. The British Council learned in 1961 that the Ministry’s nominations for that year remained in the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries for two months before they were forwarded to London.
8The British Council, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and other Western organizations that administer academic exchange programs with the Ministry have had similar experiences. The Canadian government, informed by our experiences and those of the University of Toronto, has sought to escape this problem by incorporating the following detailed statement in the annex to its December 1973 agreement with the Soviet government: “The data sheets submitted will include the following information: name of candidate, place and date of birth, present address, education, place of work or study, proposed field of study or research, including a statement on the proposed research topic, list of publications if applicable, university or institute at which participant is principally to reside, other institutions, universities, or organizations he would like to visit, names of specialists in the receiving country he would like to meet, foreign language competence (written and spoken), marital status, whether the participant will be accompanied by dependents, each dependent’s name, place, and date of birth if applicable, and the approximate date of arrival in the receiving country.”
9Calvin B. Hoover, Memoirs of Capitalism, Communism, and Nazism (Durham, 1965), 8-9.
10The Department of State expelled three Soviet participants for deliberate violation of the Department’s travel regulation. Two Soviet scholars were required to return to the Soviet Union because they were expelled from their universities, one for gross misbehavior and the other because he was not qualified for the course of study he requested and because he refused to participate in classes and seminars.
11Of the seven expelled from the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1969, five were Harvard graduates, one was from Indiana University, and one was from the University of Washington. Four were Jews.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.