The article is devoted to the specifics of Soviet-American relations. The main sources were documents of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, mainly introduced
into scientific circulation for the first time, as well as memoirs, journalism and other materials. It is shown that the Ministry of Culture was the leading institutional channel with a wide range of both officially nominal interdepartmental contacts inherited during the reorganization carried out during its creation, and newfound communication lines complicated by private-corporate interfaces. It was revealed that such a status allowed the Ministry to act as a kind of barometer-an indicator of the dynamics of the Soviet-American dialogue at various stages of the Cold War. It is concluded that the “cold” dialogue in the field of culture during this period was of a complex, polyvalent nature. The official negative ideological rhetoric from the USSR and the United States, especially intensified during the years of escalation of tension, underwent parallel depreciation in the form of continued cooperation motivated by mutual interest in its concrete results and enrichment of experience. This prepared an “imagological turn”, the neutralization of political discourse and the convergence of cultures directly in the period under study, and also created the basis for a new understanding of these trends in order to diagnose and overcome conflict situations of our time.
This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under Grant № 22-18-00305, https://rscf.ru/en/project/22-18-00305/, “The images of enemy in Cold War popular culture: their content, contemporary reception and usage in Russian and U.S. symbolic politics”.
For citation: Yudin K.A. “The Soviets should not underestimate our resolve”, or “let's engage in culture”: the specifics of the Soviet-American “cold” dialogue in the late 1970’s — 1980’s, Ivanovo State University Bulletin. Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 2, pp. 135—145.