Citizen DiplomacyA Project of Soviet-American Exchange and Understanding in the 1970s and 1980s

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birgit Menzel
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 243094162

In the late 1970s and 1980s, thousands of American citizens began to establish personal relations with citizens of the Soviet Union; beyond the frozen relations of official diplomacy they wanted to get to know the face of the enemy, the Evil Empire according to president Reagan, for which effort the term of Citizen Diplomacy was found. The Space Bridges (1982-1989), the first live-encounters of Soviet and American people made possible by satellite technology, became a new format of direct communication. But numerous contacts and projects, private as well as institutional, developed among people of all social strata of both superpowers. Scientists and businessmen, artists and journalists, private persons and diplomats were equally involved in this network, which in 1985 comprised already more than 230 organizations. The projects ranged from book fairs of independent publishers in Moscow to encounters of writers, physicians, sportsmen and parapsychologists. They included Soviet-American youth-theatre performances and Rock-concerts, as well as the first personal meetings of Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts. Playing a leading role in this was the California Esalen-Institute, a private center of the Human Potential Movement, aiming at social change. In 1980, under the name of Track II, the Soviet-American Exchange Program was founded at Esalen, which was followed by the Soviet-American Physicians Group and the Association of Space Explorers. Within the past decade the Citizen Diplomacy Archive Project has managed to integrate the majority of more than 100 private archives, under the leadership of Anatol Shmelev, which has been integrated into the Hoover Library of Stanford University and thus made accessible for scholarly research. My research project is to reconstruct the hitherto unknown history of the Soviet-American relations of citizen diplomacy from the American as well as the Russian side. The study of both sides with the eyes of a German opens up a third perspective, open and critical to both sides. Also, this analysis shall be grounded with empirical material and enriched by present day interviews with former participants, lending the project a topical dimension. In this way questions of continuity and changes, with relationship to present initiatives of Citizen Diplomacy, will be addressed. There is some evidence for the assumption that this cooperation was an early form of democratic engagement for many participants, reaching out into present day activities. The question whether and how far this cooperation, which is forgotten or invisible today, has had a long-term impact, will only be answered after the history of Citizen Diplomacy has been written. The project of its reconstruction is seen as a contribution to the culturally entangled history of the Cold War, but it can also be seen as a contribution to intercultural, trans-disciplinary Russian Studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants