American-Soviet Friendship

AMERICAN-SOVIET FRIENDSHIP. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, American peace activists, labor organizers, and intellectuals sympathetic to socialism formed a succession of organizations to promote cultural interchange between the Soviet Union and the United States in order to enhance popular understanding of and sympathy for the Soviet Union and to influence official US policy favorably toward the Soviet Union.

The earliest of these was the Friends of Soviet Russia. Formed in 1921 to help the Soviets combat widespread famine resulting from drought and foreign blockade, this organization raised relief, sent tractors, and established children’s homes. Between 1924 and 1929 there was a lull in its activities.

Two events catalyzed a new friendship effort. In November 1927 delegates from fifty-one countries including the United States attended a labor congress in Moscow organized to form a world labor league of “Friends of Soviet Russia,” whose purpose would be to defend the Soviet Union against an anticipated rhetorical and possibly military attack by united capitalist powers. Then, in 1929, a group of Russian airmen billed as the Soviet Round-the-World Fliers visited the United States. Shortly thereafter, Friends of Soviet Russia was reorganized as the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU) to follow the aims of the 1927 labor congress. The American Friends of the Soviet Union affiliated itself with similar groups in twenty different countries and with the International Friends of the Soviet Union, headquartered first in Berlin and later, after Hitler expelled it, in Amsterdam. Its first campaign organized mass receptions for the visiting Soviet fliers.

The stated goals of the FSU were: to mobilize the masses for militant action against war and in defense of the Soviet state through meetings and organization of FSU Anti-War Committees in all basic industries;to encourage normal trade relations with the Soviet Union; and to popularize the successes of socialism in the Soviet Union through lectures, pamphlets, leaflets, films, and magazines. While the organization saw itself as having a base in the working class, it saw intellectuals and professionals as having an important role in cultural activities.

The Friends sponsored a broad program of activities. Since collectivization of agriculture was just beginning in the Soviet Union, the group raised funds for the purchase of tractors to be sent as a present to the first collective farms. The FSU also sponsored trips by delegations of trade unionists to study the conditions of workers in the Soviet Union and held mass-action rallies. Its principal publication was Soviet Russia Today, an illustrated monthly first published in February 1931, which contained articles about the Soviet economy, political administration, life, and culture. (This magazine severed relations with the FSU in December 1937, became New World Review in the 1950s, and ceased publication in 1986 as Update/USSR).

In the 1930s the FSU was quite radical, holding mass meetings where speakers denounced religion, advocated defense of the Soviet Union, and urged preparation for class war. Speakers included William Z. Foster and James Ford, former Communist candidates for president and vice president, respectively, and Charles Smith, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. After 1934, however, meetings became more moderate in tone. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the FSU prepared a Golden Book of American Friendship with the Soviet Union, published in November 1937. Thereafter, the organization was largely inactive, becoming defunct in 1939.

In July 1938 Mary Van Kleeck, associate director of the International Industrial Relations Institute, chaired a dinner conference on Soviet progress at which announcement was made of the formation of a new American council on Soviet relations, whose purpose would be to direct a program to encourage American-Soviet relations. There was some continuity of participation from the Friends organizations to the new council, notably including author and lecturer Corliss Lamont, who had been involved in the previous groups and was an organizer—and in 1941 became national chair—of the new group.

The National Council on Soviet Relations brought together largely professional people desiring to increase understanding of the USSR in the United States and believing that, in the struggle against fascism, American interests coincided with those of the Soviet Union. In response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the council organized a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden in July to promote American-Soviet cooperation against Hitler, and, later that year, another rally to publicize the need for prompt American military aid to the Soviet Union. After the United States entered the war, the council advocated a second front in Europe and a declaration of war against Finland.

In November 1942, the council sponsored a Congress of American-Soviet Friendship at Madison Square Garden that was attended by several thousand people. It featured addresses by Vice President Henry Wallace and the presidents of the American Federation of Labor and the United Auto Workers, and messages of greeting and support from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared 8 November 1942 “Stalingrad Day” in New York. Corresponding meetings were held simultaneously in several other U.S. cities.

The success of the congress affirmed the notion that American-Soviet cooperation was important to the maintenance of world peace and corresponded to American policy and interest. The official sanction of the cause of American-Soviet friendship inspired the leadership of the council to establish a permanent organization, and the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship was incorporated a few months later. The five incorporators included the chair of the congress, Corliss Lamont, Dr. Harry Grundfest, Rev. William Howard Melish, George Marshall, and William Morris, Jr.

Local affiliates sprang up quickly. Some were independently formed language and cultural groups, while others were more political; still others had their origins in local Russian War Relief committees, many of which re-formed as local Councils of American-Soviet Friendship when President Truman cut off aid to Soviet Union in August 1945. By the 1940s, there were thirty-two active council affiliates across the country.

Three deserve particular mention. In Chicago, leaders of three local organizations—the FSU, the Chicago Forum on Russian Affairs, and Russian War Relief—established a Chicago Society for American-Soviet Relations early in 1943, which affiliated with the National Council and changed its name to the Chicago Council of American-Soviet Friendship later the same year. A Los Angeles Society for Cultural Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, founded in 1939, and the American-Russian Institute of San Francisco, founded in 1931, similarly affiliated with the National Council around 1943. These three groups, along with the National Council itself, are apparently the only Soviet friendship organizations to have survived from World War II to the present time.

The program of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship emphasized cultural interchange as a means of strengthening bonds of understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. The council sought to counteract negative propaganda about the Soviet Union by means of a broad spectrum of public-information activities. These included annual mass rallies, usually in Madison Square Garden in November, in celebration of anniversaries of the Russian Revolution; the publication of numerous pamphlets such as Women in the Soviet Union and The Voice of American-Soviet Friendship; and sponsorship of study tours to the Soviet Union and speakers’ tours around the United States. Pictorial exhibits focusing on various aspects of Soviet life and culture were also developed for public view; the most significant of these was the “American-Soviet War Exhibit,” shown at the Museum of Science and Industry in New York City in 1943 with the active cooperation of the War Department and the Lend-Lease Administration.

Although the National Council enjoyed widespread support from government officials and business and labor leaders during the early forties under the chairmanship of Corliss Lamont (1943–1946), groups such as the America First Committee, Committee to Defend America, Fight for Freedom, Incorporated, and the Friends of Democracy denounced the council from the outset as the “Voice of Stalin in America.” After the war, a radical shift in American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and the growing hostility of the Cold War brought the organization under increasing attack. The Truman administration moved from its earlier position of support for the National Council to an attitude of outright opposition, and in 1946 the House Committee on Un-American Activities began a formal investigation of its activities. The initial phase of this investigation resulted in the committee’s demanding the surrender of all correspondence and financial records of the organization. The council refused on constitutional grounds, and both the council’s chair, Corliss Lamont, and its executive director, Richard Morford, were cited for contempt of Congress. The National Council was officially placed on Attorney General Tom Clark’s list of subversive organizations proscribed for federal employees in 1947, and in 1954 the Subversive Activities Control Board declared the council to be a Communist front organization.

Much of the energy of the council and its active members during the ensuing decade and a half was absorbed in suits and appeals associated with these actions. Morford was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1950 and served three months in Manhattan’s West Street Jail. In 1951, however, the US Supreme Court ruled that the US attorney general had acted in a capricious, arbitrary, and illegal fashion in designating the National Council a subversive organization, and in 1963 the Second District Court of Appeals overturned the council’s designation as a Communist front.

In the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, public interest in and support for the council declined sharply and the number of local affiliates shrank to three, from a high of thirty-two. Monetary support dwindled similarly. Nonetheless, under the successive chairmanships of Dr. John Kingsbury (1949–1956) and artist Rockwell Kent (1957–1971), the council continued to pursue a program of public information activities aimed at fostering greater cultural understanding between the Soviet and American peoples and closer cooperation between their governments. Rallies and festivals of Soviet Friendship were held periodically, and the council’s Committee of Women was one of fourteen cooperating organizations that sponsored an International Women’s Exposition for Peace and Friendship in 1952. The council sponsored regular study tours to the Soviet Union and maintained a lending library of literature as well as more than sixty different photographic exhibits of aspects of Soviet life. Other projects included art exhibits, Soviet film festivals, a speakers’ bureau, forums, and rallies. During this time the council also actively supported the broader-based US movements for disarmament and a nuclear test ban and worked against the McCarran-Walter and Smith acts.

A new period of growth for the council began in the early seventies, partly as a consequence of the official abolition of the subversive organizations list. Under successive chairmanships of William Howard Melish (1971–1978), Ewart Guinier (1979–1984), John Cherveny (1985–1987), and actor John Randolph (1988–), twenty-four new local affiliates were formed, making a total of twenty-seven by 1988. The first national convention was held in 1977, and the governing structure was reorganized to provide for more local participation and control. In January 1981 Alan Thomson became the new executive director, replacing Richard Morford, who had served in that capacity continuously for thirty-four years.

The Council’s programs included an American-Soviet exchange of teenage youth, in cooperation with the Soviet organization Sputnik; sponsorship of young Americans at Artek, a Soviet youth camp on the Black Sea; a speakers’ program, sponsoring lecture tours of Soviet students and professionals at US colleges; and maintenance of a lending library that made available an extensive collection of publications and films to Russian studies programs in the United States.

Improvement in official US relations with the Soviet Union also fostered the creation of other American groups interested in American-Soviet friendship. These represented a very diverse range of endeavors; exemplary were Anniversary Tours, founded by Lem Harris in the early seventies, which specialized in package tours to the Soviet Union; Promoting Enduring Peace, established in Connecticut by Jerome Davis in the late 1970s, which sponsored a Volga Peace Cruise and a Mississippi Peace Cruise in alternating years for joint groups of Soviet and American citizens; and Soviet American Woolens in Kezar Falls, Maine, founded by Marty Tracy and Peter Hagerty, which sold blended skeins of Soviet and American wool marketed as Peace-Fleece through American church and community groups.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989 suspended many of the friendship and exchange programs that had flowered in the environment of détente. Most of the individuals involved remain active in peace and justice activities, however, often in association with United Nations-related groups.

The National Council of American Soviet Friendship survived the Soviet break-up. In 1993 the council formally changed its name to the US Council for International Friendship and adopted a new statement of purpose advocating peaceful relations between the United States and all nations, specifically including the republics of the former Soviet Union. None of the Friendship Societies previously affiliated with the council remained active in any of the former Soviet republics, however.

The US Council supported friendship with nations whose political systems differ from that of the United States, and especially with nations whose citizens are guaranteed economic, political, and cultural rights. Its program called for international arms reduction, the establishment of trade relations, and exchanges in science as vehicles for the establishment of world peace. The council also focused its attention on fostering international exchanges of trade union representatives. At the end of the twentieth century, there were ten active local councils across the United States affiliated with the US Council.

National Council of American-Soviet Friendship Records. Guide. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_134/

Butkovich, Catherine. “An Approach to American-Soviet Understanding through Cultural Interchange.” Seminar paper, Northwestern University, 24 April 1949. Typescript.

National Committee, Friends of the Soviet Union, “Who Are the Friends of the Soviet Union?” n.d. (c. 1931).

National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. “We Proudly Present: The Story of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.” n.d. (c. 1953).