Call me comrade

In​ 1971, an elderly bookseller in Berkshire, Harold Edwards, began writing to the Aidov family in Moldavia. Slava Aidov was serving time in Dubravlag, a Soviet camp for political prisoners, and his wife, Lera, isolated and lonely, seized on the connection with Harold. Their correspondence continued for fifteen years. They talked about children and grandchildren, about the television they were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England to Moldavia, maternity wear, razor blades, reference books on homeopathy and fasting, magazines, jeans, lipstick; in the other direction, books on Russian art and architecture, Red Moscow perfume, a samovar. Both Harold and Lera were inclined towards vegetarianism but found it a struggle, Lera admitting that ‘the smell of fritter stimulates desire to eat it,’ and Harold joking that maybe when he was ninety he would be able to free himself from ‘these fleshly desires’.

In the late Cold War, letter-writing provided one of the chinks in the iron curtain. Harold began writing to the Aidovs after seeing the name and address of their daughter in a publication by Amnesty International, a translation of Soviet samizdat that included contact details for relatives of political prisoners. Letter-writing was central to Amnesty’s campaigns against human rights abuses: supporters wrote to governments on behalf of prisoners but also to the prisoners themselves, demonstrating that ordinary people abroad cared about their fate. They weren’t the only ones writing across the Cold War divide. In my research on religious minorities in the late Soviet Union, I found that missionary groups in the UK and US encouraged church members to write to persecuted fellow believers, giving instruction on ‘how to write to Christian families in the Soviet Union and other communist countries’: correspondents were warned to ‘keep letters short, use simple words’ and to time letters to coincide with Soviet holidays, when the censor would be busy. This was letter-writing as a form of soft power. The Edwards-Aidov correspondence was published in 2006, long after the Soviet bloc had fallen and members of the two families had met, and the book – From Newbury with Love, edited by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter and Marina Aidova – is a reminder of a time when individual efforts could breach great geopolitical divides.

But these covert pen-pal relationships, facilitated by organisations critical of the Soviet regime, have an unexpected antecedent. In Dear Unknown Friend, Alexis Peri takes us back to the 1940s and 1950s to uncover an earlier history of letter-writing across the Cold War division. The epistolary friendships she traces were not illicit, but arranged and encouraged by Soviet state institutions, and tolerated by their government counterparts in the US. Peri’s account unsettles the customary view that exchanges between citizens of the two Cold War superpowers only began after Stalin’s death, first in the form of officially sanctioned citizen-diplomacy schemes, then as part of an independent subculture, linked with dissent and human rights activism. The scale of the project Peri describes was modest, but at its peak in 1949 – as hostilities between Stalin and Truman escalated – 319 pairs of women were regularly exchanging letters between the US and USSR.

The pen-pal programme had its origins in wartime Moscow. With the USSR desperate for outside assistance, the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee, set up in 1941, was tasked with fostering connections in Allied countries and encouraging British and US women to ‘invest personally’ in the war effort. They envisaged sustained exchanges of letters, with women encouraged to write not only about world events and politics but about their everyday lives, their relationships and families, their jobs and hobbies. The committee staff translated the letters from Russian into English and vice versa. Peri tells us that occasionally the letters were very lightly censored: ‘Most of the phrases that were cut were either boasts that the author made about her own country or potentially insulting remarks she wrote about her pen-pal’s country.’

The Soviet organisers had some success in finding willing letter-writers in the UK, but struggled at first to identify a partner association in the US. In 1943, however, emotive coverage of the Battle of Stalingrad prompted some American women to reach out spontaneously, dropping heartfelt notes into mailboxes addressed simply to ‘A woman, Russia’. By that summer, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, recently established in New York and apparently unaware of the Moscow initiative, had started working on its own Soviet-American letter-writing scheme. The effort faced obstacles: the organisation’s far-left politics, coupled with the FBI’s concern that letter-writers might let slip ‘valuable information’, led State Department officials to warn off potential correspondents, citing the danger of overloading the postal service with personal mail during wartime. But in 1944 the National Council’s Committee of Women established contact with the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee and the pen-pal programme was underway. The State Department and FBI now seemed willing to turn a blind eye – perhaps, Peri suggests, because the participants were all women and therefore regarded as harmless.

But were they? For the organisers in Moscow there was a clear political agenda: letter-writers were expected to plug socialist achievements, especially in terms of women’s emancipation, and to promote the Soviet peace campaigns. The women were told to probe their pen-pals’ voting intentions and nudge them in the right direction (in 1948, that meant towards the Progressive presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace). In practice, though, the letters proved much more than a stab at propaganda. Letter-writers on both sides certainly expressed pride in their country, but they were also endlessly curious about their pen-pals’ lives, eager to keep the epistolary friendship going. Even in 1953 and 1954, as the political landscape shifted (McCarthyism in the US, new priorities in the USSR) and official backing for the Soviet programme was removed, the letters kept coming. Some wrote to work through feelings of loss and grief, especially during the war, or to overcome loneliness; others hoped to make the world a better place for their children; many in both camps were enthusiastic about the potential for female friendship as a new form of diplomacy that might help prevent future war.

The kinds of women who were attracted to the scheme changed over time. The Americans were mostly white and middle class. During the war, their politics tended to the left of centre, and many had a personal investment in Soviet victory against Nazism: about a third were Jewish Americans; others were the wives or mothers of servicemen. After the Allied victory, more politically conservative, openly religious women joined the programme, often inspired by Christian pacifism. As the rift between the US and the USSR deepened, the politics of new recruits swung back to the left. The ideological outlook of the Soviet participants is harder to trace, but over time there was also a shift of sorts: a diverse socioeconomic group during the war, including factory and farm workers, followed by a more professional cohort (doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists), the vast majority ethnic Russians living in Moscow.

Introductory letters often revealed the gulf between the women. Confusion over names was indicative of deeper cultural differences. One Soviet writer, having received a letter from a Mrs Leonard Osborne, opened her response ‘My dear friend, Leonard!’ American women sometimes worried that they didn’t know whether their pen-pal was a Miss or a Mrs; they were reassured that ‘it makes no difference. Here we call all people “comrade” be they married or not.’ The American participants enthusiastically described their domestic comforts (‘We have a small, comfortable home with every modern convenience such as a telephone, electric lights and many electric appliances including a radio, vacuum cleaner and electric washing machine’). The Soviet women didn’t try to compete. Instead, they concentrated on their occupation and education (‘I am a scientific worker in one of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Not so very long ago I was just an ordinary “factory hand” in one of the Moscow factories’).

American housewives with hoovers, upwardly mobile Soviet workers: the introductory letters conformed to expectations. But as the epistolary relationships deepened and the masks slipped, the women found that they had problems, anxieties and challenges in common. Even if their new friend had different politics or beliefs, the women steered away from conflict, quietly reframing what had been said in their own terms. When Mary Roe Hull, an elderly Presbyterian from Wisconsin, and Nina Morozova, a war widow and mother, were set up as pen-pals they had little in common, save experience working as typists. But their correspondence flourished, fuelled in part by both women’s advocacy for world peace. Hull’s commitment rested on Christian teaching, and her letters were full of references to scripture; Morozova believed in the same cause but neatly ignored the religious prism through which Hull wrote. Morozova was sometimes dogmatic: ‘Expose those odious warmongers whenever you get a chance to. There is no word I hate more than “war”.’ But she also talked about her grief and loneliness, and Hull latched on to that, encouraging her to look for love again.

Some correspondents initially found the other’s values and experiences hard to understand. Jean Jahr was raised in a large, working-class, Sephardic household on New York’s Lower East Side; she had dreams of a college education but gave them up to get a job. At work she met her future husband, an arts co-ordinator and performer, and was soon busy raising two children. She was involved in progressive politics, and proud of America’s tradition of radicalism, but in her early letters she let her husband and her children take centre stage, emphasising her role as housewife. Olga Melnikovskaya was a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad who moved to Moscow after the war, became an archaeology researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and shared a room with her parents in a communal apartment. At first her letters revealed little about her personal life or living conditions, and even when she opened up she drastically rewrote key moments – she said her fiancé had been killed at the front, rather than that he jilted her on his return – and chose not to disclose her suicidal despair, or the compulsive eating which afflicted her after the war. Melnikovskaya foregrounded the importance of work in her life, and the collectivism and mutual support between workers. ‘I can’t imagine how I would have been able to bear all I’ve had to bear if I had lived in any other country. Here, we are never left by our lone [sic] self … We have a very united collective at our lab. We all help each other.’

For all these differences, material and ideological, the two women were curious about each other’s choices. Melnikovskaya wanted better to understand Jahr’s decision not to work: was it hard to find employment, or impossible to find daycare or after-school clubs, as they had in the USSR? There were also convergences. While both women lived in accordance with their society’s gender norms – home making in the US, paid work in the USSR – over time their correspondence found space for frustrations, for a sense of dreams deferred. Jahr spoke of ‘tedious housework’ and her desire for at least some kind of job (though ‘one cannot speak of that’); after Melnikovskaya had a baby, in 1953, she chose to leave her in the care of relatives and nannies rather than in state daycare. Once her children were teenagers, Jahr knocked ten years off her age and returned to the workplace, which gave her huge personal satisfaction. ‘Neither Jahr nor Melnikovskaya described themselves as feminists, but they certainly named the unequal demands on working mothers and claimed greater fulfilment for themselves,’ Peri writes, suggesting that their conversations and the ‘workarounds’ they came up with foreshadowed the ‘major debates of the feminist movements’ that would later unfurl in both countries.

As their families grew​ , participants in the programme exchanged thoughts on how to help their children develop sound morals. Both American and Soviet correspondents were determined to pass on to the younger generation their commitment to the peace cause. A translator working for the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee, Ekaterina Andreeva, wrote to an American participant, Jeanne Woolf, to suggest that her son Don join the correspondence scheme, even though all other participants were female. Andreeva admitted that she had ‘fallen’ for Don (‘such a nice, clean, typically American boy!’) and thought Don might like to write to a Soviet girl of his own age: her (blonde) niece Marina, perhaps, or her (brunette) friend Amelia – ‘he can choose according to his taste.’ Don took up with Marina, his younger brother with Amelia. The new generation deepened the bond between the families, and Andreeva and Woolf exchanged more than thirty letters, often talking about the way Don, Cameron, Amelia and Marina should be raised, gently exploring one another’s political values in the process.

One summer, Don was awarded a place on a music course and made plans to find odd jobs to cover part of the fees. Andreeva applauded Don’s musical achievements, but questioned his money-making initiatives. She pointedly remarked that in the Soviet Union a talented child would receive their tuition for free. There followed an extended, thoughtful exchange between the women about the value of paid work for schoolchildren, then increasingly common in the US, allowing them to buy clothes, records and movie tickets. Stalinist culture wasn’t averse to children developing a sense of individuality, but it didn’t view entrepreneurship favourably. Neither woman wanted the difference in their views to damage their friendship: ‘But we will not start to argue about this or any other topic, right, Katia?’ Woolf asked. ‘People’s beliefs are shaped by their needs and conditions as well as influenced by the history of their countries. I am trying to understand you.’ Andreeva responded in kind, re-articulating her position that while teenagers should experience the world of work (e.g. summer placement on a collective farm), they didn’t need financial recompense, and she was scathing about the consumer items young Americans coveted. Yet she too insisted that the disagreement need not imperil the women’s friendship. Their lively interest in each other’s values and beliefs, she wrote, could only advance the cause of world peace.

Peri’s discoveries provide a new perspective on the period. Existing scholarship explores the history of women in the US and USSR separately, but in looking at them together Peri uncovers a shared sense of overload and burden, even before independent feminist movements provided the organisation and language to challenge it effectively. Her book suggests that even in the early years of the Cold War, grassroots connections across the political divide were possible. As the women explored their experiences as mothers and workers, and their expectations of their children, they found a space for discussion and debate.

When Lera Aidova began her correspondence with Harold Edwards in 1971 she sent a message via David Bonavia, the Moscow correspondent for the Times, to remind her British friend that their letters would be read by the censor. The warning was heeded and the correspondence – warm, friendly, in some ways intimate – skirts political topics; there is little to hint at Slava’s dissident activities or his ongoing harassment by the KGB. A generation earlier, Peri’s correspondents were also cautious. (Americans were no less wary than their Soviet counterparts: by the early 1950s some were keeping carbon copies of every letter in case they were ever called to account.) But less cautious than we might expect. The official nature of the scheme provided the women with a sense of security, and its political premise encouraged the participants to make comparisons between the two systems and to consider the ways in which the different ideological and political regimes shaped their daily lives, for better and for worse. The women only ever knew what their pen-pal chose to tell them, but it was enough to challenge their views on the world.