CHAPTER THREE

The Varieties of Cultural Exchanges, 1958-75

The most remarkable aspect of Soviet-American academic exchanges, and of cultural exchanges as a whole, is that they were launched only two years after the crushing of the Hungarian revolution and have survived the major crises of the past two decades and the disagreements that grew out of the exchanges themselves. In fact, they have acquired apparent permanence and may now influence the political relationships under which they operate. Department of State statistics demonstrate that the number of Americans and Soviets visiting under the exchanges agreements has been remarkably stable, the only great leaps being those years in which large athletic teams or groups of performers have distorted the figures. Thus, the number of Americans who went to the Soviet Union in each of the first three years under all these programs exceeded those of every other year until 1972, and the large increases since then are due largely to brief visits of planning teams under the various joint research agreements signed in the 1970s. While the annual totals have been remarkably constant and many participants in later years have been repeaters or alumni, the variety of exchanges inside and outside the official agreements has slowly increased, enriching and strengthening cultural and political ties between the two countries.

The history of the exchanges reveals several striking characteristics. Some elements, such as the programs for both junior and senior scholars in Russian studies and the humanities, public health, science, athletics, and national exhibitions, have been constant factors, operating within slightly modified limits that the biannual agreements establish. Others are additions that are made usually after years of prodding by American institutions and the Department of State. These include those for language teachers, effective in 1963; for undergraduates and university classroom teachers allowed in 1972 and begun in 1974; and the joint research programs after 1971, still fledglings in 1975. In addition, the size and quality of the agreements, and even the ease and duration of the negotiations, have been related to the larger framework of Soviet-American relations. Fluctuations in number of those actually exchanged tend to lag about two years behind political developments, demonstrating that cultural exchanges have reflected rather than directly affected the major changes in relations. Thus, the number of American participants in 1971 was the second lowest in this history, and a substantial increase occurred only in 1973, although detente began in 1969 and the February 1970 agreement had reversed the downward statistical trend that had begun with the 1964 agreement.

The cultural exchange programs since the first one was signed in January 1958 have remained a part of the official agreements that the Department of State has negotiated biannually, first with the Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and later with the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The second agreement, signed in November 1959, required only two weeks of negotiations (the first consumed three months), considerably expanded all the programs, provided for direct exchanges between Harvard and Leningrad Universities and Columbia and Moscow Universities, and included two science agreements as appendixes. The third, in March 1962, required five weeks but provided a general increase of almost fifteen percent and authorized the exchange of senior scholars and lecturers as well as summer programs for language teachers. This agreement reflected the improvement in Soviet-American relations that culminated in the nuclear test ban treaty in the summer of 1963, and it made 1962 and 1963 the most promising years until the early 1970s. The peak years for Americans going to the Soviet Union on all the exchange programs between 1960 and 1972 were 1964 and 1965.

The group of junior scholars sent to the Soviet Union in 1963-64 was the largest and most able the Committee had forwarded, and the number of those who applied for 1964-65 was not exceeded until 1974-75. The review that the participating universities made in 1963 was so persuasively optimistic that the Ford Foundation in August 1964 awarded the Committee $1,500,000 for the period from July 1965 through June 1970. Moreover, prospects were so exciting and attractive that several universities sought responsibility for directing the Committee’s affairs during 1965-70. The public shared this enthusiasm and confidence. A Louis Harris national poll announcement on December 15, 1963, revealed that sixty-nine percent of the American nation approved the exchange of young scholars and only twenty-four opposed. On the other hand, only thirty-four percent favored exchanges of scientists and engineers and fifty-four percent opposed.

The next three agreements reflected the changed atmosphere after the removal of Khrushchev, growing tension over America’s increasing involvement in Vietnam, pressure and crises in the Middle East, the “spring” in Czechoslovakia, and increasing Soviet concern with ideological issues, dissent, and dissenters. The February 1964 agreement required seven weeks of negotiations and reduced the academic programs substantially. The March 1966 agreement constituted still another decline. Indeed, 1967 was the slimmest year for academic exchanges since their establishment, thirty percent below the average for the previous nine years. When I visited the Soviet Union in September 1967 on behalf of the Ford Foundation to discuss ways of expanding academic relationships through joint long-term and multinational research projects, I was not even able to meet the officials with whom I had been in correspondence. Moreover, in 1967-68 only one American and one Soviet performing arts group were exchanged, and no cultural leaders visited the other country.

The agreement signed in Moscow on July 15, 1968, represented a further decline. In fact, the Soviet draft proposals for those negotiations, due in August 1967, arrived only on April 5, 1968, more than three months after the period covered had in fact begun. It reduced all the Committee’s programs, and others as well. For example, that of major performing arts groups dropped from five to three, national exhibits from two to one, and technical delegations from fourteen to eleven. At the same time, it provided for an exchange of delegations to consider new programs for weather control, treatment of industrial waste and pollution, and study of solar eclipses. The atomic energy agreement, which the Soviet government had allowed to lapse in 1966, was also renewed, so that 1968 foreshadowed Soviet interest in increasing exchanges in science and technology in the 1970s.

The seventh agreement, signed February 10, 1970, after only a week’s negotiation, reversed the downward trend. All the Committee’s programs were increased, although not to their earlier levels. The other academic exchange programs remained stable, but the performing arts group exchange rose from three to five, and a new category of exchanges of delegations and information on oceanography, urban transport, air pollution, management systems, social security, agriculture, economics, and the treatment of waste water was added. This reversal and subsequent expansions and improvements were apparently directly related to the Soviet decision to adopt the approach called detente. They reflected the winding down of American participation in the war in Vietnam, with growing prospects of an important communist triumph; the fighting on the Ussuri in 1969 and the rising Soviet-Chinese hostility; Ostpolitik and the benefits it produced for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe in particular; and the desperate Soviet necessity to obtain scientific and technical assistance from the West.

Moreover, the Soviet desire to purchase massive amounts of grain to meet the great shortage, represented by the meeting of Brezhnev and Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz on April 11, 1972, the day the eighth exchanges agreement was signed, affected Soviet policy. The quick and cordial negotiations were also no doubt part of an effort to establish a friendly atmosphere for the visit President Nixon was to make in May 1972. This agreement maintained most of the academic programs at the 1970 level but increased that for language teachers. In addition, it finally provided that eight American and Soviet scholars teach semester or full-year courses in the other’s universities in fields ranging from the natural and social sciences to language and literature. Moreover, for the first time, junior American scholars were allowed to bring dependent children as well as spouses, opening the program to some otherwise unwilling to participate.

The agreement signed in Washington on June 19, 1973, for the period from January 1974 through December 1976 was concluded much earlier than usual. It enlarged slightly the number of major performing arts groups and of individual artists, and it provided for seminars and exchanges of educational specialists. In addition, while the 1972 agreement provided for an exchange of forty graduate students and young scholars, the new one called for “at least forty.” Therefore, in the spring of 1974 each side nominated forty persons and ten alternates, all of whom were placed, as were all fifty-two nominees in the summer of 1975. Moreover, Brezhnev and Nixon in 1973 renewed the agreements through 1979, with a review scheduled in December 1976.

In short, the negotiations themselves, the agreements, and the numbers exchanged all follow the larger pattern of Soviet-American relationships. They reveal that the Department of State and those who depend on it to advance cultural exchange programs have little authority in dealing with the Soviet government, but also that firmness, good will, and imagination ultimately do have some influence and can be productive under benign circumstances.

The cultural exchanges have also been distinguished by variety, each program possessing its own purpose and significance, and all of them together reflecting some of the character and vitality of modern culture. These varieties, as well as those elements of our culture that are not included in these formal and restrictive agreements (such as publications), together reveal some of the limited ways in which these two states and societies now touch each other.

For most Americans, and probably for most Soviet citizens as well, basketball players and ballet dancers, sprinters and soloists are the most important elements. In fact, impresario Sol Hurok and the Soviet artists whom he brought to this country, generally within the agreement, have dominated the public image of cultural exchanges. Thus, the Bolshoi Ballet had made four tours to the United States by 1970, as had the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble. The Kirov Ballet has completed two tours of the United States. Such splendid groups not only serve a Soviet political purpose, entertaining and impressing thousands, but also earn dollars. For example, on its first trip to this country, the Moiseyev Folk Dance Ensemble grossed $1,500,000 in an eleven-week tour. On the other hand, American groups perform in central cities in the Soviet Union, providing thousands of Soviet citizens some understanding and insight into the vitality and variety of our cultural life. Perhaps the most successful have been Benny Goodman, who gave thirty-one concerts in a tour in 1962, and Duke Ellington and his orchestra, who visited five Soviet cities in 1971 and attracted immense and enthusiastic audiences.

Movies constitute a less-important element in the public aspect of exchanges because Soviet films are simply not popular in the United States and because of Soviet reluctance to encourage and import our films, which they consider a projection of the United States and a corrective for their official version of this country. For example, the Soviet Union in 1959 purchased ten American feature films at low prices, the first ones imported since 1949. Through 1967 it purchased a total of forty-five. American distributors in 1959 purchased seven excellent Soviet films, The Cranes Are Flying, Swan Lake, Circus Stars, The Idiot, Quiet Flows the Don, Othello, and Don Quixote. However, our public is unfamiliar with the style and content of Soviet movies and has no special interest in Soviet actors or actresses. Indeed, American distributors lost almost $500,000 on the first seven, all of which American critics acclaimed. Moreover, the Soviet film industry has not analyzed the American market or studied promotional methods. American distributors provide the Soviet Union a percentage of the box office receipts for Soviet films shown here. The Soviet government refuses to adopt this system for American films. Instead it purchases them directly at relatively low cost and profits substantially from immense Soviet public interest. In spite of intensive efforts on our side, few exchanges of documentaries or film delegations have taken place. The first joint production, of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, was undertaken only in 1975.

Privately arranged, issue-oriented efforts outside the exchanges agreements have also attracted a good deal of public attention and have had some influence. The Peace Hostage Exchange proposals, which attracted enthusiastic support in 1962, perhaps best demonstrate popular eagerness to remove the fear and suspicion which poison relations and the hope that the sincerity and good will of individual Americans might change the atmosphere. An imaginative New York advertising executive suggested that a number of Soviet and American leaders have their children or other close relatives reside in Washington and Moscow, respectively, as “peace hostages.” Public response was so enthusiastic that the group planned to lease eight vessels from the Maritime Administration reserve fleet to carry eight thousand volunteer hostages to the Soviet Union. Some enthusiastic supporters urged exchanging a million. These dreams, like others, faded before the Soviet failure to respond. The Citizens Exchange Corps since then has concentrated on sending tourist groups and on helping the rare groups of Soviet tourists who visit the United States. In addition, in the summer of 1975 it arranged for two sets of conferences each year with the Institute of Soviet-American Relations, a propaganda organization—the first two sets in 1975 and 1976 on health delivery services and on elementary and secondary education.

On quite a different level, but in the same spirit, the Quakers have achieved some quiet effects, but they have often been thwarted. The Soviet government has long been favorably disposed toward the Quakers, even though there are less than two hundred thousand Friends in the world, of whom somewhat more than half live in the United States and Canada, and even though (perhaps because) the Quakers come from the middle class or upper middle class and concentrate in the intellectual professions. Their long-term concern for peaceful relations, understanding, discussion, and education have clearly won Soviet respect. Quaker relief work in Russia during and immediately after the First World War also left a good impression.

The postwar work of Quakers in other countries was launched in 1947 by British Quakers, who established the Educational Interchange Council to exchange German, Austrian, and British students and language teachers. They expanded this to conferences, in particular of political and educational leaders. In 1951 the conference program included Yugoslavia and in 1955 the Soviet Union and Poland. The British also established programs in which young men and women from the United Kingdom and other countries engaged in summer work projects in East European countries. Later they arranged brief exchange visits of British teachers of Russian and of Soviet teachers of English.

Interest among American Quakers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe began in 1952 when they began a series of annual seminars lasting eight or ten days for diplomats, particularly from Eastern and Western Europe, on “National Interests and International Responsibilities.” Soviet diplomats participated after 1956. Seven seminars have been held in Eastern Europe, and the 1974 seminar was in the Soviet Union. By 1973 more than two thousand diplomats from a hundred countries, including seventy from the Soviet Union, had participated.

In 1954 the Quakers established annual seminars on East-West exchanges in Austria, inviting six West and six East European countries to send representatives of youth organizations. A Quaker group visited the Soviet Union in 1955 to establish contact with Christian and Jewish groups. Representatives from the Soviet Young Communist League or Komsomol then attended the 1955 and 1956 seminars, and another group visited Friends throughout the United States in 1958. American Quakers participated as observers in the Moscow Youth Festival in 1957 and in a similar one held in Vienna in 1959, but they then concluded that these vast, highly organized spectacles were not meetings in which they could operate effectively.

From 1960 through 1965 the Quakers maintained a system of annual seminars for small groups of youth leaders from the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries chosen on an equal basis by the Americans and the Soviets. These lasted three weeks and occasionally produced tense discussions of critical issues.

In 1960 the Quakers began an exchange of four elementary or high school teachers, each spending from two weeks to three months in the other country. Finally, in 1966 the American Friends Service Committee and the Institute of Soviet-American Relations began a series of annual seminars on Soviet-American relations, sometimes in the United States, sometimes in the Soviet Union (the 1974 seminar was in Moscow), and sometimes elsewhere. These are designed for twenty participants from each country, ordinarily men and women at mid-point in their careers. In short, since 1955 the American Friends Service Committee has staged a variety of exchange programs with the Soviet Union. These programs are small; over the first fifteen years only 219 Soviet citizens participated. The Quakers have faced the same problems as those administering other exchanges, with the Soviet Union often canceling programs just before they were scheduled to begin. Moreover, most Soviet participants have been more interested in propaganda than in candid discussion of different points of view and in identifying common interests.

Private meetings of Soviet and American scientists with scientists and public figures from other countries to discuss major international issues have had the same goals but have probably had much greater impact. One such series, called the Dartmouth Conference (the first session was held at Dartmouth College in 1960), was financed and to some degree initiated by the International Affairs Division of the Ford Foundation. Its meetings bring together for about a week from thirty to fifty Soviet and American intellectual leaders, including a few scientists, to discuss issues such as effective communications and the economic problems of less-developed countries. The eighth Dartmouth Conference, on “Problems of Detente in the Next Five Years,” took place in Tbilisi in April 1974.

Another more important group is known as the Pugwash Conference because it held its first meeting in July 1957 at the summer home of Cyrus Eaton in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. It had its origins in the concerns of British and American scientists, particularly those active on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, about the spread of nuclear weapons, but Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India and A. V. Topchiev, then Chief Scientific Secretary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, also played roles. The first meeting brought together twenty-two men, all but two scientists, from ten countries—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia, Austria, France, Poland, and the People’s Republic of China. They spent four days discussing the social responsibilities of scientists, the dangers raised by nuclear weapons, and disarmament. Since 1957 the Pugwash group has held from one to three small and largely confidential conferences each year in various parts of the globe, with scientists from twenty to thirty countries participating. Pugwash has also organized symposia and study groups, published several volumes, and forwarded its agenda and occasional statements to the governments of the major states. Disarmament and arms control have remained the most important themes, but there have also been sessions devoted to the role of science in helping developing nations, the environment and the population explosion, biological and chemical warfare, and the free flow of scientific information.

These meetings apparently have been relatively free from national poses and politics, but the participants have gradually learned that the basic problems remain national and political and that few scientists are able to purge the national devil within them. The sixth conference, in Stowe in 1961, was almost destroyed when the Soviet Union tested the largest atomic bomb at the very time Soviet scientists at the meeting were proposing universal and complete disarmament. American activities in Vietnam were discussed heatedly in meetings between 1964 and 1968. The session in Nice in the fall of 1968 produced vigorous discussion but no agreement concerning the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was not mentioned at the conference in Sochi in December 1969.

The effectiveness of Pugwash depends on the vigor of the group in each country; some are energetic and productive, others are not. The establishment of an executive committee in 1963 failed to provide continuity, and most meetings of these busy men have been brief and hurried. Only about a thousand different scientists attended the conferences between 1957 and 1974, and few of them were young.

Above all, these earnest scientists have run directly into the main issues separating the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus, the statement produced at the end of the nineteenth conference in Sochi in a quiet and civilized way summarizes the basic disagreement concerning the free flow of information among dedicated scientists:

The Pugwash Conferences held thus far have helped educate important scientists to the realities of international politics, and they add a new sense of realism both to their research and to their deliberations. They provide an important channel of communication among eminent scientists who have come to like and trust each other. Above all, many participants carry their views to their political leaders. Thus, Pugwash may have exerted a considerable influence at the very highest levels of the Soviet scientific and political communities and at the points where those groups interact. Through the relationships established via conferences and the information that flows from them through the upper levels of the scientific establishment, some eminent Soviet scientists, including Andrei Sakharov, have acquired understanding of the need for the freer flow of information and for political leaders who recognize that need.

Our government has of course been especially eager to use the exchanges agreements to improve the flow of people and ideas, and it has given encouragement to every public and private activity that can assist. At the official level, the Department of State has constantly and vigorously sought to eliminate restrictions and to make communications between the United States and the Soviet Union as free as they are among Western countries. It has therefore pressed for the elimination of Soviet jamming of Western radio broadcasts, of Soviet censorship, and of all controls. This pressure helped persuade the Soviet Union to end jamming of foreign government broadcasts in September 1973, although it still jams Radio Liberty and resorts to jamming all foreign broadcasts during crises, such as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. All Western states have been constant critics of jamming, as expressed, for example, at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. This serves at least to place Soviet leaders on the defensive and to help improve the quality of the Soviet mass media.

The Soviet position on the flow of information has led our government to emphasize a variety of ways of breaking through or circumventing the controls. While the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe remain the most important American instruments against the Soviet blockade and are remarkably inexpensive (Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe together cost about $60,000,000 each year), the Department of State considers that national exhibits promise the greatest immediate political benefit of all the elements included in the exchanges agreements. Soviet reluctance to continue the exchange of exhibits and the lack of publicity and information about our exhibits in the Soviet Union suggest that the Soviet government shares this opinion. The Department uses the exhibits to display an authentic picture of the United States at important Soviet centers over a prolonged period, thereby providing a wide range of contacts and countering Soviet ignorance and misinformation concerning this country. In a sense, exhibits are the cultural equivalent of fleet visits or “showing the flag.” The young Russian-speaking American guides are effective respondents to thousands of queries from Soviet visitors, and they supplement the demonstrations of our artistic, scientific, technical, and productive skills.

The first exhibit, the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow in 1959, attracted 2,700,000, even though the Soviet press paid little attention and Khrushchev in particular criticized it (as did the House Committee on Un-American Activities). Attendance often reached 60,000 a day, and Soviet visitors “liberated” seventy percent of the books displayed. The eight exhibits between 1961 and 1967, on subjects such as plastics, transport, medicine, and graphic arts, attracted a total of 4,813,771 people, an average of slightly more than 600,000 per exhibit. Throughout 1972 the exhibit on research and development attracted an average of 17,000 daily in Moscow. In short, these exhibits, the product and pride of USIA, greatly advance our national interest in educating millions about the United States and American society.²

Soviet exhibits in the United States have not been quite so successful. The 1959 exhibition at the Coliseum in New York attracted more than 1,000,000 Americans, but eight exhibits between 1961 and 1967 attracted a total of only 952,000 visitors, an average of 120,000 per exhibit. Attendance in recent years has increased as the quality of the exhibits and the skill with which they are prepared have improved.

In all its negotiations the Department has sought radio and television programs, the right to establish reading rooms, and free sale of publications. The Soviet government has agreed to “encourage” the exchange of publications and to “facilitate the exchange of radio and television programs on scientific, technical, cultural, and other educational subjects” through commercial channels. It has not implemented these parts of the agreements, except for that part concerning distribution of the two governments' journals, Amerika and U.S.S.R., and the Department of State has valid complaints about the restricted distribution of Amerika.

Soviet publications are sold here in bookstores owned by Americans, which are in fact instruments of the Soviet publishing system and sell only books published in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Americans of course can also purchase Soviet publications directly and through other bookstores, but the Soviet government maintains control over access to information there and selectively imports in scientific and technical fields. Soviet publishing organizations translate and widely sell several hundred American books each year—until recently very rarely paying royalties, even in rubles. The Soviet decision in February 1973 to become party to the International Copyright Convention may change at least the policy on royalty arrangements, but we have little evidence yet. Indeed, the Soviet Union thus far has emphasized the translation and publication of Soviet works in the United States.

France has succeeded in making arrangements for the public sale of contemporary literature as well as of classical and technical French books in the Soviet Union. A 1959 protocol stipulated that the Soviet government would allot 200,000,000 francs (about $500,000 then) for the purchase of French books each year, largely for libraries, but that some would be sold openly in a specified bookstore in Moscow. However, the French have been unsuccessful in their efforts to establish reading rooms, such as they have in other countries, and to arrange for the public sale of French newspapers in Moscow. Intourist hotels set aside for foreigners since April 1968 have sold small numbers of copies of leading European newspapers kept under the counter—for hard currency only.³

Private travel, or tourism, is so much an assumed part of the life of the average American that including it in a formal exchanges agreement seems, and is, preposterous. However, because of the Soviet Union’s position on travel, in each of the agreements the two governments have assured that they would encourage and facilitate tourist travel.

Tourists ordinarily acquire a shallow understanding of any society they visit, and the Soviet “tourist world” is carefully contrived so that most foreigners see selected parts of the Soviet Union without meeting its inhabitants. However, tourism constitutes a remarkable index to the Soviet government’s attitude toward the world. From 1937 until the death of Stalin, virtually no American tourist visited the Soviet Union, and only forty-three traveled there in 1953. Approximately 2,000 went in 1956, 2,500 in 1957, and 5,000 in 1958, when the American Express Company was allowed to establish an office in Moscow. During the first four years under the exchanges agreements, approximately 35,000 Americans visited the Soviet Union as tourists; 1,200 Soviet tourists visited the United States over the same period.

Each year from 1959 to 1965 approximately 10,000 American tourists visited the Soviet Union. The figure stood at approximately the level of 20,000 per year from 1966 until the early 1970s, and then rose from about 50,000 to 65,000 annually by 1973.⁴ These increases reflect not only growing interest in the Soviet Union but also the opening of seventy cities to foreigners, improved quality of hotel facilities Soviet advertising, and improved Intourist service, although few alumni of “Skintourist” can praise it as efficient.

Soviet tourism in the United States is quite another matter. We know from information Soviet tourists have provided that the police investigate them carefully before they receive permission to travel. Soviet tourists did not visit this country before 1958, when sixty-six came. With rare exceptions, Soviet tourists have traveled in groups of twenty or thirty. In fact, the first Soviet tourist who came as an individual arrived in 1966.

From 1958 through 1970 the average number of Soviet tourists was 195 per year. In 1961 the Department of State granted 183 visas to Soviet tourists; the figure rose to 317 in 1972 and 558 in 1973. In Moscow in September 1974 a ten-day conference of representatives of American tourist agencies and of the Soviet Administration for Foreign Tourism concentrated on ways of increasing American tourism, particularly through expanding the number of Soviet hotels and improving Soviet service, although the Americans had hoped to emphasize means of achieving a six-way increase in the number of Soviet tourists.

Of all the varied elements of the cultural exchanges, those involving education have been the largest and the most important because of their contributions to knowledge and understanding and their long-term political impact. Within the series of academic exchanges, those involving junior scholars or graduate students and young faculty, who spend a semester or an academic year in research, have been the most constant, have involved the largest numbers and the longest periods of time, and have been the most significant intellectually and politically in the eyes of both American and Soviet officials and scholars. They constituted the bulk and the core of the work of the Inter-University Committee and of IREX, the major American organizations engaged in the cultural exchanges. Their history represents or reflects that of the entire exchange.

The Soviet government in 1958 satisfied the Committee’s main interest by agreeing to an exchange program for junior scholars. The Department of State, with the eager approval of those universities engaged in the Committee’s work, in turn accepted a program between four universities—Columbia and Moscow, and Harvard and Leningrad. Early in 1959, therefore, Harvard sent five eminent scholars to discuss a direct exchange with Leningrad State University, which returned the visit in April. In that same month three representatives from Columbia University traveled to Moscow State University, which replied shortly thereafter. Within a twelve-month period, Michigan, California, and Yale sent similar delegations to institutions with which they wished to have direct contact, and Michigan State, Indiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Chicago all demonstrated great interest in direct relationships.

The exchanges agreement signed on November 21, 1959, provided for four groupings—Columbia and Moscow, Harvard and Leningrad, Yale and Kiev, and Indiana and Tashkent—with each group to exchange five professors and lecturers. The agreement also provided that other universities could establish similar arrangements. Moscow and Columbia agreed, for example, that each would send up to five professors to the other university each year for brief periods, and that they would also exchange books, periodicals, and other library materials.

The bilateral arrangements between “sister universities” failed utterly. Each pair of institutions exchanged ceremonial visits that were cordial but unproductive. The visit to Indiana University made by the group from Tashkent was both hilarious and illustrative. The group arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, without notice on a Friday afternoon of a football weekend when all hotel and motel rooms in the area had been reserved. They were without funds because they had flown from New York to Chicago and had spent their dollars on a taxi to Bloomington, Illinois. Indiana received the Ministry’s letter concerning the visit after the delegation had returned to Tashkent.

The bilaterals suffered from other ailments endemic to Soviet administrative confusion and political intrusions. For example, the first Harvard professor to visit Leningrad arrived in May 1960 during the tension created by the U-2 flight, was not accepted at the university, and met no scholars. Both American and Soviet scholars could have acquired the same opportunities for research or for lecturing as tourists, particularly since the agreement stipulated that the visits be brief. The most serious difficulty reflected the simple fact that Soviet university officials enjoy no authority; the universities are directly under the rule of the Ministry, which was apparently willing to include bilateral agreements but not to allow them any substance. In fact, Harvard officials discovered by accident that President Pusey’s correspondence with the rector of Leningrad State University went first to the Ministry, which on occasion did not forward it to the university. Above all, many professors from Harvard could clearly continue research more effectively at a number of other institutions than at Leningrad, just as many from Leningrad would have been more satisfied at another American institution. The bilateral program was therefore abandoned in 1962.

The failure of direct relationships between universities constitutes one of the paradoxes of the academic exchanges. Both the Department of State and the American academic community at the beginning insisted that the governments should at most facilitate the programs and encourage institutions and individuals to make their own arrangements. Moreover, direct relations between universities have worked well for some other countries, generally those with small exchanges with the Soviet Union. They may revive when the atmosphere changes and when institutions on both sides can identify needs special to them that even the most efficient large programs do not satisfy.⁵

On the other hand, the two governments on occasion have also reversed positions on their roles. Thus, the Soviet position has been and remains that the governments should maintain control and that the agreements should identify and approve all programs. On August 31, 1961, however, the Soviet government established the Institute for Soviet-American Relations under the Union of Friendship Societies, which issued appeals to private institutions and individuals for exchanges that bypassed the formal programs. This led the Department of State in 1964 to insist that all exchanges be included in the agreements, in order to prevent the Soviet organization from making separate arrangements with individual institutions, which would have destroyed the negotiating base of the Committee and of other scholarly groups. Later, in the 1970s, both the Department and the Soviet government began to allow direct relationships between institutions, outside the framework of the exchanges agreement.

The so-called bilateral or sister-university arrangements were replaced by formal programs for senior scholars between the Committee and the Ministry incorporated in the agreement signed in March 1962. This provided that twenty-five senior scholars over the two-year period could spend up to one semester in the other country and that fifteen scholars could be invited for lectures for up to four weeks. The program for lecturers was abandoned in 1966. The numbers and periods of time for senior researchers have risen and fallen within small limits as the temper of Soviet-American relations has changed.

This arrangement remained small because other programs for senior scholars were created. The 1958 agreement concentrated upon junior scholars. The failure to include the Soviet Academy of Sciences encouraged the National Academy of Sciences and ACLS in 1959 and 1960, respectively, to establish small progams within the exchanges agreement for senior scholars interested in the institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The ACLS proposal in July 1959 restricted the program on our side in the first year to twenty or thirty specialists in Russian studies, but it also suggested a series of seminars with the Institute of History and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. The agreement signed twelve months later for the academic year 1961-62 provided for an exchange of three lecturers for up to one month, each on a topic posed by the receiving side, and of five research scholars for a total of thirty months. The first American arrived in the Soviet Union in June 1961 and four others by fall, and the first Soviet humanists and social scientists came to this country in April 1962. The March 1962 agreement raised the figure for lecturers to seven during the two years and for research scholars to fifteen for a total of seventy months. Lecturers were dropped in 1966. Since then, the agreements have provided for an exchange of twelve scholars for from three to ten months for a total of fifty-five months for each period.

These programs have enabled a small number of Soviet and American humanists and social scientists, of whom I was one, to carry on research in the other country. The vexations that arose were like those which the Committee endured but were less troubling because this exchange was so small and involved only senior scholars. However, this program and that of the National Academy of Sciences were important beyond their size because they increased the number of American institutions engaged in academic exchanges and enabled the centralized Soviet government in its negotiations to take advantage of our numbers and diverse interests.

Probably the most effective exchange, and that most simple to administer, has been the summer program for language teachers, which the Committee first suggested in 1956. The second exchanges agreement in December 1959 provided for negotiations for courses for twenty-five language teachers, accompanied by one or two observers or specialists, for up to twelve weeks between June and September 1960, the year in which the Soviet-French program added annual summer sessions for language teachers. In 1961 the Soviet government reached agreement with the British Council concerning a program similar to one we had proposed. However, the Committee’s did not begin until the summer of 1963 because of extraordinary Soviet delays.

In this program American teachers of Russian spend ten weeks in Moscow State University, where they live in a dormitory and take courses in Russian given by Soviet professors. A Soviet group of the same size spends ten weeks at an American university that has had much experience in teaching English to foreigners. Thus, Cornell University aided the Soviet teachers in 1963 and 1964, Georgetown University in 1965 and 1966, and the University of Michigan and the University of California in Los Angeles in later years.

This program has had few troubles and has even been praised in the Soviet press, perhaps because both governments see no hazards from such a technical project and appreciate the competence and dedication of the instructors and the participants. It was so valuable and involved so few problems that the Committee sought to raise the number of participants to forty in 1964 and to fifty in 1965. However, the maximum number in any agreement in the 1960s was twenty-five, and the Ministry reduced this to twenty in 1968. It rose again to twenty-five in 1970 and to thirty in 1972 and thereafter.

The unsuccessful small programs of short visits by senior scholars who hoped to meet with groups of specialists of course raised less-delicate problems than having Soviet and American professors teach regular courses in universities in the other country. In many fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, American scholars held most Soviet scholarship in low regard. Both administrators and faculty also feared criticism for such appointments from parents, alumni, and legislators. Moreover, they also concluded in the 1950s and 1960s that an American invitation to an eminent Soviet scholar might endanger him. In this kind of exchange, as in others, Eastern Europe differs greatly from the Soviet Union. Since 1955 hundreds of scholars from East European countries have taught in our universities, and a smaller number of Americans have taught there.⁶

However, beginning in 1955 many universities offered visiting professorships, especially in Russian literature, to Soviet scholars, most of whom our scholars knew were eager to accept. Soon after the Committee was founded in 1956 it began to discuss an exchange of professors for classroom teaching in language, literature, and history, where our needs and interests were then greatest. In 1958 we proposed that an exchange of fifteen experienced language teachers begin the following year. We renewed this early in 1959. The second agreement included a clause that the United States would invite Soviet teachers of Russian “to occupy positions in American universities for teaching the Russian language,” with “arrangements on positions, transportation, salaries, lodging, and academic benefits as enjoyed by American colleagues,” and that the Ministry would invite American teachers of English. However, the Ministry did not respond to the Committee’s specific proposals. The Committee renewed them in April 1961 and even identified the Soviet scholars our universities sought, but again it received no response. In February 1964 the Committee proposed an exchange of teaching assistants in Russian and English, but the Ministry refused to discuss the suggestion. The following year it proposed an exchange of five language teachers and of two teachers of literature and linguistics, each for either a semester or an academic year. Again, the Ministry did not reply.

The eighth exchanges agreement, signed in Moscow in April 1972, finally included exchanges of professors to give semester or full-year courses in the natural sciences, technical sciences, humanities and social sciences, and language, literature, and linguistics, “in accordance with the desires of the receiving side.” The first opportunity for scholars to teach in the other country came in the spring semester in 1974 when seven Americans taught American history, American literature, linguistics, chemistry, and chemical engineering in Moscow, Leningrad, and Novosibirsk, while four Soviet scholars taught statistics, mathematics, Russian, and psychology in four American universities—North Carolina, Tulane, Ohio State, and MIT. In the spring semester of 1975, nine Americans taught as Fulbright-Hays lecturers in Soviet institutions—five in Moscow State, two at Tbilisi State, one at Voronezh State University, and one at the Institute of Construction and Engineering. Seven were scientists, one a historian, and one a professor of literature. Seven Soviet scholars, three scientists, a historian, a specialist in history, two in language and literature, and a professor of journalism, taught in seven American institutions—San Francisco State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Montana, and the University of Tennessee. In all cases but one, the American scholars were accompanied by their families. The Soviet scholars were all unaccompanied.

The exchanges agreements that other Western states have with the Soviet Union are similar to those which the Department of State has signed, and the achievements and difficulties are also remarkably similar. However, the Soviet government’s policies toward other states concerning the exchange of classroom instructors demonstrate the particular sensitivities it has with regard to the United States. For example, the Ministry accepted two language teachers from the United Kingdom as early as 1961, and since 1967 it has exchanged from four to six instructors and teaching assistants each year. Austria since 1961 has exchanged four professors each year, ordinarily teachers of Russian and of German, and the German Federal Republic and the Soviet Union since 1970 have exchanged four teaching assistants and two professors for a semester each year. Italy and the Soviet Union in 1968 began the exchange of three language teachers. The exchange of classroom teachers between France and the Soviet Union since 1964 reveals the special position France occupies in Soviet foreign policy, and perhaps also the important role that Communists play in the French educational system. In that year, French instructors of French began teaching in ten different Soviet cities—Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov, Erevan, Tbilisi, Khabarovsk, and Irkutsk. The number of French teachers in Soviet institutions rose to fifteen in 1966, twenty-seven in 1969, and forty-five in 1972. Of the approximately three hundred men and women from the West who have taught in the Soviet Union since 1958, somewhat more than half have been French.

Of course, sending undergraduates to the other country for a year of study raises most delicate issues for both American and Soviet administrators and scholars. However, the December 1959 agreement provided for a summer exchange of undergraduate students of English and Russian, as the Committee had proposed that February. In 1961 the Committee suggested an exchange of 150 undergraduates, with groups of 15 to tour the host country for five weeks accompanied by scholars and a native tour guide. The Soviet government in 1959 briefly demonstrated interest in an undergraduate program, suggesting the University of Michigan for its undergraduates, but this quickly evaporated. Therefore, perhaps fortunately for us, the Committee began, and others have since continued, immensely successful one-way programs for undergraduate study in the Soviet Union that have helped lead to exchanges of undergraduates outside the official program in 1974.

The Soviet government approves of the various programs for sending undergraduates there, presumably because it obtains dollars from the participants (tuition in 1974 was $3,000 for a semester), considers increased knowledge of Russian by young Americans a political advantage, believes that the Americans return from the Soviet Union with favorable impressions, and assumes that they have minimal contact and therefore little influence on Soviet students and faculty members. On the other hand, the Ministry of Higher Education until 1974 showed no interest in sending undergraduates to the United States, where they would be welcome additions to foreign student groups on our campuses. It has also resolutely discouraged the efforts of the Experiment in International Living, which has programs in other countries in which youngsters live with families, especially in the summer months.

The Committee’s summer language program for undergraduates reflected the determination of its founders in the 1950s and 1960s to strengthen the field of Russian studies as well as the expansion of foreign language study. The Soviet Union was seen as a “living language laboratory” that would test traditional methods of teaching Russian. The Committee also considered it an opportunity to attract bright science students into Russian language study. In fact, nine of the first twenty students were science majors. The Committee therefore organized a Russian language summer study tour in 1959. The Carnegie Corporation provided the funds (approximately $180,000) for the first three years, and a portion of the dollars necessary for the succeeding three years. The Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has provided support for this project and its successor since 1962.

In the first year, 1959, twenty-two undergraduates who had studied Russian at least two years spent eight weeks of intensive language study at Indiana University or at Middlebury College. Then, accompanied by three senior language teachers, they flew to London, journeyed to and from Leningrad on Soviet ships, traveled in European Russia, and spent two weeks in a summer camp, all under a pledge to speak only Russian. The results were immensely positive, particularly in increasing motivation and in improving speaking skills, and the program grew steadily.

In 1960 the 40 student participants came from ten different colleges. In 1961 the number rose to 105, of whom 42 were high school language teachers. The numbers leaped so impressively and so many colleges and universities were completing their own arrangements that the Committee discontinued its program after 1963. In 1964 Indiana University alone sent 120 students. In 1965 approximately 500 participated, almost all in tours organized by institutions located in the midwestern or western parts of the United States.

As more and more colleges and universities began to establish summer study tours (in 1972 eighteen originated on American campuses), the Council on International Education Exchange (the Council on Student Travel from 1947 until November 1967) became the central organization for making summer study arrangements for many colleges and small universities. The Council had become involved in exchanges with the Soviet Union in 1959, when it sponsored exchange tours of student leaders. Since 1966 it has administered growing annual summer study tour programs for several hundred undergraduates, as well as two other especially exciting undergraduate ventures. In one, between 150 and 200 undergraduates spend the summer in intensive Russian-language study at Leningrad State University. In the other, which began in the spring semester of 1970, approximately 30 undergraduates, from fourteen colleges and universities in the first year, spend a semester at Leningrad State University. The participants and their universities have been so satisfied that the program has continued to grow. Many of its alumni are now highly motivated and immensely promising graduate students in our major universities. In fact, the program is so successful that the principal concern in 1976 is that Leningrad State University will establish a center for language study for foreign students and isolate them in a kind of ghetto.

The scholars involved in the Committee’s academic exchange were so convinced that undergraduate study in the Soviet Union under appropriate conditions was valuable that in 1968 its Committee on the Future proposed sending fifty undergraduates to the Soviet Union and fifty to Eastern Europe each year, on an exchange basis if necessary. IREX has not carried out this proposal, in part because it has concentrated its energies on joint research projects and on Eastern Europe and in part because some universities have established undergraduate programs that supplement the work of the Council on International Educational Exchanges. Thus, the University of California in Berkeley in 1972 established a summer quarter program at Leningrad State University, granting its student participants nine credits for work in history, philosophy, literature, and art, all for a total fee of $1,450, including round-trip fare from London to Leningrad.

On April 18, 1974, the State University of New York and the Ministry of Higher Education agreed to an exchange of ten upper-division undergraduates between the State University and the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages—m. Thorez to study advanced Russian, as well as Russian and Soviet literature, and English and American studies, respectively. The Americans in the fall semester of 1974-75 lived in a Moscow hotel and attended classes established solely for them. They found the instruction excellent, met many Soviet students, and enjoyed and benefited from the five months. The ten Soviet participants and the Ministry both considered their fall semester in Albany successful, and the agreement provides for exchanges in both semesters in 1975-76, preferably with the Americans this time in Soviet dormitories.

The Russian-language study tours and the semesters in Leningrad and Moscow have been the least troublesome programs to administer, almost certainly because they are one-way study projects outside the exchanges agreements and thus do not involve reciprocity with the Ministry and attendant problems. If the undergraduate exchange organized by the State University of New York proves successful, it will presumably produce increased confidence among Soviet political and educational leaders and may lead to most promising approaches. In fact, it is paradoxical that the aspect of academic exchanges both sides considered most sensitive may help establish direct agreements between universities and will lead toward the free movement of people and ideas that we have always sought.

The Soviet government is almost inevitably more interested in opportunities for research here in the natural and physical sciences than in the humanities and social sciences because of its eagerness to improve and expand its economy and its military strengths by tapping our scientific resources. Consequently, Soviet scientists were among the first to go abroad after the death of Stalin, and the vast majority of the Soviet participants in our academic exchanges, and in those with other countries, have been scientists.

However, our scientists were not eager in the 1950s to study in the Soviet Union or to learn more about Soviet scientific strengths and achievements. They believed the United States superior in most sciences and concluded that they could learn little from visits, research there, or combined research operations with Soviet scholars. Few knew Russian or were interested in learning it. Most assumed that their knowledge of the Soviet sciences, acquired through journals, abstracting and technical services, and publications concerning Soviet equipment and methods, was as complete as Soviet secretiveness would allow. Moreover, they had been flattered by having scientists from throughout the world come here for research, although they had also learned that even brief visits distract. In short, they generally lacked the motivation that inspired our Russian specialists to create the Committee. In consequence, formal exchange programs between our organizations of scientists and the Soviet Academy of Sciences and between the Atomic Energy Commission and the Soviet State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy began rather late.

The nature of atomic science, especially of atomic weapons, has made exchanges of information concerning even peaceful uses of atomic energy between the two countries at once most important, most sensitive, and most difficult to arrange. The first exchanges agreement therefore did not include the atomic field. The first Memorandum on Cooperation in the Field of Utilization of Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes was signed by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Soviet counterpart agency, the State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy, on November 24, 1959, and was attached to the second exchanges agreement that was signed three days earlier. This venture began only in May 1960, almost two years after the academic exchange program. It provided for short tours or visits to high-energy physics installations and for the exchange of specific numbers of unclassified documents and doctoral dissertations on the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

The Soviet government allowed this small program to lapse in 1967 and 1968. The joint research projects mentioned first in the 1959 memorandum did not begin until 1970, when American and Soviet teams of scientists worked together for several months, in 1970-71 at the High Energy Physics Institute at Serpukhov and in 1972 at the National Accelerator Laboratory at Batavia, Illinois. These programs have had little significance, although they no doubt persuaded some officials and scientists of the advantages of increased cooperation and of the importance of forging additional peaceful bonds.

The exchange of senior scientists between the National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences also began relatively late, although the Soviet government had proposed such an exchange in the discussions that began in October 1957. In April 1958, three years after our specialists in Russian studies had become interested in research opportunities in the Soviet Union and three months after the first exchanges agreement had been signed, President Detlev Bronk of the National Academy of Sciences visited the Soviet Union, in part at the request of the Department of State. Bronk and his associates were reluctant to sign an agreement because they believed that scientists should be allowed to travel freely and work in other countries without the intervention of any organization. In addition, while his knowledge of the organization of Soviet science was limited, Bronk realized that the Soviet Academy of Sciences has authority over institutes carrying on virtually all Soviet basic research. The National Academy, on the other hand, is an honorific and advisory organization and has no institutes, laboratories, or scholars engaged in research, which in this country is carried on in universities, private research organizations, government laboratories, and industrial installations. In short, this exchange “matched a relatively small nongovernmental body with what is in effect the holding company for much of the Soviet Union’s gigantic scientific establishment.”

Bronk soon learned, too, that the interests of the two academies differed. The main purpose of the Soviet Academy was to strengthen those research areas in which the Soviet Union was weakest. Through its central administration of basic research it therefore identified the critical fields in which visits were to be made, and then simply assigned selected scholars to a “mission” abroad to improve Soviet capabilities. On the other hand, the major interest of our National Academy, as of the Committee and of IREX, was to assist any interested and competent American scholar to go to the Soviet Union. In any case, Bronk agreed to consider the draft agreement for an exchange that Academician Alexander N. Nesmeyanov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, gave him. Fifteen months later, on July 9, 1959, the two Academies signed an agreement which provided that twenty prominent scientists from each country (half of the participants were to be members of the Academies) might visit the other country in 1959 and 1960 to observe, lecture, and participate in seminars. In addition, eighteen scientists in fourteen specific fields might visit the other country each year for one-month surveys. Finally, specialists in six specific fields from each country could spend a total of thirty-two months in research in the other country over a two-year period.

In November 1959, when the two governments renewed the original exchanges agreement, the two Academies simply agreed that their first accord would be fulfilled over the next two years. In their second agreement, on March 8, 1962, both sides consented to furnish annual lists of subjects for research and to exchange about twenty-five scientists for from 3 to 10 months each for a total of 150 months over the two-year period. In addition, each side could send twenty senior lecturers for a total of 20 months and ten scholars for surveys for a total of 10 months. The 1964 agreement reiterated the terms of 1962. On this occasion, on American insistence, the agreement did not specify the fields in which exchanges were to take place. From this time, even after the summit agreements were signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972 and 1973, the pattern and even the size of this small exchange of scientists remained the same.

Medicine, a nonpolitical and neutral field of study in which the two countries have different problems and resources but in which they share common concerns and potential long-term benefits from cooperation, constitutes probably the most promising area for exchanges. The participation of Soviet medical doctors in international medical conferences, informal exchanges between medical scientists, and the contribution of the Sabinapplied seed virus toward controlling polio in the Soviet Union helped to create the atmosphere in which the first agreement was negotiated. The United States Public Health Service was especially eager that the Soviet Union increase its participation in international medical organizations and work on public health problems, while Soviet officials and medical scientists no doubt sought also to demonstrate the progress Soviet medicine had made and to learn from the United States. Even before negotiation of the first agreement began, the Public Health Service had proposed to the Department of State a number of fields in which it was eager to exchange information, and the Department in October 1957 received similar proposals from the Soviet government.

Exchanges in the field of public health service have therefore occupied an important role in all the exchanges agreements. The first one, for example, provided for the exchange of delegations of five or six medical scientists for two to six weeks in eight specific fields, as well as of groups of three or four for two or three weeks to lecture in three cities of the host country. Between 1958 and 1972 seventy delegations made “grand tours,” with a total of about 135 American doctors and 100 Soviet doctors involved, at a cost to this country of about $150,000 per year. Eight joint seminars were held in that period in the United States, and six in the Soviet Union. Fifty-six American scientists carried on research in the Soviet Union, and sixty-four Soviet scholars studied here. In addition, a substantial exchange of periodicals and books was established.

Following an American initiative in November 1970, the two governments in 1971 agreed to establish a joint Soviet-American Exchange Policy Board, headed by the designates of the Soviet Minister of Health and our Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, to meet annually to plan cooperation and joint research projects in the areas of viral oncology, atherosclerosis, and environmental health. In February 1972 the governments signed an agreement to pool their efforts in research on cancer, heart disease, and environmental health problems under a Joint Soviet-American Committee for Health Cooperation, which began work the next month. Subcommittees then identified areas of research, created joint research teams for common efforts, and added arthritis and the delivery of health services to the joint research subjects.

At the Moscow summit meeting in May 1972, Brezhnev and Nixon signed a five-year Agreement for Cooperation in the Field of Medical Science and Public Health. In the following two years Soviet and American medical scientists have signed work plans and protocols, created a bilingual glossary of terminology, aligned procedures and criteria, and begun the exchange of research materials. In February 1973 Soviet and American cardiologists agreed to exchange data on sudden heart attacks and to establish joint research projects on preventive medicine and emergency care. In September of that year, the Ministry of Health and the Public Health Service established telex communications so that a “health hot line” now improves communications. Consequently, in 1975 scarcely a week passes in which a Soviet doctor does not visit the National Institute of Health. At the same time, an increasing number of American doctors visit Soviet medical institutions.

Thus, the period since 1958 has produced a variety of exchange programs, largely but not entirely within the formal exchange agreements. Fruitful yet fragile, generally undramatic but nevertheless important threads now link the two societies. They reflect the initiative, good will, intellectual vitality, and eagerness of various groups within the United States, and of our government, to create friendly relationships with the Soviet people and Soviet organizations as well as the Soviet government’s decision to establish and nurture intellectual and other relationships with its most feared rival. On the educational side alone, the exchanges have expanded to include programs for undergraduates and for classroom teachers that were almost unthinkable in 1958, and they have helped create the atmosphere in which the joint research agreements, all potential and little performance as yet, have been concluded since 1971. These various exchanges, however, do not include any substantial flow of publications or even expanded exchanges of books and journals, end Soviet jamming of Western broadcasts, or ease substantially other Soviet controls over cultural relations.

¹Joseph Rotblat Scientists in the Quest for Peace. A History of the Pugwash Conferences (Cammbidge, Mss., 1972), xiv-xv, 6.

²Organizing exhibits is expensive. The total cost of the 1959 exhibit, which was exceptional, was somewhat more than $3,600,000.

³According to the New York Times of April 21, 1966, twenty-eight daily and forty-two Sunday subscriptions to the Times were then held in the Soviet Union.

⁴According to the New York Times of July 28, 1971, 66,365 Americans visited the Soviet Union in 1971 and 5,268 Soviet citizens visited the United States. These statistics include visitors of all types; two-thirds of the Soviet visitors came on official business, and others came as members of athletic teams and other such groups. According to Soviet sources, the total number of Americans who visited the Soviet Union was 66,164 in 1972 and 91,254 in 1973, when 9,600 Soviet citizens, mainly officials, came to the United States (Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 1974).

⁵Academic exchanges between Canada and the Soviet Union began in 1963 with exchanges between the University of Toronto and the Ministry of Higher Education. They were later expanded to include small programs between other Canadian universities, British Columbia, Carleton, and Alberta, and individual Soviet universities. In October 1971, when a cultural agreement was concluded between the two governments, the bilateral arrangements were replaced by a national program. However, the Carleton-Leningrad agreement survived as an independent arrangement within the general framework.

Similarly, Australian National University and Monash University in 1964 began small programs with Moscow State and Leningrad State Universities, respectively. The Soviet Union and the United Kingdom in 1968 competed arrangements for some exchanges directly between Soviet and British universities, and the agreement with the German Federal Republic in 1969 also provided for short-term exchanges of lecturers between two sets of universities.

⁶American professors have taught at Moscow State University in exceptional circumstances. Thus, Professor Nicholas Kazarinoff of the University of Michigan, who speaks fluent Russian, taught mathematics there in 1960-61. Professor Harold Berman of the Harvard University Law School taught a course in Russian in 1961-62 until obvious pressure from some official source emptied his class just as he was beginning to discuss the decisions of the Supreme Court under Justice Warren and the major issues that it still faced.