Academic and cultural exchange treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union
The Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, also known as the Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields, was a bilateral agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on various fields including film, dance, music, tourism, technology, science, medicine, and scholarly research exchange. The agreement was signed on 27 January 1958 in Washington, D.C., negotiated between William S.B. Lacy, U.S. President's Special Assistant on East-West exchanges and Georgy Zarubin, Soviet ambassador to the United States.
The Lacy-Zarubin Agreement was renegotiated every two years, and during the detente, the duration was extended to three years. The final agreement was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at the 1985 Geneva Summit, and the agreement was in effect until the Soviet collapse.
Historical context.
Before the Lacy-Zarubin agreement was established, at the Foreign Minister's Conference in Geneva in October 1955, the United States, Britain, and France proposed to remove the barriers to “information media, culture, education, books, and publications, science, sports, and tourism” exchange.
The United States proposed an exchange program to the Soviet Union once during World War II and after the War in October 1945. However, it was rejected by the Soviet Union on both accounts. However, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov was interested in some notions of the exchanges resulting in the Soviets suggesting a bi or multilateral agreement that involved some of the proposed programs. Upon Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union began to actively welcome Western artists into the country. Notably, Soviet cities Moscow and Leningrad invited the American musical Porgy and Bess during their 1955 tour in Europe.
The agreement was established during the ‘Thaw’ of the Cold War, an era of peaceful co-existence or temporary relaxation in political tension between the US and Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev was a notable figure in the Soviet government who actively worked to reform the repressive policies of the Stalin regime. In February 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union, Khrushchev's speech criticized Stalin's foreign policy and showed indications of changing attitude towards the West and indicating peaceful co-existence. Since then, the Soviets started to sign cultural agreements with the West, including with Norway, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom and followed by the United States.
While American citizens actively shunned peacetime propaganda during and after the world wars, tensions between the Soviet Union resulted in gradual support of exporting American culture, technology and way of life. With the start of the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower continued efforts from Truman to engage the on-site exchange of professionals. In August 1954, Eisenhower created state-sponsored tours of American artists to Soviet regions with the purpose of “maxim[izing] psychological impact.” This was funded by the President's Emergency Fund for the Arts.
Negotiations.
While attempts for exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union began as early as 1945 by President Truman, negotiations to solidify an actual agreement did not start until the summer of 1957. Nikita Khrushchev began advocating for an exchange agreement with the United States early in the summer. He believed this would help reaffirm his nation's status as a global superpower comparable to the United States. In October 1957, formal negotiations with William S. B. Lacy, president's special assistant on East-West exchanges, and Georgy Zarubin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, began in Washington for exchange agreements. On January 27, 1958, the final agreement was signed.
United States objectives.
The United States was fuelled by a motivation to expand its administrative relationship with Soviet institutions in an attempt to improve its understanding of the isolated country and promote detente through cooperation and interdependence. This was paired with the potential for technological, scientific, cultural and educational advancements from long-term cooperation. American acceptance of the agreement “signified a policy shift away from an aggressive strategy of the liberation of the Soviet bloc to a gradualist approach.”
While there existed an East-West Contacts Staff in the United States State Department at the time, the United States was required to sign an official agreement amidst increasing reciprocal interaction with the Soviet Union. It was an executive agreement, and unlike a treaty, it did not require U.S. Senate's ratification.
Soviet Union objectives.
Due to its centralized government, the Soviets required an official agreement to plan and assign the budget for the exchange activities. The agreement also provided the protection and justification for the responsible Soviet agencies.
The Soviet Union was motivated by acquiring American knowledge and skill, fast-tracking its technological and scientific advancements in the field. It also sought to improve the Western world's view of the relatively isolated Soviet Union as a country open to cooperation and peace equal to that of the United States. At the time, domestic artists, scholars, scientists had called for more interactions with foreign contact. Thus, the Soviet government utilized the agreement to give in to their demands while demonstrating Soviet achievements to the outside world to be recognized as equally prestigious to the U.S. Soviet approach to the agreement signified an acceptance of expanding the cultural relations openness to foreign influence.
Implementations.
For the agencies of the exchange, there was a partnership between the U.S. government and the private sector, while all the Soviet agencies were governmental. Many of the U.S. exchanges, including “science and technology, radio and television, motion pictures, publishing, youth, education, performing arts, athletics, and tourism” were conducted by the private sector. The partnership reduced the costs for the exchange for the U.S. government, and the private sector had the approval to exchange with the most developed in the communist world. For the Soviets, all these exchange agencies were governmental. Soviet's international exchanges were not managed by private sectors and needed to be supervised by the state's political authority.
Both the U.S. and the Soviet public supported the cultural exchange under the broad framework of the agreement. There was minimal opposition from the Congress, and the exchange was welcomed by the civil society, including academia, the media, science community, churches, sports organizations and associations, the industries, and the general public support. The U.S. had a “lukewarm reception,” most evident in conservative media outlets. The agreement was also widely covered in the Soviet press and enjoyed public support.
Cultural exchange.
Cultural exchanges proved to be one of the many efficient ways of engaging in cultural and propaganda warfare for both the United States and the Soviet Union. This practice stemmed from well before the Cold War, during the Second World War. The Lacy-Zarubin Agreement aided in furthering cultural ties between two countries while pushing forth their agendas of spreading communism or democracy to emerging new countries by providing opportunities for cultural expansion. On top of musical and theatrical exchanges, both countries sent dancers, hosted sports competitions featuring their respective athletes, and allowed for the engagement of film and production companies.
Film.
The Lacy-Zarubin agreement set up film trades, exchanges, and co-productions between the American and Soviet film industries, marking growth in film diplomacy between the two states. It allowed Sovexportfilm, the Soviet Union's most prominent film export/import organization, to engage with and learn from American production companies in Hollywood.
Representatives from both parties had to engage in several rounds of negotiations to finalize specific details of the agreement pertaining to film, as the first section on film trade included vague diction such as "equality" and "mutually acceptable financial terms". To determine how these principles were to be implemented, a permanent committee of 2 representatives from each party was established. They met four times during their mandated year, twice in Moscow and twice in Washington.
The initial negotiations began on March 25, 1958, at the Motion Pictures American Association (MPAA) headquarters in Washington D.C. Eric Johnston, president of MPAA, led the U.S. delegation, along with MPAA vice-president Kenneth Clark and head of the USIA film department Turner Shelton. Four people made up the Soviet delegation: deputy head of the Ministry of Culture Vladimir Surin, the vice-chief of the Ministry of Culture's foreign relations department Aleksandr Slavnov, director of Sovexportfilm Aleksandr Davydov and his aide Yevgenii Kachugin. The first round of negotiations resulted in little success for either party. When discussing the number of films that each country sold to the other, the Soviet delegation insisted on equality. At the same time, the U.S. side argued that this was not feasible as the American film industry produced 400 features each year while the Soviets produced at less than a quarter of that rate. Furthermore, the Soviets would not agree to return a share of sales to American studios, which led the U.S. delegation to raise their prices ($250,000 to $1 million) while offering no more than $20,000 for most Soviet films. The negotiations ended when Johnston proposed an 8:5 U.S. to Soviet film ratio on the final day, which the Soviet delegation firmly rejected.
The second round of negotiations started about six months later, on September 16, 1958, when the delegation met in Moscow. For the Soviets, choosing American films was time-consuming as they had to be largely apolitical or compatible with the government's ideology while appealing to audiences. Almost two weeks on, the Soviet delegation had not yet selected the American films they wanted to purchase. Johnston feared that the negotiations would end without a deal again. To try to avoid leaving empty-handed, he requested a meeting with Khruschev, which took place on October 6. Three days later, a deal was finally agreed upon. The Soviets proposed the U.S. to Soviet film ratio of 10:7, and both parties were to pay approximately $60,000 for the other's feature films. For the U.S., significant investment was needed to promote Soviet films, but for the Soviets, American films cost little to advertise as their popularity in the box office was assured. In the United States, The 1960-61 version of the Lacy-Zarubin agreement left the studios to directly engage in most of the negotiations rather than through the State Department.
Dance.
The performing arts exchange was conducted through the American commercial impresarios, such as the Legendary Sol Hurok and Columbia Artists Management.
The Moiseyev Dance Company.
The Moiseyev Dance Company, formally known as the State Academic Ensemble of Folk Dances of the Peoples of the USSR, first visited the United States in April 1958. Performing in large cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia, the dancers represented the Soviet Union to Americans who had never been exposed to Soviet culture, evoking both positive and negative responses from over forty million people in North America. Despite the ongoing efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy in what is known as and the House Un-American Activities Committee to strictly distinguish American values from Communist identity, the Dance Company became a nationwide sensation, resulting in mail orders of over $180,000 before the box office opened a few weeks before the first show. The Soviet government meticulously chose the Moiseyev Dance Company to represent the face of the regime through the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement. It aimed to paint a positive image of the Soviet Union as a uniform yet multicultural state. It thus was captured in the Dance Company's incorporation of dances from Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Poland, Hungary and others.
Music.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union sent several musicians to either country to spread the cultural significance of each respective country. The United States’ Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra made its way to the Soviet Union in May 1959, while individual Soviet artists Gilels, Kogan, Petrov, Lisitsian, Dolukhanova, Bezrodni and Ashkenazi visited the United States the same year.
Jazz.
In particular, the United States consciously sent many jazz musicians on tours throughout the Soviet Union after the Agreement came into place. The State Department sold tickets to overseas performances, provided material recordings for radio stations to broadcast, and spread information about jazz stories to newspapers worldwide. As was the case with the Moiseyev Dance Company, this was done carefully calculated by the United States government in its efforts to push forward the trope of the country as multicultural, friendly and anti-racist.
Exhibitions.
The fourth and final form of cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and America was holding exhibitions. This was known as a "reverse tourism" form that brought foreign experiences, images, and products to the population.
One of the most famous exhibitions was in New York and Moscow in 1959. The Americans set up a six-week exhibition about