Yudin K.A. Metamorphoses of “cold warming”: Soviet-American cultural relations in the late 1950’s — early 1960’s

The article examines Soviet-American cultural ties and the influence of national, institutional and personal factors on them. The role of the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, the USSR State Radio and Television and other structures in the administrative-organizational and informational-political support of con-tacts with the American side is touched upon. The mechanisms for implementing the Agreement “Lacey — Zarubina” between the USSR and the USA on exchanges in the field of science, technology, education, culture and other fields of 1958 are detailed. On the basis of archival materials, the features of mutual perception and the results of enrichment with experience in the field of cinematography and media technologies in general are revealed. Conclusions are drawn that this stage can be considered as an installation and diagnostic stage in the development of Soviet-American relations, the transformation of the image of the other. On the one hand, the Soviet side demonstrated cultural and political “generosity”, which was expressed in the partial imagogical rehumanization of the United States, the admission of cooperation, the popularization of the significance of Soviet-American relations and the variety of communicative shades. On the other hand, the erection of ideological barriers in the form of archaic isolationism, idealization and propaganda of the Soviet way of life, declaring intransigence towards “bourgeois culture” continued. All this constituted the ambivalence of the “cold warming” atmosphere.

Acknowledgments: 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 ene-my in Cold War popular culture: their content, contemporary reception and usage in Russian and U.S. symbolic politics».

For citation:

Yudin K.A. Metamorphoses of “cold warming”: Soviet-American cultural relations in the late 1950’s — early 1960’s, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2023, iss. 1, pp. 117—128.