Abstract
Better Red than dead?” This question was still being debated in Europe when the first batch of US grad students arrived in the USSR under terms of the cultural exchange signed by Willliam Lacy for the US State Department and Soviet Ambassador Georgii Zarubin on January 27, 1958. Most of the twenty American students arrived at Moscow State University (MGU) in September, but a few went to Leningrad State University. Their Soviet counterparts went to Harvard and Columbia—the only US universities the Soviets deemed on a par with MGU and Leningrad. As one of those at MGU, I proposed to the History Faculty that I research “Soviet Disarmament Policy, 1917-1934,” for my Ph.D. at Columbia. A sign of future trouble, when the department typed the title in Russian, it came out as “The Soviet Struggle for Disarmament.” On the positive side, the department assigned as my adviser a retired diplomat specializing in disarmament, Boris Efimovich Shtein, out of favor in the late Stalin years because he had been close to another Jew suspected of pro-Western leanings, Maksim Litvinov.
Highlights
“Better Red than dead?” This question was still being debated in Europe when the first batch of US grad students arrived in the USSR under terms of the cultural exchange signed by Willliam Lacy for the US State Department and Soviet Ambassador Georgii Zarubin on January 27, 1958
Most of the twenty American students arrived at Moscow State University (MGU) in September, but a few went to Leningrad State University
While American music and other cultural offerings made a positive impression on many Soviets in the 1950s and later, Popov’s book asserts that the greatest win for American PR was produced by the Hollywood films that Stalin permitted to be shown during the Great Patriotic War, because they showed a life style that jolted Soviet imagination
Summary
One of those students was Nikolai (Kolya) Popov, who in 2020 published his memoir, Russia and America: “The Direct Connection.” Recollections of an Amerikanist and Sovietologist. While in Washington, Popov began to investigate public opinion polling, an art or science not much studied or practiced in the USSR. One of the leading Soviet experts on opinion surveys, Popov got a job at the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada (founded in 1967) and headed in the Gorbachev years by Georgii Arbatov (1923-2010), a leading Amerikanist.
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