CHAPTER SEVEN

Eastern Europe: Another World

With the exceptions of Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania, and of Romania since 1962, that part of the world now called Eastern Europe has been firmly under the dominance of the Soviet Union and of communist parties and governments loyal to it since the end of World War II. The Soviet army, which had overrun most of the area in the drive that helped end the war, still maintains forces in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. After the war the Soviet Union installed governments that communists by 1950 called People’s Democracies and that the rest of the world then called satellites. It made their armies and political police instruments of Soviet will, and it lashed their economies to that of the Soviet Union. When the new regimes possessed what Lenin called the commanding heights in their hands, they set out to destroy rival political groups and institutions, acquired authority over the economies, tightened all controls, and then purged even the communist parties of those whose loyalty to the Soviet Union was not absolute. By 1950 they had begun the attempted transformation of the lives of their peoples in a massive effort to “build the foundations of socialism” on the Soviet model. The peoples of Eastern Europe were so isolated that the outside world could communicate with them only by radio, which was consistently jammed, and free floating balloons, launched in Western Germany and carried by prevailing winds across Eastern Europe.

Greece and Yugoslavia alone then escaped the Soviet cordon. Greece was able to maintain its independence because the Greek people, provided with economic support and military equipment by the United States and other Western countries, in a bitter civil war defeated the Greek communists, whom the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria supported. Yugoslavia remained an independent communist state after Stalin ousted it from the Cominform in 1948 because of Tito’s resolute vigor, the united nationalist support of the Yugoslav peoples, massive economic aid and military supplies from the Western states, and a kind of protective umbrella that the United States held over Yugoslavia.

The new regimes, eager to solidify control over their populations and determined to destroy all Western influence, flouted the treaties they had signed at the end of the war. They harassed Western missions, arresting, imprisoning, and torturing their employees. They closed Western information agencies and restricted and then eliminated all Western news services. They nationalized Western properties without compensation. Hungary in February 1950 imprisoned an American businessman, Robert Vogeler, and the Czechoslovak government in April 1951 arrested and imprisoned an American newspaper correspondent, William Oatis, as symbolic closings of the door to the West. The actions of the Bulgarian government were so reprehensible that the United States closed its legation in Sofia from 1950 until March 1960.

After the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, a series of changes within the Soviet government and of Soviet policies toward Eastern Europe gradually produced a thaw and a relaxation of tensions. Within the Soviet Union the new collective leadership released many political prisoners, slightly let up on the severe controls, and talked a good deal about increasing supplies of consumer goods. In foreign policy it helped arrange an armistice in the Korean War and launched a grandiose campaign for “peaceful coexistence.” At the twentieth party congress in February 1956 it launched a campaign of de-Stalinization and introduced a series of important ideological changes, which suggested that war was not inevitable, that socialism could be attained in some states through peaceful means, and that there were several roads to socialism besides that of the Soviets. The new Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, the expressions of resentment that surfaced because of the relaxations, and the remarkable economic, political, and spiritual recovery of the West European peoples and states together produced a series of changes within Eastern Europe that ultimately made academic exchanges possible under arrangements similar to, but superior to, those established with the Soviet Union.

The New Course designed to make the regimes more palatable led instead to violent explosions, first in Eastern Germany in 1953 and then in Poland and Hungary in 1956. These eruptions were based on immense and deeply felt dissatisfactions and resentments. They reflected also the erosion of ideology, the revival of nationalisms, and the growth of anti-Soviet feeling among the suppressed peoples, even those groups most favorably treated—the workers, the intellectuals, and the students, all of whom were impressed by the vivid contrast between the promises made and the realities they had to endure. It is not surprising that the decade of utter isolation had heightened interest in political, economic, and intellectual ties with Western Europe on the part of the great majority of the educated, communist and noncommunist alike. Above all, both the governments and the peoples of these countries had become convinced that they could obtain economic benefits from the West with Soviet permission, by “working between the feet of the Great Powers.” Thus, popular hope to restore the traditional ties with Western Europe and the efforts of the regimes to obtain respectability and scientific and technical assistance ran along parallel courses.

The recovery of the peoples and states of Western Europe from the destructions caused by the war played a most important role in the revival of hope, the growth of nationalism, and the explosions of 1956 and 1968. The vitality of the West European states and the American guarantee over them signified the success of the doctrine of containment so far as Europe itself was concerned. In the 1950s the belief that Eastern Europe might be liberated by Western arms and the proposal that Western and Soviet forces should disengage in central Europe both evaporated. At the same time, the cataclysmic fear that there was “a finality, for better or worse about what has happened in Eastern Europe,” also began to fade away as historical perspective overcame the shocks of war and of the postwar crises. Thus, even after 1956, after the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961, and again after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, hope has become stronger that the East European states will gradually regain more freedoms and rejoin the European community.

Western leaders and peoples also began to recognize that immense Soviet power and skillful control were balanced by the spiritual and intellectual weaknesses of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Western observers came to appreciate the extraordinary vulnerability to ideas that corrodes the Soviet system, particularly in Eastern Europe. Then, the chasm between the economies of Eastern and Western Europe, in spite of the considerable progress made at crushing cost in the East, persuaded leaders on both sides to accept the advantage of improving relationships. Finally, Western peoples concluded that recognizing contemporary Soviet control over Eastern Europe did not mean approving it and that a “vast possibility of peaceful change” existed throughout Eastern Europe, even under restrictions Moscow dictated.

The 1956 revolt in Poland brought a national communist leader, Gomulka, from prison to rule, and he introduced substantial relaxations of controls. The Soviet government reluctantly accepted the Gomulka government and its policies, and later it maneuvered Wladyslaw Gomulka into restoring many of the earlier constraints. The revolt in Hungary led to massive and forceful Soviet armed intervention, which crushed the revolution and installed Janos Kadar as head of a regime thoroughly loyal to the Soviet Union.

Some Western observers judged that the 1956 revolts marked “the beginning of the end of communism.” Others considered them a crushing setback to dreams of increased freedoms and of closer relations with the West. Paradoxically, the revolts in Eastern Europe and Soviet reactions led not to the re-establishment of controls as fierce as those exercised between 1947 and 1953, but to further relaxation and above all to greater Soviet acceptance of increased contact with the West. The Soviet government apparently recognized the desperate need to reduce the magnetic attraction the West exercised upon Eastern Europe by tolerating some controlled relationships that would also strengthen the East European economies. It no doubt also believed that the Gomulka and Kadar regimes and the demonstration of Soviet resolution together ensured the Soviet position, without at the same time multiplying fears of Soviet expansion in other parts of the world. Soviet policy also reflected the confidence and ebullience of Khrushchev, who launched a program to make the so-called virgin lands agriculturally important, abolished the machine tractor stations, and talked of overtaking and surpassing American production in significant agricultural and industrial fields. The appearance of the first sputniks on October 4 and November 3, 1957, helped increase Soviet self-confidence. This was both reflected in and mounted because of the vigorous diplomacy of Khrushchev and Bulganin, the new emphasis upon peaceful coexistence, the temporary return of Tito to friendly relations with the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1959. In short, after 1956 some West Europeans and Americans perceived new opportunities to overcome the bafflements the Soviet Union and these regimes had established and to reopen relationships with Eastern Europe.

American scholars and academic institutions gave precedence to Russia and the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe when establishing priorities in research, instruction, and academic exchanges, as our government did in defining foreign policy. The first two important graduate programs, the Russian Institute at Columbia in 1946 and the Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1947, both concentrated exclusively upon the Soviet Union. In fact, in 1946 less than five percent as many scholars were interested in Eastern Europe as in Russia. Moreover, our scholars, and the public in general, have traditionally neglected Eastern Europe, which they considered a backward part of the world buffeted between Russians and Germans, peopled by wild and unruly groups in constant conflict with each other, and the immediate cause of both world wars. Scholars interested in Eastern Europe tended to have a kind of inferiority complex because they attracted little attention and commanded little influence in their profession. The enormous expansion of interest in Russia only increased their feeling of neglect.

Yet, many of those most responsible for beginning Russian studies, particularly Coolidge at Harvard, Mosely at Columbia, and Robert J. Kerner at the University of California in Berkeley, combined a powerful interest in Eastern Europe with that in Russia. Their activities helped to promote the study of Eastern Europe. Exile and refugee scholars, many of supreme quality, such as Oscar Halecki and Otokar Odložilik, were also important in expanding this activity. The Soviet role in that area and the 1956 explosions inevitably increased both scholarly and popular interest, which always follow the headlines.

Finally, the Inter-University Committee with its earliest travel grants helped stimulate interest in Eastern Europe among Russian specialists. The Committee encouraged these Fellows to travel through Eastern Europe, preferably on their way home from the Soviet Union, to obtain greater return from the immense investment in travel for such a short period, to acquire insights into the Soviet Union from even brief comparisons with other countries that communists ruled, and to use Eastern Europe as a kind of decompression chamber after the plunge into Soviet reality. Many, of whom I was one, were fascinated by their first experiences in Eastern Europe, as Coolidge and Mosely had been earlier, and they later encouraged the expansion of East European studies and academic exchange programs with Eastern Europe.

Scholarly relations with Eastern Europe were opened not by scholars, universities, or governments but by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. These private institutions used their enormously expanded incomes after World War II in many fruitful ways. The Rockefeller Foundation concentrated upon promoting research in biology and agriculture throughout the world and, briefly, upon expanding the study of other areas and of international politics, largely within the United States. The Ford Foundation emphasized expanding and improving higher education, with particular stress upon the study of foreign areas and of international politics. The foundations' interest in Eastern Europe in the mid-1950s was a natural and pragmatic expansion of their domestic and foreign programs. Their senior officers during the war had become keenly aware of the tensions and hazards of international politics. They also realized that the two world wars had had their origins in a sense in Eastern Europe. Most of them also accepted the thesis expounded by Walter Lippmann in 1947 that the world would not enjoy peace until Soviet armed forces had left Eastern Europe. The relaxation of tensions after the death of Stalin and the 1956 eruptions in Poland and Hungary consequently increased their interest.

Both foundations began their programs with Poland because the Polish government after 1956 was eager to increase contact with Western states. Moreover, after 1953 the flow of tourists, largely of Americans of Polish descent to Poland, reflected profound popular interest in both countries. Finally, of course, Polish relationships with the West had traditionally been stronger than those of any other East European country.

The Rockefeller Foundation had demonstrated an interest in Eastern Europe and in Russian and East European studies already in the 1930s. It helped establish the Russian Institute at Columbia University in 1946, and it assisted until 1968, when it ceased supporting international studies. It also helped establish the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, and it provided important grants to institutions abroad, particularly to the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, St. Antony’s College in Oxford, and a number of universities in Japan.

The Foundation officers were therefore especially impressed and concerned by developments in Poland in 1956, and they considered establishing a program that would enable Polish scholars to visit the West for the first time since before the war. A number of Foundation officers visited Poland in February 1957, and the Foundation shortly thereafter provided laboratory equipment and materials to all Polish universities except the Catholic University in Lublin. At the same time, it launched a fellowship program that enabled a number of young scholars, primarily in scientific and medical fields, to study in Western Europe and the United States. More than forty Polish scholars visited this country in 1957 alone, and the Foundation provided funds for travel in Western countries for approximately forty Polish scholars each year from 1957 until 1964. The Foundation also assisted a few Czechoslovak and Yugoslav scholars, and it enabled a small number of American scholars, primarily in medicine, to consult with colleagues in Poland.

The Ford Foundation played an even more important role. Its International Training and Research Division, between its establishment in 1951 and 1967 when its functions changed, contributed more to improving and expanding the study of other areas of the world than any other American institution. However, the International Affairs Division, established in 1949 to coordinate Foundation activities in reducing international tensions, played the central role in opening scholarly relations with Eastern Europe. It sought to increase understanding of the conditions necessary for establishing and preserving peace, to improve the structures and procedures of private groups interested in international relations, and to strengthen the United Nations and its associated agencies, and it inevitably became interested in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Until late in the 1960s this venturesome division supported a large number of conferences or forums of important Soviet, East European, American, and other leaders, largely on international politics, but occasionally on scientific relationships, economic growth in less-developed countries, and various approaches toward peace. It was an important financial supporter of the Pugwash and Dartmouth Conferences, and in 1966 it began to support groups interested in establishing cultural relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Developments after 1953 and the 1956 explosions therefore excited the officers of the International Affairs Division and the Foundation trustees, who decided in November 1956 to examine ways and means of reopening “channels of communication” with Poland on at least a short-term basis. This announcement stimulated an invitation from the Polish government, and a group of Foundation officers visited Poland in February 1957. In the following month the trustees announced a one-year pilot program of $500,000 “to establish and renew contacts with Western colleagues” and to provide books “for Polish humanists, social scientists, architects, and engineers, in the interest of national security,” and “in full knowledge reverses are possible.” The Foundation trustees and officers were interested in helping Poland identify and train potential leaders, convinced that first-hand exposure to Western Europe and the United States would have important intellectual and political consequences.

In the first year, 1957, twenty Polish scholars went to the United States and fifteen to Western Europe, while ten American and West European scholars went to Poland, each for an academic year. In addition, twenty nonacademic intellectual and cultural leaders visited the United States and twenty-five Europe for two months. Twenty-five Polish graduate students received aid for study here and twenty in Western Europe, and ten American and West European students studied in Poland, each for an academic year.

After the program had been in operation for two or three years, both Polish and American officials and scholars realized that Polish scholarship would obtain increased benefits and American funding would be most effectively used if the fellowships were concentrated in a select number of fields and if Polish, American, and West European scholars engaged in joint long-term research projects on large subjects of common concern. Therefore, joint research in fields such as applied linguistics, educational planning, social and applied psychology, urban planning, public administration, and business management gradually became important elements of the Ford venture.

It is difficult to determine just how many Polish scholars participated in this twelve-year Ford program. Some traveled to Western Europe, some to the United States, and some to both. Some received more than one grant from the Foundation, and some combined Foundation awards with aid from other institutions. Most engaged in research, but some took part in training workshops or round-table discussions. Some participated even when the relationship between the Foundation and Poland was broken because they had received grants before the disagreement. Moreover, even after the project was formally ended and the Foundation in 1968 transferred its academic exchange activities to IREX, until late 1974 it annually brought a handful of intellectuals from Eastern Europe to this country. However, more than 330 Polish humanists and social scientists participated between 1957 and 1962, and more than 100 studied in this country or in Western Europe between 1964 and 1968 on fellowships from the Ford Foundation. Between 1957 and 1966 the International Affairs Division spent more than $6,000,000 on its programs devoted to Eastern Europe.

As the Foundation officers had hoped, the presence of Polish scholars in West European and American institutions, and the increasing contact of all kinds that the Foundation encouraged, created interest in exchanges among other organizations. Some private foundations, like the Ventnor Foundation, were especially interested in improving medical facilities. Others, such as the Pulaski and Kosciuszko Foundations, reflected powerful interest among Americans of Polish descent who wished to assist Polish scholars to come to the United States and to strengthen ties between the two countries. The Pulaski Foundation in 1964 even began to bring Polish undergraduates here. The Brethren Service Commission since 1957 has brought to this country twenty to thirty Polish farmers each year to study agriculture, a program it expanded later to Bulgaria. The National Student Association in 1959 began an exchange of two graduate students each year with the Union of Polish Students.¹ In the same year, the International Institute of Education in New York established another program for five students each way.

Finally, our government became increasingly active, limited only by its financial resources and by caution lest it jeopardize these successful private programs. Beginning in 1958 the Department of State began to bring selected Polish political leaders to the United States for short tours, a program that it had begun in other countries in 1948. The Fulbright-Hays program was extended to Poland in 1959, when it brought ten Polish scholars here for research, and later to other East European countries. By 1970 as many as forty-three Polish scholars were studying in the United States annually on funds from the Department of State, the Department of Agriculture, and the Public Health Service. In another program of enormous benefit, the Department of State extended the Information Media Guarantee Program to Poland, until 1967 providing more than a million dollars each year to assist in the purchase of American publications and films, which are vitally necessary for libraries and basic intellectual relationships. In October 1972 the Polish and American governments signed an agreement on cooperation in science and technology that provided for joint research and shared funding in a large number of fields, from architecture to chemistry, mining, and pollution control. This was renewed and expanded in October 1974.

As a result, scholarly exchanges between Poland and the United States grew rapidly. They doubled from 1957 to 1958. Between 1956 and 1960, more than one thousand Polish scholars came to this country. On occasion in the 1960s, more than three hundred Polish scholars were here on long-term research grants, in most cases from universities, that used private foundation or National Science Foundation funds.

The success of these ventures and the evidence of their immediate value to Poland encouraged other East European governments to invite the Ford Foundation to establish similar arrangements. Programs of approximately the same size (twenty-five scholars and five cultural leaders each year) were established with Yugoslavia in 1959, with Hungary in 1962, and with Romania in 1965, and smaller ones with Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in 1968. The program with Yugoslavia became the Foundation’s largest in Eastern Europe. Moreover, just as the Foundation program with Poland led many universities, other institutions, and the government to sponsor study opportunities for Polish scholars, so these persuaded other institutions and the Department of State to begin programs in the other countries. In 1970, 154 Romanian scholars were engaged in research in the United States, a great number of them on grants from the Department of State, a few on the IREX exchange program, and the remainder aided by universities and other foundations. Thirty-five Americans were in Romania at the same time, including professors teaching language and literature in three Romanian universities.

These efforts all benefited substantially in organization and administration from experience in Poland. In 1962, for example, all Yugoslav participants were in economics, sociology, and law. The Czechoslovak program established in 1968 concentrated upon business management and public administration. In all these countries, particularly Yugoslavia and Hungary, Foundation officials and consultants and their counterparts in Eastern Europe agreed that the programs would be particularly fruitful if the East European scholars would review their needs, draft proposals to help meet those shortcomings, invite a group of American specialists in those fields to visit, meet scholars, and review proposals, and then discuss with the Foundation a program that would help efficiently meet national requirements. Consequently, cooperative ventures increased in number and importance, and efficiency and good will both increased.

These experiences in the 1960s led to other impressive approaches, particularly conferences in Eastern Europe bringing together specialists from the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Soviet Union on subjects of mutual interest. The best example of this was a conference held at Lake Balaton in Hungary in 1968, after two years of planning, under the direction of Earl Heady of Iowa State University. Financed by the Ford Foundation and by the governments of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, this conference attracted about one hundred agricultural specialists for a two-week period to discuss economic decision-making and planning models at farm, regional, and national levels. Approximately one-half of the participants came from the United States and Western Europe, with the other half from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, discouraged similar meetings, but IREX was able to arrange others in the 1970s.

After the exchanges with the Soviet Union had survived three years, the universities that participated in the Committee at their annual policy meeting in November 1961 decided to expand the academic exchange program to include Eastern Europe. The Committee decided to concentrate its efforts on Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. It eliminated Poland and Yugoslavia because of the relative ease with which Americans were able to study in these countries and of Polish and Yugoslav scholars to come to the United States, particularly under Ford Foundation auspices. It dropped Romania from consideration because the Department of State and the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 1960 had established a cultural, technical, and educational exchange program; this provided for an exchange of from three to six scholars each year. It did not consider Greece because it was a friendly and democratic state, and Greek and American scholars could easily arrange to study in the other country. In addition, the Ford Foundation’s Foreign Area Fellowship Program in its definition of foreign areas in the early 1950s had placed Greece in the Middle East, rather than in Eastern Europe. The Foundation’s and then the federal government’s fellowship programs thus omitted Greece from East European grant programs, while at the same time, for other reasons, they excluded it from Middle Eastern programs as well. This definition has had an important influence on our study of Greece, because university programs devoted to Eastern Europe and to the Middle East both neglect Greece.

Albania was omitted because so little interest appeared. East Germany was rejected because of the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Moreover, our government did not recognize East Germany, and few scholars were willing to venture into a country where they would receive no diplomatic protection. However, I conducted informal discussions with East German scholars at international conferences in 1960 and 1965. IREX resumed these talks in October 1972 and included funds for East Germany in its 1973-74 budget. The government of the German Democratic Republic chose to delay formal discussion of an exchange program until the United States and other governments had recognized it. Most observers thought that East Germany would insist that any academic exchange be part of a cultural affairs agreement between the two governments, but in February and March 1975 it negotiated a two-year program with IREX to begin in the fall of 1975 for a total of twenty months each way each year.

In preparing its proposals for Eastern Europe, the Committee naturally benefited from experience with the Soviet Union. Consequently, it prepared draft proposals designed to resolve in advance the problems that plagued its programs with the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education. Thus, the drafts specified that all institutions of higher learning should be included and that spouses and children could accompany participants. They did not distinguish between senior and junior scholars. The proposals were modest, from two to five scholars during each of the first two years. The accompanying letters described the Committee’s experience in administering programs with the Soviet Union, thus reassuring these governments that the Committee and its work were respectable. They indicated that Committee representatives would like to travel through these countries and visit a variety of institutions on their way home from a visit to the Soviet Union in June 1962.

Each of the three countries agreed to an exchange of three junior and senior scholars each year, beginning in September 1963. The programs expanded gradually but impressively from this small base, except for cautious and reserved Bulgaria, which even refused to accept books offered by the British Council. The Bulgarian exchange rose from three in 1963-64 to five for a total of fifty months per year for 1966-67. After Pravda on March 1, 1967, alleged that the Committee was an instrument of the CIA, the Bulgarian government reduced the program to fifteen months, demonstrating that it did not consider the charges true but reproving the Committee for being subject to Soviet criticism. The figure rose to twenty-three months in May 1970 and to twenty-eight in 1974-75. These numbers seem adequate for both sides.

The Hungarian exchange also progressed slowly because the Ford Foundation had established its program for scholars from Hungary in 1962. Thus, it grew from three scholars in 1963-64 to eight for a total of thirty-six months each year for the period from 1965 through 1968. The Hungarian government ended the exchange in June 1968 after one year’s notice, because its charge d'affaires in Washington, Janos Radvanyi, had defected to the United States. However, even after “these unfriendly events,” the Hungarians allowed two American participants to extend their terms of study. The program was resumed at a level of fifty months per year in January 1969 and was raised to seventy for 1974-75. A good number of Hungarian scholars (eighty-eight in 1970) studied in the United States throughout all of these years under other arrangements.

The exchange with Czechoslovakia, timorous in 1962 and 1963, grew rapidly and was most satisfying and promising until the 1968 invasion. It expanded from three in 1963-64 to four the following year, nine in 1966-67, and eleven for 1968-69. The Czechoslovak government in December 1964 even offered three bonus fellowships in organic chemistry and forestry. In 1964 the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education accepted two additional two-year fellowships that the Committee, with Department of State funds, offered for promising young scholars in American studies. Interest in programs with Czechoslovakia was so high that a number of universities established direct relationships with Czechoslovak institutions. Czechoslovakia in 1968 accounted for one-half of all long-term visitors from all of Eastern Europe in the United States. Indeed, the Czechoslovaks by August 1968 had already used their quota for 1969-70 as well. Committee and IREX officials were in London on their way to Czechoslovakia in particular and to the other East European countries on August 20, 1968, prepared to expand the exchange programs significantly. The program negotiated in January 1969 reduced the number to fifty months per year, where it remains in 1974-75. However, IREX has placed Czechoslovak scholars above this annual base, as did the Committee.

The enormous increase in interest among Czechoslovaks was reflected in the number of Czechoslovak scholars in this country, which rose from 83 in 1965 to 208 in 1967, 422 in 1968, and 405 in 1969, almost all of whom were sponsored and supported by universities and other private institutions. In the fall of 1969 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs assumed responsibility for all educational, scientific, and cultural contacts, and imposed severe restrictions on travel abroad. The figure then dropped dramatically to 101 in 1970.

The Committee’s establishment of programs with these three governments encouraged the National Academy of Sciences to complete agreements in 1966 with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia for exchanges of 40 months per year for each country, except Yugoslavia, which agreed to only 16. These exchanges remained small, although they grew to a total of 228 months for 1972-73, largely because scientists from these countries found it relatively easy to come to the United States under other auspices and because few of our scientists were interested or had the language qualifications necessary for studying in Eastern Europe. Moreover, the average length of study for our scientists was short; in 1972-73, ninety-two American scientists spent an average of 2-1/2 months in Eastern Europe. In 1968, fewer than ten percent of the East European scholars in the United States were participants in an official exchange program, and the percentage of American scholars in Eastern Europe under formal auspices was even smaller.

The changes within Eastern Europe in the 1960s led to proposals for revised and expanded programs. Thus, in 1967 when the Ford Foundation reviewed its international activities, it suggested exchanges of teachers of languages and literature between universities in Eastern Europe and the United States; cooperation in establishing and strengthening American studies centers and East European studies centers; and joint research projects on issues such as urban planning and pollution. Obtaining published materials quickly and easily was (and remains) a concern for scholars on both sides. Therefore, particularly in Prague and in Warsaw, I proposed that a private American university establish a university bookstore on the property of the Academy of Sciences, in a kind of sanctuary, in which any Czechoslovak or Polish citizen could buy with local currency any American book (no newspapers or periodicals, at least at first) he wished. The Foundation was to provide a small grant to help establish the bookstore, which would also have served as a central purchasing agent for all university and other libraries interested in purchasing books, journals, and newspapers from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The dollars that our universities would have spent for Polish and Czechoslovak publications would have been pooled to purchase the American books sought by Poles and Czechoslovaks, and the local currencies accumulated in Warsaw and Prague would have been used to pay for Polish and Czechoslovak publications for our libraries. Any surplus of Polish or Czechoslovak currencies would have been used to purchase copies of older publications available in Eastern Europe but not in the United States, or for microfilming newspapers and journals. Czechoslovak and Polish officials were deeply interested, but they did not accept the proposal, in part because of the opposition of their national book monopolies, but particularly because their governments would have had to surrender their censorship controls, which remain essential to these regimes.

IREX devoted the early 1970s to converting the Ford Foundation programs for Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia into genuine exchanges at substantially the level the Foundation had supported from these countries to the United States. Yugoslavia raised difficulties because Tito’s government became increasingly repressive concerning relations with Western states, delaying responses to IREX nominations, generally rejecting those with Slavic names, and in effect denying the field work essential for anthropologists and sociologists. Moreover, IREX in its first agreement in 1968 had recognized Yugoslav financial problems and generously undertook to support both Yugoslavs in the United States and Americans in Yugoslavia, as well as to pay for all travel. Eight months of determined negotiations with the Yugoslav Federal Administration for International Scientific, Educational, Cultural, and Technical Cooperation were required before agreement was finally reached on July 18, 1974, to move toward a reciprocally financed program by 1975-76. With this agreement, IREX’s exchanges with the six countries of Eastern Europe amounted to a total of 36 8 months annually.

IREX has also been able to arrange or support a series of joint and international conferences that offer great promise for expanding relationships. Thus, in 1972 it sponsored a conference in Sterling Forest, New York, on Romanian-American cooperation in the social sciences. This led to a joint seminar on economic relations in Bucharest in May 1974. IREX supported an international conference on Bulgarian studies at Madison, Wisconsin, in May 1973 and one of Romanian and American historians in Romania in 1974. It helped organize four Polish-American conferences in Poland in the summer of 1974, one of jurists, one of historians, one on the application of computers in the social sciences, and one on public policies in industrially developed countries.

The Department of State has made even more impressive progress with its programs than has IREX. The 1972 scientific and technical agreement with Poland was followed by a similar one with Hungary and a larger accord with Romania in December 1974. Extension of the Fulbright-Hays program to some countries in Eastern Europe brought substantial advancement. Thus, in 1973-74, at a time when five Soviet scholars were scheduled to come to the United States for one semester on this program, eighteen Poles, forty-four Romanians, and thirty Yugoslavs studied or taught here.

Analyzing the differences between the American and West European exchange programs with Eastern Europe and between the American programs with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union illuminates the particular role the East European states play in East-West relations and the dilemmas closer relations raise for their governments and for the Soviet Union. Briefly, the West European ventures were later, in general, than the American. They almost inevitably became larger than ours, in part because the distances are not so great and travel costs are minimal. Thus, the West European governments find it easy to arrange summer school sessions, short-term visits of scholars and outstanding intellectuals, colloquia and conferences, exchanges of groups of specialists and delegations, and exhibits. The West European exchanges are also far more political, perhaps because in every case a government ministry or agency administers them, and also because scholarly interest in Eastern Europe is not high, except in the Federal Republic of Germany, which did not establish formal exchange programs with any East European states until 1970. By 1975 all Western states except Spain and Portugal had agreements and active programs, in every case imbedded in inclusive cultural exchange agreements between two governments. These exacting agreements closely resemble each other, to the point that some of the smaller ones, such as those of Denmark and Norway with Bulgaria, faithfully follow the model of the more substantial efforts. However, even these tiny agreements reflect the powerful desire of both sides to maintain and increase relationships.

The programs the British Council administers are probably the largest and most effective of any with East European countries. They also constitute a striking comparison with those of the Committee and IREX. The British Council had cultural centers in most East European countries before World War II and re-established them after the war. In fact, it had twenty-six representatives in Prague, Brno, and Bratislava in 1947 and nine in Hungary in 1948. These centers remained open in Poland and Yugoslavia but were closed in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania in 1949 and 1950. Consequently, the British Council did not need to re-establish relationships with Poland and Yugoslavia. After three years of talks, a representative of the British Council visited the other four countries in April 1962, exchanging letters that established cultural exchange programs, including scholars and teachers.

The basic interest of the British Council, like that of the European governments, was to establish a foundation on which it could project a favorable image into Eastern Europe, increase political influence, and expand opportunities for trade. The British in this part of the world, as in other areas, have emphasized improved and expanded English language teaching and the establishment of centers and libraries. For example, already in the 1950s the British Council maintained libraries in Warsaw, Krakow, Belgrade, and Zagreb. In each of its four new programs, the British have presented books to important libraries. Thus, the Council persuaded the Czechoslovak State Library in Prague to establish a special section for books in English. It presented more than five thousand volumes to this section in 1966, and the library had eight thousand English volumes when the Soviet armies invaded in 1968. The interest in learning English and the success of the British Council in satisfying this demand were so great that the Council was providing language teachers in Budapest as early as the summer of 1963. Six teachers of English were engaged in instruction in Czechoslovakia in 1966. In that year, 260 Polish teachers of English spent short periods of study in the United Kingdom. Even in 1969, Czechoslovakia began an exchange of secondary school language teachers.

Until the mid-1960s British scholars demonstrated little interest in spending a semester or an academic year in Eastern Europe because of declining interest in this area in British universities after World War II. For example, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London, the largest institute of its kind in the United Kingdom, graduated only one Ph.D. dealing with Czechoslovakia between 1947 and 1962. In 1962-63 the British Council obtained no applications from scholars who wished to spend a year in Bulgaria or in Romania.

Interest increased dramatically in the late 1960s, largely because the University Grants Committee increased funds for East European studies and because language instruction for undergraduates expanded rapidly in the provincial universities. This led to a number of direct exchange programs between British and East European universities, such as that between Charles University in Prague and the University of London in 1966 for the exchange of language teachers, and agreements in the following year between three provincial universities and Sofia. By 1971 British universities had agreements for exchanges of lecturers with universities in four other countries in Eastern Europe. By 1970 a number of institutions were sending undergraduates to Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria to improve their Russian and were exchanging other undergraduates with institutions throughout Eastern Europe. For example, the University of Sussex began to send four to six undergraduates to Charles University to study Russian and to accept six Czechoslovak students interested in improving their knowledge of English. Leeds University has assimilar program with Brno, and Bradford with Presov in Slovakia; the Bradford curriculum requires its Russian language majors to spend five months in Presov, which also provides three Russian language instructors for Bradford. Sheffield and Olomouc, Glasgow and Charles University, and Bradford and Skoplje constitute other such matches.

The programs administered by the French and Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs are very much like those of the British Council. Italy completed its first cultural exchange agreement with Poland in 1961, and followed with Bulgaria in 1962 and Romania in 1963. By 1971 Italy had established agreements and even mixed commissions to administer exchanges with all the East European states, including Albania. In that year, Italy had exchanges of chairs or professorships with Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. In 1972 fourteen professors from Eastern Europe taught in Italian universities, and a similar number of Italians were teaching in Eastern Europe. In that same year, Italy provided more than eight hundred months of fellowships for East European scholars (considerably more than double the IREX programs) and could send Italians who wished to study in Eastern Europe for almost eight hundred months.

The German government and German organizations did not begin scholarly programs with Eastern Europe until 1965, when the Deutsche Austauschdienst (DAAD) began to assist both young and senior scholars from Bulgaria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia to study in Germany. In 1965 it made awards to 75 Czechoslovak scholars for study in Germany, and more than a third of all DAAD fellowships went to East European scholars that year. In 1967, 178 scholars from Czechoslovakia, 15 from Yugoslavia, 36 from Hungary, and 35 from Poland were studying there. The Humboldt Foundation awards for 1969 included 62 senior scholars from Czechoslovakia, the largest number from any country in the world, as well as a total of 36 from Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. In that year, one-fifth of all the prestigious Humboldt fellowships awarded to foreigners went to East Europeans. In short, the traditional ties between Eastern and Western European universities and other institutions of higher learning were being re-established by the time the Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and those ties revived and even increased in all countries except Czechoslovakia after that event.

In some ways American exchanges with East European countries are similar to those with the Soviet Union. In all instances, American organizations negotiate with a communist government that has full control over its end of the exchange process. These governments are interested largely in improving and increasing their scientific, technical, and management capacities, and the great majority of the East European scholars who come to the United States and Western Europe are in some field or other of science and technology.

East European nomination of scholars in fields sensitive for military reasons occurred only in the first two years. For example, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education for 1963-64 nominated three scholars and three alternates. Five of these nominees were in sensitive military fields, and the sixth was an officer in the security police. Three of the four Hungarians nominated the first year were also in sensitive fields.

The political controls and restrictions exercised by the East European governments resemble those of the Soviet Union, but they are much more relaxed. Americans in these countries have to assume that their mail will be censored. Surveillance has occurred occasionally or spasmodically, and the security police have sometimes acted as irresponsibly as in the Soviet Union. Thus, the Czechoslovak police in 1964 sought to frighten the wife of an American scholar into becoming an informer. In November 1973 Hungary summarily expelled an American scholar, without making any charges or providing any justification. When IREX immediately postponed further movement of American and Hungarian scholars, suspended exchanges scheduled for 1974-75, and insisted upon the scholar’s re-admission, the Hungarian Institute for Cultural Relations after four months allowed the scholar to return on a tourist visa. However, some Hungarians, presumably policemen, then harassed the American, who was also exposed to treatment he considered undignified when he left. IREX then reduced the 1974-75 program to its formal quota, postponed indefinitely negotiations for joint research projects, and suspended its sponsorship of a Hungarian-American conference on comparative law.

Far more East European scholars almost inevitably seek to study in the United States than American scholars in Eastern Europe, even though the East European governments have in general been eager to expand the exchange on a reciprocal basis and have rarely rejected our nominees.² A high proportion of young Americans qualified for study in Eastern Europe has applied for research there, but of course the basic number remains small, even though growing. The Committee, the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of State, IREX, and other organizations have been imaginative and energetic in stimulating increased interest in all fields of study, such as geology, linguistics, mathematics, and music, but the number of those interested is not large.

Thus, only 20 applied for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria in the first year, 1963-64, and only 36 in 1967-68. The largest number of applicants for these three countries together in any one year was 43. The Committee in no year received more than 8 applications for study in Bulgaria. In the exchange program with Romania that the Department of State administered, the Department could find no qualified candidates in the third year. In the fall of 1967, 561 scholars from Eastern Europe were in the United States and only 94 Americans were in Eastern Europe. In 1968-69, when 422 Czechoslovak scholars were here, only 17 Americans were in Czechoslovakia. The following year, the figures were 101 and 15, still a great disparity. In 1969-70 IREX placed 63 East European scholars in this country, while sending only 20 there. Two years later IREX noted that East Europeans had spent 442 months in the United States, while our scholars spent only 257 there. The Department of State statistics for exchanges of all kinds show that 1,426 East Europeans had come to this country and that only 288 Americans had gone there in 1970. Consequently, the contrast between the flood of East Europeans eager to come here and the number of Americans qualified and interested to study there constitutes a problem for those who seek an exchange that approaches some balance, if only for financial reasons.

IREX therefore has established a number of awards to encourage scholars to plan research in Eastern Europe, to enable institutions to engage in cooperative research projects with East European institutions, and to assist graduate students in the social sciences in particular to acquire language and area training so that they might qualify to study in Eastern Europe. In 1974 IREX announced it would consider applications from those who did not know Hungarian, “if their research topics do not require a command of the language,” and that it would accept applications for two-year awards, the first year to be devoted to intensive study of Hungarian in Budapest. It also encouraged direct exchanges between individuals and institutions through planning grants. Still, in spite of these imaginative approaches, the IREX agreements with Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia for 1974-75 totaled only 368 months each way. However, because IREX occasionally accepts and places more scholars from Eastern Europe than the formal agreement provides, it budgeted for 545 months for 1974-75.

The differences among Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania serve to demonstrate the acute variety that exists within Eastern Europe, which President Johnson recognized in his February 1964 proposal for “treating different East European countries differently.” Even the organizations that administer the exchange program differ from country to country. For example, the Czech and Slovak Ministries of Education direct their programs, the Institute for Cultural Relations with Foreign Peoples the Hungarian, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences the Bulgarian.

The exchange programs with Eastern Europe differ in many ways from those with the Soviet Union. The Committee and IREX have always negotiated their own agreements, independent of the Department of State, and negotiation has been always much simpler and easier than with the Soviet Union. The original agreement with each East European country was concluded in just a few hours, and the Committee arranged renewals sometimes by correspondence. Placement has not constituted a problem. Neither the Committee nor IREX succeeded in persuading the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education to shift the system of counting participants from a semester or academic-year basis to a man-month basis, which would have allowed both sides flexibility and would have increased the number involved. After the first two years, the East European organizations quickly agreed to transfer the measurement system to man-month counting. The efficiency of communications and of administration is notably higher in Eastern Europe and generally is like that among West European states. Indeed, by 1975 IREX had telex communications with every capital in Eastern Europe except Prague (and Tirana), and this shortcoming was repaired to some degree by telex communications with Bratislava.

The East European countries provide much more data concerning their participants than does the Soviet Union, and they send a smaller percentage of party hacks. Thus, even in the first year, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences provided the home addresses of its nominees, and the Hungarian Institute for Cultural Relations enclosed diplomas and lists of its nominees' publications. East European candidates generally are far better informed concerning American scholarship than are their Soviet counterparts, and their command of English is significantly superior. The East European states also send to this country a much higher percentage of scholars in the humanities than does the Soviet Union. In 1972-73, for example, four of the sixteen Hungarian scholars on the IREX program were historians, as were two of the thirteen Romanians. In 1973 six Bulgarian philosophers were engaged in research on our campuses.

The East European states have been remarkably permissive in admitting Americans for study, except for the decision of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education to deny admission to an American scholar in 1963-64 because the Department of State had denied admission to Czechoslovak scholars in sensitive fields and to retaliate for a group of Czechoslovak denials in 1972-73. Moreover, most American candidates have been interested in twentieth-century history, political science, and literature, sensitive subjects in countries communists rule. Bulgaria in 1966, after some discussion, admitted an American and allowed him access to archives for study of the Jews in Bulgaria during World War II. In 1969-70 the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education admitted scholars interested in the nationality problem in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia between 1918 and 1939 and Czechoslovak-Yugoslav relations over the same period. The Czechoslovaks in 1973-74 even admitted an American interested in Thomas Masaryk.

Above all, Eastern Europe remains more open and free. All institutions of higher learning are accessible to our scholars, regardless of their age or experience. No city in any of these countries is closed, and travel and field studies are easy. Americans are not only able to travel throughout these countries, but they have also found it simple to enter and leave, obtaining visa renewals with no difficulty. In fact, one scholar left Hungary on six different occasions during his academic year there. Wives and children have been accepted from the beginning. Moreover, two of the first Hungarian participants brought their wives, an achievement that only one senior scholar from the Soviet Academy of Sciences managed before 1972.

Archives and libraries are open to all Western participants, and field work raises no problems, except occasionally in Czechoslovakia since 1969. Thus, in 1967-68 young scholars spent the academic year working in the Archives of the Institute of the History of Socialism, formally of the History of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, an archive similar to one in the Soviet Union denied to even senior Soviet scholars. As early as 1965 an American scholar was able to use a questionnaire and a poll in research on Czechoslovak journalism. In 1972-73 another was able to interview a significant number of Romanian factory managers in his study of the social impact of technological change.

Poland is so relaxed and open that a number of American universities have established their own exchange programs with Polish institutions. Stanford University and the University of Warsaw in 1964 began an exchange of graduate students that soon led to a substantial Stanford undergraduate program there as well, and Kansas University in 1970 established a short-lived program for fourteen students with the University of Poznan. Indiana University in 1967 established an exciting exchange program with the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Each year the Institute sent four thousand books, about the number of volumes published annually in Czechoslovakia that would be of interest to the Indiana University Library. Indiana in return gave the Institute a copy of each book reviewed by the Journal of American History in the field of American history, about five hundred books each year. In addition, it provided two senior fellowships in American studies, including round-trip travel from London. From the beginning, most of the Czechoslovaks brought their wives and families. The Czechoslovak government ended this program in 1970.

In 1974 the University of Florida began to send up to thirty-five students to the University of Poznan for summer study. Romania in 1969 began to send undergraduates to the United States, and in 1971 it sent eight to the United Kingdom, at Romanian expense. After IREX established special grants to encourage “collaborative projects” between American and Soviet and American and East European institutions, sixteen of the nineteen awards for 1972-73 involved projects with Eastern Europe and only three with the Soviet Union.

The experiences of West European organizations have been similar to ours. Perhaps the best illustration of the East European approach is the system that the British Council and the Polish Ministry of Higher Education have used since 1968 for selecting Polish scholars for twenty-three British Council fellowships. The Poles nominate forty scholars, the British Council rates them in priority, and the Polish Ministry then nominates the top twenty-three on the British list. The Polish Cultural Institute in London chooses the British participants in this program, and a British Council representative participates in the selection process. Similarly, a joint Yugoslav-British board awards fellowships from the Yugoslav government to young British scholars.

Finally, the countries of Eastern Europe have been far more receptive to exchange classroom teachers than has the Soviet Union. The Committee and American universities as early as 1958 sought arrangements under which Americans might teach American literature and English in Soviet institutions, and Soviet scholars might teach Russian language, literature, and history here. The Soviet Ministry of Higher Education refused even to consider exchanges of teachers until 1972, when the Soviet government at last agreed to include an exchange of eight instructors in various fields beginning in the spring of 1974.

Eastern Europe is substantially different. Since 1955, hundreds of East European scholars have taught in American universities. Indiana University in the 1960s appointed Czechoslovak scholars as visiting professors to teach music, folklore, economics, and theatre. In some years, more than thirty Polish scholars were visiting professors in different American universities. As early as 1965, American professors were teaching English and literature in Polish universities, with funds provided jointly by the Polish universities and by the Department of State. At the same time, two Americans began to teach English in Czechoslovakia and one in Bulgaria. The Fulbright-Hays program for lecturers began to operate in Yugoslavia in 1964 and elsewhere in Eastern Europe in 1966-67 (seven years earlier than in the Soviet Union), with one American in Bulgaria, three in Poland, from four to six in Romania, and thirteen in Yugoslavia. In 1975, at Polish initiative, several American Midwestern universities began assisting the University of Warsaw to establish an American Studies Center, with a strong library and courses in English given by American professors on history, literature, economics, art, and such subjects.

The total population of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania is approximately one-third that of the Soviet Union, and the addition of Yugoslavia to that group brings the total up to less than half that of their large eastern neighbor. However, throughout the 1960s and thus far in the 1970s, the number of scholars from these six countries in the United States and of American scholars in these six countries in every year has exceeded those figures for the total Soviet-American exchange. The growth of exchange programs throughout these years and the improvements in exchange conditions were both much more rapid and easier than with the Soviet Union. In fact, the number of East Europeans in the IREX exchange increased forty percent in 1972 over 1971. As a British Council representative remarked, “In a word, the East Europeans are more like other Europeans.”

¹As mentioned earlier, this student exchange, founded on idealism, hope, and innocence but desperate for funds after the first year or two, sometime in the early 1960s began to accept financial support from the CIA. When this became public knowledge in the winter of 1967, the embbrrassed association quickly withdrew the sole participant then in Poland and ended its program.

²This has also been the case in Western Europe. Over the years, the number of East European scholars who have come to the United Kingdom has been about twice as great as that of British going to Eastern Europe.