When Stars and Stripes Met Hammer and Sickle: The Chautauqua Conferences on US-Soviet Relations, 1985-1989 (review)

The Chautauqua Institution was founded in 1874 in the western Finger Lakes region of upstate New York as a summer camp for Sunday school teachers. Throughout its history it has combined religion, education, recreation, and the arts. According to this official account, Chautauqua made its mark on Cold War history in the second half of the 1980s by sponsoring five meetings between representatives of the Soviet Union and the United States. The events, each of about a week's duration, included formal lectures by representatives of each government, question-and-answer sessions with members of the audience, and performances of music and dance by leading artists from each country. Ross Mackenzie, the "historian emeritus" of the Chautauqua Institution, has written a clear, well-organized account of the five Soviet-American conferences, based mainly on transcripts of the meetings and interviews with participants. Mackenzie suggests that the meetings contributed to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War by encouraging representatives of each country to appreciate the basic humanity of those on the other side. "In the five Chautauqua conferences," he writes, "it became possible to see that behind the public appearance of Soviet communism or of American capitalism were human beings 'just like us,' to use the phrase of the woman who first met the Soviet visitors as they filed though Buffalo airport" (p. 179).

By the 1980s many other participants in U.S.-Soviet discussions—from diplomats negotiating arms control to scientists in the Pugwash movement to academics and former government officials in the Dartmouth conferences—had long since recognized that their counterparts were genuine human beings. The novelty of the Chautauqua phenomenon was that it made this insight available to larger numbers of ordinary "citizen diplomats." The five conferences, held each year from 1985 through 1989, took place first at the Chautauqua Institution, then near Riga, Latvia, then back at Chautauqua, then in Tbilisi, Georgia, and finally at the University of Pittsburgh. The last three conferences, in particular, included "home stays" that enabled the visiting U.S. or Soviet citizens to lodge with local families. As many as a few hundred visitors during a given conference thus had the opportunity to see how people on the "other side" lived and to develop close personal bonds with them.

The personal dimension of the Chautauqua meetings was probably more meaningful than the formal political lectures. The lectures evinced a certain set-piece quality, as the representatives presented the familiar and time-worn arguments of their respective governments. The result often was mutual recriminations about the origins of the Cold War. The Soviet representatives would complain about the Western allies' delay in opening a second front, thereby obliging the Red Army to bear the brunt of fighting against Hitler's forces. The U.S. representatives, for their part, blamed the Soviet side for using the presence of its occupation troops to install Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. The frequent direct quotations from the conference transcripts reveal historical inaccuracies in many of the responses during the question-and-answer sessions as well as in the formal presentations of both sides—as when Paul Nitze, one of the chief arms-control officials during the Reagan administration, made rather disingenuous arguments about the extent of Soviet defenses against U.S. nuclear attack in order to justify pursuit of the administration's Strategic Defense Initiative. Soviet officials (at least in the first couple of meetings, before Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost allowed them to speak somewhat more candidly) glossed over their country's human rights violations and restrictions on information, claiming falsely, for example, that copies of The New York Times "were easily accessible in libraries" (pp. 59–60). These polemical exchanges hardly make for compelling reading. But readers who are too young to remember being bombarded by such arguments on a regular basis may find it useful to have these exchanges reproduced...