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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DEAR UNKNOWN FRIEND: THE REMARKABLE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN AMERICAN
AND SOVIET WOMEN  
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Yelizaveta P. Renfro
October 28, 2024
Yelizaveta P. Renfro
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_ This book chronicles the World War II-Cold War-era program that
encouraged private pen pal correspondence between women in the USA and
the Soviet Union, an initiative that fell victim to the rancorous
politics of the era. _

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_Dear Unknown Friend
The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women_
Alexis Peri
Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674987586

In September 1947, Myrtle Park, a 46-year-old housewife who raised
cattle and wheat in Englewood, Kansas, sat down at her desk and began
to write to an “Unknown Russian Friend.” In her letter, she wrote
of her fervent desire for peace. “We believe that the USA and Russia
can and should be friends,” she confided, “but our leaders,
unfortunately, do not always express such confidence. They do not
represent the interests of the common people of the United States.”

She concluded her letter, “I do so hope you, Russian people, may
have the opportunity to go on with your way of doing things without
ever having to fight another war. I am, sincerely your friend, Mrs.
Ethan J. Park.”

A few months later, a response arrived from a Muscovite named Irina
Aleksandrovna Kuznetsova:

“I was deeply touched by your interest to hear from far-away Moscow
and the sincere sympathy that breathes in your letter. Those who have
lived through the horrors of the last war cannot look with equanimity
on preparations for a new war and cannot consider it other than the
most horrible crime.”

To this, Park replied:

“I completely agree with you that war is the most horrible crime. I
am determined that I shall do my little, tiny bit toward furthering
understanding and peace on earth. World peace is based greatly on
understanding, isn’t it?”

Park and Kuznetsova were just two of the 750 “ordinary” American
and Soviet women who participated in a pen-pal program between 1943
and 1953 that sought to foster diplomacy and understanding between the
two nations. This program is the subject of Alexis Peri’s _Dear
Unknown Friend_ [[link removed]],_ _a highly
readable and engaging history of a little-known aspect of Cold War
history.

The correspondents, who held no government posts and had no
foreign-relations experience, “thrust themselves onto the
international political stage at a time when women were relegated to
playing minor roles,” Peri explains. In the process of sharing the
personal details of their lives, “they began to model what they
believed was a new, woman’s style of diplomacy: a diplomacy of the
heart. This was the idea that heartfelt storytelling and expressions
of empathy could be mighty political forces, strong enough to help win
wars and secure peace.”

The pen pals believed they would succeed in their peacemaking
endeavors where official diplomacy had failed for two reasons. First,
they were women, and women “were better than men at listening,
forming friendships, and avoiding conflict,” writes Peri. And
second, they believed they could be frank and open in their
discussions because they were “common people,” not politicians.
What the author finds in the letters is a “mixture of peacemaking
and propagandizing.” While the writers were often genuine in their
writing, they simultaneously “performed what, in their eyes, it
meant to be a citizen, woman, worker, mother, and peace advocate in
the United States or Soviet Union.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of the pen-pal project was that it
“upends the conventional historical wisdom that there was virtually
no contact between American and Soviet citizens during the
Truman-Stalin era.” In fact, like many historians, Peri believed
that “communication between American and Soviet civilians began to
flow only after Stalin died in 1953 and when President Dwight D.
Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev tried to ‘thaw’ relations
between their countries.” It was when Peri was conducting research
on another project that she discovered the letters, “hastily bundled
together and gathering dust in the State Archive of the Russian
Federation.” Her project casts a light on this virtually unknown
chapter in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Women wrote not just about politics and war but also about their
personal experiences as wives, mothers, workers, and other identity
categories to which they belonged. Interestingly, though, the American
and Russian letter writers stressed different aspects of their
identities. Explains Peri:

“The Americans began by describing their marital status, children,
and living conditions in that order of priority, whereas their Soviet
interlocutors stressed their educations and occupations. Some…did
not mention family life until a second or third letter. Conversely,
American letter writers often did not indicate their level of
education until well into the correspondence.”

The letters shed light on correspondents’ priorities and
self-perception, says Peri, and also served to challenge and correct
cultural labels:

“The letters cut against emerging cold war stereotypes that Soviet
women were so haggard and overworked that they had little time or
energy for their children, and that American women were so absorbed in
homemaking that they did not look far past their manicured lawns or
local parent-teacher associations to make larger contributions to
society. In fact, the vast majority of the American and Soviet
correspondents understood ‘women’s work’ to mean some
combination of the domestic and the professional.”

In other words, women were discussing the challenges of “having it
all” even before this topic came to the forefront of feminist
conversation. Though the letter writers “did not identify as
feminist activists,” Peri stresses that their explorations of their
roles as women served as an important precursor to the feminist
movements that followed:

“Pen friendship…helped raise the letter writers’ consciousness
of what was possible for them to achieve as women and what constraints
prevented them from realizing their potential. Such awareness was
integral to the women’s liberation movements, which crystalized in
the United States during the late 1960s and in the Soviet Union during
the 1980s. Many (especially middle-class) women in the United
States…pushed for more professional and educational opportunities,
whereas women in the Soviet Union often sought greater freedom to
spend more time at home…Equal wages, steady employment, and access
to childcare and contraception were major demands of both
movements.”

When the letter-writing program started during World War II, the USSR
and United States were political allies and had reason to foster
friendship and understanding between their peoples. However, in the
postwar period, as tensions between the countries escalated, the
program came under scrutiny until, says Peri, “corresponding for
American-Soviet friendship was increasingly looked upon as an act of
subversion, not of patriotism.” While each letter had always been
reviewed by authorities on both sides — passing through at least
four sets of hands between the time it was written and the time it
reached its intended recipient — in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
participants began to feel pressure to stop writing (and many did).

Those who continued, like Gladys M. Kimple of Friday Harbor,
Washington, recognized they were taking a risk, since American mail
going to the USSR was now being inspected by the CIA. “Aware she was
under surveillance, Kimple began censoring her remarks but did not
hide her disdain for new, uninvited readers,” Peri reports. “As
the campaigns against communism intensified, she wrote more frequently
and defiantly.”

In the end, Peri notes, Kimple’s “family paid a high price for her
involvement.” Not only was her brother-in-law “hauled before the
Weld Committee on Un-American Activities,” but her son was
“honorably discharged” from the U.S. Air Force and lost his
license to fly. “Translated into everyday language,” Kimple
explained in one of her letters, “it means that because of mine —
not his — beliefs he is considered insufficiently trustworthy for
military service.”

With officials in both countries dubious of the program’s benefits,
it was eventually discontinued, but its impact, though modest, is
noteworthy. The “diplomacy of the heart” that a small group of
American and Russian women practiced for a decade can teach us
something even today. Peri writes:

“It was based on the notion that during times of war, hot or cold,
being emotionally open, empathetic, and even vulnerable could be
politically expedient rather than pose a political liability. The pen
pals frequently argued points of view that aligned with those of
hardline politicians. The difference was they wrapped their
disagreements in a mantle of shared humanity and common concern. They
altered the method, not the message. And this enabled them to write
through disputes and misunderstandings and to exchange dozens of
letters during an era when official diplomacy between the United
States and the Soviet Union was often at an impasse.”

I find Peri’s book fascinating for personal reasons, as well. My
Russian mother and American father met in the Soviet Union in the
mid-1970s, at another juncture of the Cold War, and I was born there
but grew up in the United States in a bilingual home. Though my two
grandmothers, who were both having children during and immediately
after World War II, were not part of the pen-pal program, they were
the ages of many of the correspondents, and in reading the personal
accounts of the American and Soviet women as they navigated
motherhood, household duties, work, politics, and other concerns, I
was able to see something of my grandmothers’ experiences and
attitudes reflected in the words of other women. The pen pals speak as
much for their cohorts as they do for themselves.

But even without a personal connection, this book is a worthy read,
sure to appeal to anyone interested in Cold War history, women’s
history, or the feminist movement. Peri writes in an engaging and
accessible style; this is not a dry, formidable tome but rather a
lively volume that keeps its focus on individual lives and stories.
Carefully researched, Peri’s work does much to place the women
she’s studying within historical and political contexts, and she has
gone beyond archival documents to contact descendants of the women to
discover what became of the letter writers and whether their pen-pal
activities had a lasting impact on them. (Peri’s research on this
latter question is inconclusive; she notably had much more luck in
tracking down American descendants than Russian ones.)

Though few in number, the women who wrote to one another from 1943-53
were “part of a groundswell of new attitudes about women’s rights
and about the power of citizens to prevent war.” As Peri notes,
“We can see history flow through them. Their conversations created
ripples, and those ripples streamed into the currents of thought that
helped define an age.”

_Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of a book of nonfiction,
_Xylotheque: Essays [[link removed]]_, and a
collection of short stories, _A Catalogue of Everything in the World
[[link removed]]_. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared
in Glimmer Train Stories, Creative Nonfiction, North American Review,
Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review,
Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from
George Mason University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska._

* the Cold War
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* USA
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* USSR
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* Citizen Diplomacy
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