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Lessons from the Last (Cold) War: Author Explains How Cultural Exchange Raised the Iron Curtain

December 2003

Retired diplomat Yale Richmond presented his book, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War, before a public audience at IREX headquarters on November 19. Richmond described the underestimated role of cultural exchanges, particularly the flagship exchanges conducted by the Interuniversity Committee on Travel Grants and its successor, IREX, in lifting the Iron Curtain.

Enumerating the many theories on why the Cold War ended—Ronald Reagan’s challenge to tear down the Berlin Wall, Star Wars and military spending, the pope’s visit to Poland, Radio Free Europe, Soviet mismanagement, glasnost’ and domestic reforms, the emergence of internal dissidents—and acknowledging truth in all of them, Richmond detailed the sweeping influence and reach of cultural exchanges.

More than 50,000 Soviet citizens, including scholars, politicians, artists, and a number of KGB agents, came to America on exchange programs from 1958 to 1988, preparing the way for glasnost’ and an end to the Cold War. With the policy of peaceful coexistence, Khrushchev enabled the US and USSR to undertake extensive cultural exchange by intergovernmental agreement beginning in 1958.

Through the mechanism of intergovernmental agreement, both the Soviets and the Americans sought control over the program and participants. Both sides also saw immediate benefits: the United States was able to broaden contacts within the USSR, develop a cadre of regional specialists who could tell fact from fiction, penetrate Soviet barriers to outside information, and obtain improved access to information from within the USSR, while the Soviets gained access to Western science, presented the USSR as an equal to the United States, and promoted itself as a peaceful nation.

Many Soviet participants went on to prominent professional roles in Russia, including Aleksandr Yakovlev, a Gorbachev advisor know as the father of glasnost’ who spent most of his time at the Columbia University library reading books that were unavailable at home; Oleg Kalugin, the self-described first and last KGB officer elected to the Columbia University student council who later aligned himself with the democrats in the legislative Council of People’s Deputies; and Nikolai Sivachev, a researcher assigned to determine why the United States under Roosevelt took up the New Deal rather than communist revolution. Richmond cited Viktor Kremenyuk, a future director of the Institute of USA and Canada Studies, who explained that before the exchanges, the elite institute staff had all of the relevant facts and information about the United States but did not understand them.

Theater and film also brought new understanding between the United States and the USSR. Washington’s own Arena Stage brought the anger and controversy of the Scopes Monkey Trial to Russia with a production of Inherit the Wind. Private screenings of the movies On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove shocked the intelligentsia with their portrayals of the consequences that would strike them, too, in the event of a nuclear war.

All told, through cultural exchanges, Richmond stated, “the two countries came to know each other intimately … [and received] some assurance that they would not misunderstand each other’s intentions. Exchanges proved they could live with many visitors from other countries without a threat to national security.” Many scholars, he noted, assert that the concrete cooperative benefit of intrusive arms control would not have come about without the baseline of trust and understanding fostered by exchanges. In these and other ways, cultural exchanges lifted the Iron Curtain.

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