-
3 The Cultural Agreement
- Penn State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 THE CULTURAL AGREEMENT If we are going to take advantage of the assumption that all people want peace, then the problem is for people to get together and to leap governments—if necessary to evade governments —to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other. — . , Waging Peace, – President Dwight D. Eisenhower envisioned a people-to-people exchange, with people indeed bypassing their governments to learn more about each other. But that was not to be for many years, and in the interim, exchanges had to be negotiated and carried out by governments with their cumbersome bureaucracies and political and security considerations, and under agreements laboriously negotiated and implemented. Soviet ignorance of the United States was abysmal. Isolated from the outside world and continually told by their media of all the achievements of the Soviet state, the Soviet people believed that they were far better off than those who lived in the capitalist West. American knowledge of the Soviet Union was not much better. “It is hard for us now to imagine how distant we were from each other and how little we understood each other,”writes Sergei Khrushchev,son of Nikita Khrushchev, in describing his father’s meeting with Dwight Eisenhower at the July FourPower Summit Conference in Geneva.1 “Living on either side of the iron curtain,” he explains,“we knew nothing about each other. Diplomats and intelligence agents supplied their leaders with information, of course, but that was not enough to gain an understanding of the other side. We had to look into each other’s eyes.”2 Eisenhower and Khrushchev did look into each other’s eyes at Geneva; and they must have liked what they saw, although it took another three years before the two governments were able to forge a cultural agreement that would enable thousands of American and Soviet citizens to meet face to face. At the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Geneva in October , the United States, together with Britain and France, proposed a seventeen-point program to . Sergei Khrushchev, “ The Cold War Through the Looking Glass,” American Heritage, October , . . Ibid. remove barriers to normal exchanges in the information media, culture, education , books and publications, science, sports, and tourism.3 The initiative was rejected by Molotov, who accused the West of interference in Soviet internal affairs. But the Soviets did show interest in some of the proposals, and Molotov suggested that they might wish to conclude bilateral or multilateral agreements that “could reflect what is of particular interest to the countries concerned.”4 Further developments had to await the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in where Khrushchev criticized Stalin and signaled changes in Soviet policy that included peaceful coexistence and increased contacts with the West. After the congress, the Soviets moved swiftly to initiate exchanges with the West. Cultural agreements were signed with Norway and Belgium later that year, and with France and the United Kingdom in . Negotiations with the United States began on October , , and a U.S.-Soviet agreement on exchanges was signed on January , .5 This “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields”6 included exchanges in science and technology, agriculture, medicine and public health, radio and television, motion pictures, exhibitions, publications, government, youth, athletics, scholarly research, culture, and tourism. Commonly called the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, it was named after its two chief negotiators, William S. B. Lacy, President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant on East-West Exchanges, and Georgi Z. Zarubin, Soviet ambassador to the United States. As an executive agreement rather than a treaty, it did not require ratification by the U.S. Senate, which avoided a prolonged and perhaps bitter debate in a forum that had only recently witnessed the challenges of McCarthyism. The initial agreement was for a two-year period, but it was periodically renegotiated and, during détente, when both sides felt more comfortable with exchanges, its validity was extended to three years. The final agreement in the series, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their Geneva Summit, was to have been in force until December , , but the Soviet Union ceased to exist on . For the seventeen points, see the author’s U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, –: Who Wins? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, ), –. . New York Times, November , . . “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of...