Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain

4 Scholarly Exchanges

4 SCHOLARLY EXCHANGES Historians dealing with the collapse of Communism will want to devote more than one chapter to the extraordinary impact of East-West scholarly exchanges on the societies of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Even during the years when the rapid spread of Soviet influence to Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America made Moscow look all but invincible, seeds of change that would later blossom into the democratic revolutions of – were being sown by scholars from East and West. — . , “Scholarly Exchanges and the Collapse of Communism” One chapter alone, as Allen Kassof rightly regrets, will not suffice to credit the role of scholarly exchanges in bringing about change in the Soviet Union, but I will attempt it here. As Kassof explains: Among the thousands of Soviet and East European academics and intellectuals who were exchange participants in the United States and Western Europe . . . many became members of what, in retrospect, turned out to be underground establishments. They were well-placed individuals, members of the political and academic elites, who began as loyalists but whose outside experiences sensitized them to the need for basic change. Together with the more radical political and cultural dissidents, towards whom they were ambivalent or hostile, they turned out to be agents of change who played a key part, sometimes unintentional, in the demise of European Communism.1 Kassof was executive director of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), established in  by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to represent the U.S. academic and scholarly community in its exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. IREX was the successor to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants (IUCTG), which conducted the exchanges from  to  under the chairmanships of Schuyler C. Wallace, Columbia University, and Robert F. Byrnes,  . Allen H. Kassof,“Scholarly Exchanges and the Collapse of Communism,”in The Soviet and PostSoviet Review , no.  (): –. Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University.2 Kassof, a sociologist and specialist on the Soviet Union, directed the IREX exchanges from July  to May . During those years, more than  U.S. colleges and universities were participating members of IREX. Soviet Students and Scholars The enormous impact of the exchanges on U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and with the post-communist successor states that emerged from the collapse of –, has yet to be fully understood and appreciated. — . ,“My  Years with IUCTG/IREX” Among the many provisions of the cultural agreement was an exchange of graduate students, young faculty, and senior scholars. Eisenhower wanted to exchange as many as ten thousand students and had drafted a letter to Chairman Nikolai Bulganin, the Soviet head of state, offering to invite several thousand Soviet students to the United States, all expenses paid, and let the Soviet leaders decide whether they would invite an equal number of American students in exchange. Eisenhower even checked out his proposal with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who told the president, “Though bringing ten thousand Soviet students into the United States would undoubtedly cause some additional problems, I’m all for the idea. It’s an affirmative, dynamic proposal.”3 Eisenhower’s proposal was not made public because the State Department, at the time, was trying without success to get the Soviets to agree to exchange a hundred students, and it was thought that Eisenhower’s bold proposal would only alarm them and delay the negotiations. The Soviets eventually agreed to exchange no more than twenty graduate students a year during the first two years of the agreement, and in subsequent years that figure rose to only fifty. Moreover, the “graduate students” that the Soviets would send were mostly in their thirties, well advanced in their careers, and had already earned their candidate degrees (roughly equivalent to a U.S. Ph.D.). The larger exchange that Eisenhower envisioned had to wait thirty years when free and unfettered exchanges became possible. Nevertheless , over the next thirty years, despite the ups and downs in U.S.-Soviet relations , thousands of Soviet students, scholars, and scientists would come to the United States, and an even larger number of Americans would go to the Soviet Union.        . Schuyler C. Wallace, IUCTG founding chairman, served from  to  when he was succeeded by Byrnes, who served until . . Eisenhower, Waging Peace, . Prior to the signing of the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement in January , a start had been made in scholarly...