Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey (review)

Cold War researchers have increasingly recognized the importance of public opinion and cultural relations in the four-and-a-half decades of confrontation between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union after World War II. This study by Yale Richmond, a former U.S. diplomat, describes how the two sides organized their strategies and operations. For over twenty years Richmond was an active player in this area, from its deep-freeze phase in the 1950s to the later role of cultural diplomacy in helping to undermine Soviet authority in the late 1980s.

Richmond's narrative provides a lively account of the policies and actions of U.S. Cold War strategy in what has since come to be known as public diplomacy. As a foreign service officer he was a close observer of the process from the early Cold War years to the events that marked the finale of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation at the beginning of the 1990s. In addition to serving as an embassy officer dealing directly with the subject in Moscow and Warsaw, Richmond held important policy posts in Washington, DC in the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency. After his retirement from the foreign service in 1980 he played an important consultative role in Washington's strategy in implementing the Helsinki Accords, which opened information and cultural links to Soviet audiences. Overall, he gives a fascinating account of how these actions affected the final years of Soviet rule.

The United States was a latecomer to international propaganda operations in the twentieth century. After Pearl Harbor the U.S. government organized a worldwide effort to set up information and cultural programs in the USSR. These initiatives were systematically rebuffed by Moscow at the time. During the war, and for decades afterward, Washington relied primarily on Voice of America shortwave broadcasts to reach Soviet audiences, despite the heavy jamming of its signals. This pattern began to change slowly with the limited détente agreed to by Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s. This initial breakthrough had long-term effects. In addition to authorizing a small program of cultural exchanges, it included a provision for the exchange of exhibits between the two countries. The best-known result was a large U.S. exhibition in Moscow that demonstrated aspects of American life, from Pepsi-Cola to automatic dishwashers, hitherto unknown to most Soviet citizens. More than 2.5 million Soviet citizens flocked to Sokolniki Park in the summer of 1959 for their first unvarnished exposure to a faraway country that had been described by their leaders as a sinkhole of capitalist corruption and a menace to world peace. The exhibit was a breakthrough event, setting a precedent that would lead to a series of follow-on shows attracting tens of millions of viewers across the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

At the time of the Moscow exhibit, Richmond was serving his first tour in a Communist country as cultural attaché in Warsaw. The Polish public was strongly pro-American, thanks largely to close ties with Poles who had emigrated to the United States in earlier generations. In cautious negotiations with Polish authorities, Richmond and his colleagues were able to establish a small but effective program of information and cultural operations in Warsaw. These experiences were a good introduction to the much larger problems he faced in dealing with Soviet intransigence. After a tour in the State Department's Soviet affairs section, he was assigned as cultural affairs officer in Moscow. What followed was a series of assignments in the diplomatic cat-and-mouse games that resulted in lowering the information and cultural barriers and thus facilitated the slow, uneven easing of East-West tensions after 1980.

The stage was set for this change by the Helsinki Final Act signed in August 1975 by the Soviet-bloc countries and the United States and its West European allies. The Soviet Union had been pressing for such an agreement for years, hoping to get implicit...