A Semester Abroad Behind the Iron Curtain

In 1958, Judith G. Bridell ’59 and her fellow participants in the “Experiment in International Living” program in Poland met with an official from the country’s communist party.

“I said, ‘I thought this was a Communist country—why aren’t things Communist here?’” she said recently.

Bridell, then Judith A. Gilmartin, was one of several Harvard students who took part in either this program in Poland and the USSR or an academic student exchange between the Soviet bloc countries and the United States. Both had the stated goals of promoting a cultural appreciation for—and understanding of—the “other side.”

Students fortunate enough to be selected for the “Experiment” program traveled to Poland or the Soviet Union and mingled with students in that country, staying in Warsaw or Krakow in Poland or moving around from region to region in the USSR.

Bridell’s unexpected discovery wasn’t the only one made by Harvard students who breached the Iron Curtain that year.

Those lucky enough to peek behind the ideological barrier in the midst of the Cold War found that the Soviet Union and Poland were not quite the countries of extreme oppression under harsh Communist regimes that they had expected.

SHATTERED STEREOTYPES

Gail W. Lapidus ’59, who went to the USSR on an academic exchange, said she found a radically different Soviet Bloc than she had anticipated and that these trips into Communist territory helped to “humanize” the area to Americans unaware of actual happenings in a world shrouded by Communist mystique.

“There was a tendency to think of the USSR in abstract terms and demonize it,” she said, adding that it was vastly important for a younger generation who had received little exposure to the “other side.”

Lapidus, then Gail S. Warshofsky, also said that she thought it had a similar effect on those who traveled in the opposite direction and “destroyed a lot of stereotypes about the U.S.A.”

“People would come and get a much more realistic impression of the country than what they had gotten from Soviet propaganda,” she added.

Myra B. Ramos, who graduated from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in 1959 and who was a participant in the “Experiment” program, found that being in the USSR during an international crisis—the landing of U.S. Marines in Lebanon—did not stop Soviet citizens from being friendly to her and other Americans.

“What was really impressive was how curious and friendly virtually everyone was. We were immediately identified wherever we went, and people would just throng around us,” said Ramos, originally Myra M. Bergman.

A LIFELONG IMPACT

The Harvard students who traveled east also said their positive experiences, in addition to defying preconceptions, fostered a lifelong fascination with the area and its cultural, political, and social climate.

Joan B. Urban, who attended GSAS and is now a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said that it was her time in Poland on the program that convinced her to study the Soviet Union in greater depth.

“It committed me to the study of the Soviet Bloc—not just Poland but the whole question of the Soviet Union and its relations with Eastern Europe and relations with the international community,” said Urban, originally Joan R. Barth.

Her students, she adds, are nevertheless shocked when she recounts her experiences, because they are completely different from what students today expect too.

“I’m constantly telling my tales to my students, and I guess occasionally their hair stands on end, as it doesn’t seem possible that I’ve lived through the things I’ve lived through. It was during part of the darkest years of the Cold War,” she added.

—Staff writer Betsy L. Mead can be reached at emead@fas.harvard.edu.