Comment On "Getting Inside Their Mind".

• Author: Richmond, Yale
• Position: United States-Russia foreign relations

COMMENT ON: "Getting Inside Their Mind"

www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2009/0103/comm/barrass_gettinginside.html

From: Yale Richmond, U.S. Foreign Service (ret.)

I am surprised that Gordon S. Barrass, in his article "Getting Inside Their Mind," has not a word to say about the exchange of persons between the Soviet Union and the West after the death of Stalin in 1953, when the Soviet Union began to reach out cautiously by signing agreements with Western countries for exchanges in culture, science, technology, and other fields.

During the 30 years (1958-88) of the U.S.-Soviet agreement on exchanges, more than 50,000 Soviets came to the United States on exchanges, and tens of thousands more came to Western European countries. All of them were cleared by the KGB for foreign travel and were presumably loyal Soviet citizens, Yet, they came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Those Soviets who came to the West--political leaders, students, writers, scientists, engineers, performing artists, and athletes--realized how far behind the Soviet Union had been falling, that communism had failed them, and that the Soviet media had not been telling them the truth about the West. The changes they brought prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and other reforms, and the end of the Cold War. And it was done at a cost that was minuscule in comparison with the West's expenditures for military hardware and intelligence over the same period of time.

One example was the experience of Aleksandr Yakovlev, who is best known as the godfather of glasnost, Gorbachev's policy of promoting openness in Soviet society. He was Gorbachev's liaison with the intellectuals, Gorbachev's first constituency, and protector of the liberal editors

who gave the Soviet Union its first critical and independent press. He also became one of Gorbachev's principle advisers on foreign policy, and he was at Gorbachev's side in five summit meetings with Ronald Reagan.

But in 1958, Yakovlev was one of four Soviet graduate students at Columbia University, in the first year of exchanges, for a year of study under the cultural agreement. He has said that...