Copyright or wrong.

• Author: Richmond, Yale

Another example of a quiet form of public diplomacy, which pays off, but is only visible years or decades later. -Ed.

In autumn 1967, as the newly arrived Counselor for Press and Culture at the American Embassy Moscow, I embarked on a series of calls on various Soviet government ministries and organizations involved in cultural exchanges, including some where no American diplomat had previously ventured. I was determined to do what I had done as a Cultural Attache in other diplomatic posts, and not be cowed by Soviet restrictions on my legitimate activities. Everything I did was in the open. Appointments were made over the phone to keep the KGB informed on what I was doing. I was never refused a visit, and was always received correctly, if not cordially.

At the Union of Composers, I met with Tikhon Khrennikov, the conservative composer who, at the behest of Stalin, had so tormented Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. And at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, from where writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel had been imprisoned the previous year for publishing allegedly "anti-Soviet" works, I established contact with scholars in the American section. A few months later, I surprised them with an invitation to an embassy showing of the classic film, Gone With the Wind. Two of them came, with their wives, and enjoyed the film that told them much about the antebellum American South they had been writing about.

At the Union of Soviet Writers, we discussed exchanges of American and Soviet writers, which were already taking place under the US-USSR cultural agreement, but the conversation eventually got around to copyright protection and the Soviet practice of publishing American authors without compensation. The USSR in those years was not a party to an international copyright convention, and I pointed out that by not doing so it was losing hard currency because...