Staging Stalingrad: Building a Wartime Alliance, Pro-Soviet Propaganda, and the Trope of the Two Americas, 1942–1947

On 11 January 1943, the following notice appeared in the New York Times:

Several members of the cast of “The Russian People” will enact a scene from that Soviet drama at the Lenin Memorial mass meeting at Madison Square Garden tonight, before the performance at the Guild. ¹

The Lenin Memorial mass meeting, organized by the newly formed National Council of American–Soviet Friendship (NCASF) and featuring scenes from the Soviet play adapted and directed for the Theatre Guild, followed quickly on the heels of a similar mass meeting and rally, “Salute to Our Russian Ally,” staged at Madison Square Garden on 1 November 1942 and attended by twenty thousand supporters. Both events presented speeches by American political, military, and arts leaders and Soviet dignitaries, along with theatrical scenes and musical performances. The rallies concluded when the crowd had been effectively emotionally aroused and asked to stand for the playing of the national anthems of the United States and the USSR. The crowd was asked to approve statements on US–Soviet cooperation and peace to send to President Roosevelt and General Stalin, and it apparently roared back to the stage its approval.

“Salute to Our Russian Ally,” coordinated by the Friends of Soviet Russia (FSR), a precursor to the NCASF, was the first of many mass meetings and rallies held in New York and cities throughout the United States between 1942 and 1991 commemorating the Russian Revolution and the 1933 Roosevelt–Litvinov diplomatic agreements between the nations. The largest rallies took place during 1942–6, when momentum to celebrate the wartime alliance was at its height. Strategies for building a public to cultivate a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union shifted during the McCarthy era and again following the death of Stalin, but during these early years, the central image used to capture American empathy for Russians was its wartime bravery and sacrifice, especially as it became associated with the Battle of Stalingrad. Tens of thousands of Americans showed up in support of the Soviets and the US–Soviet alliance, to learn about Soviet society, and to see star performers and military heroes take the stage. Notably, the use of the term “Russian” in reference to people and territories of the Soviet Union was also ideologically laden and part of a program of erasure of distinctive national identities, though the American rally organizers likely adopted it to avoid the more politically charged “Soviet.”

The National Council of American–Soviet Friendship staged annual rallies and public events during World War II and supported Soviet–American cultural exchanges through a variety of platforms (rallies, stage performances, exhibitions, etc.) throughout the duration of the Cold War, ostensibly to celebrate the wartime alliance and advocate for peaceful relations between the two nations. Meanwhile, it also challenged anti-Soviet propaganda in the United States and provided “educational” materials on the USSR. Throughout its lifespan, the NCASF, closely affiliated with the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) and subsequent Soviet organizations, was one of the most effective conduits for pro-Soviet information and propaganda in the United States. The NCASF, the central organization linking similar groups throughout the United States, leveraged performance in public spaces to generate a mass American progressive audience for the discussion of ideas they linked with Soviet ideology, such as antifascism, civil rights, labor rights, national healthcare and childcare programs, and equality for women. Members of the organization used their platforms to urge for the protection of civil liberties, antilynching laws, and decolonization of African countries. In their rallies, performances, and publications, these ideals were always tied to the importance of peaceful relations with the Soviet Union and to demonstrating the effectiveness of Soviet economic, technological, and cultural programs. In this way, important progressive programs began to seem naturally associated with Soviet-style socialism. The performances and publications of the group conflated emerging progressive values and US–Soviet relations.

This article examines the viewpoints and strategies of the NCASF primarily from 1943 to 1947 and how it relied on mass public events, performances, and eventually the courts to broaden its reach. I look especially at the use of imagery of a wartime alliance and the Battle of Stalingrad that the organization used to build empathy and convince the American public of the importance of American–Soviet peace and friendship. ² While cultivating symbolism connecting the battle to ideals of liberty and allyship, the NCASF grew a network for hosting and supporting Soviet-American cultural exchanges across the United States. Through the group’s work, a concept of “two Americas” gained traction. As Rósa Magnúsdóttir has written about the Soviet idea of the two Americas, implemented in official domestic and international propaganda in the 1940s, “America was to be admired for its industrial progress and ridiculed for its socioeconomic and racial conditions.” ³ The concept created absolute binary thinking about America: in one America progressive ideals and freedoms were fused with a pro-Soviet, antiwar stance, and in the other America fascism, racism, imperialism, and capitalism prevailed. Unsurprisingly, as the Cold War progressed, the NCASF faced charges from the so-called House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Council leaders took the opportunities in court to further this concept and fight for American civil liberties, which, ironically, their Soviet counterparts could never have done in their own country. The legacy, then, of the NCASF was a complex blend of promoting the pervasive binary encampments that marred American politics, amplifying divisiveness, and establishing legislative foundations for protecting certain democratic freedoms. And it all started with Stalingrad.

“Lest we forget Stalingrad”: so opens We Proudly Present, a history of the NCASF meant to create a clear, celebratory narrative about the long history of American–Russian friendship as necessary for international peace and global prosperity. ⁴ The short history, written in 1953 to accompany the tenth-anniversary celebration of the organization and the twentieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and USSR, advocated for the restoration of peaceful relations following the sanction of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the death of Stalin, anchoring a belief in fruitful cooperation to the symbol of Stalingrad as the triumphal turning point for the Allies in World War II. That the NCASF leveraged the image of the Battle of Stalingrad ten years after the Red Army defeated the Nazis there attests to its significant symbolic power for Americans. Chairman of the Council, Dr. John Kingsbury, wrote in the Foreword, entitled “Back to Stalingrad”:

[To] remind Americans everywhere what that decisive battle meant … to stir memories of what that battle signified to liberty-loving people of the whole world, to stir memories that bless and burn: that is the purpose of this pamphlet. ⁵

The pamphlet went further in memorializing the image of Stalingrad as foundational for global peace:

Mothers, wives, sweethearts of English and American boys fighting in North Africa or in the Pacific, devoured the news from the Russian front. Their loved ones were not on that front, but they knew that their future, the future of their families, of their way of life, in fact the future of civilization was in precarious balance… . The Volga was more than a Russian river. It was the bastion on which hung the hopes and fears of the United Nations. ⁶

Though in postwar America D-Day and the arrival in Normandy of the Allied Forces emerged as the central symbol of victory over the Germans, the Battle of Stalingrad had indeed captured massive American attention, concern, and, finally, hope for triumph over Hitler while the battle raged from July 1942 to February 1943. It was during this battle, with American support for the Soviet Union at its height, that the NCASF had emerged.

Founded in 1943 as a replacement to the American Committee for Friendship with the Soviet Union, with ties to earlier American organizations supporting relations with the USSR, the NCASF outlined its main objectives—which shifted little during the nearly five decades of its existence—in its certificate of incorporation:

1. (a) to strengthen friendly relations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics through the promotion of better understanding between them.

2. (b) to educate the American people on the need for such understanding and friendly relations … as essential to the victory in the present war against the Axis powers and the establishment of world-wide democracy and enduring peace.

3. (c) to act as a coordinating body and headquarters for organizations and groups of individuals subscribing to the above purposes… .

4. (d) to use any and all lawful means for the accomplishment of the above purposes, including … study and research, the preparation, publication and distribution of literature; the holding of mass meetings, exhibitions, lectures, and radio broadcasts… . ⁷

The New York branch of the NCASF became one of the most influential of the friendship organizations that emerged globally as early as the 1920s. According to a then-secret CIA report from 1957, “Soviet-Sponsored Societies of Friendship and Cultural Relations,” the Friendship Societies were formed as part of a cultural propaganda program to reach beyond the limits of Communist Parties abroad. The author of the report believed that most members of the societies “[were] unaware that they are aiding a foreign intelligence service,” noting that only a few key members and leaders in the societies were associated with the local Communist Party. ⁸

The seemingly benign term “peace” was ideologically loaded prior to and during the Cold War, as were the accompanying terms “freedom,” “liberty,” and “friendship.” In his article “The Semantics of the Cold War,” published in the Public Opinion Quarterly in 1956, political scientist William Glaser analyzed the use of heavily laden, propagandistic language in official documents of the USSR and the United States during the seven-year period following World War II. Both sides, using the same dualistic virtue system, Glaser noted, identified themselves and their allies with certain desirable attributes—“truth, cooperation, peace, freedom, etc.”—and their enemies with undesirables, including “dishonesty, evil, obstructionism, aggression, tyranny, etc.” ⁹ The friendship societies capitalized on this virtue signaling to reach mass audiences that might otherwise maintain distance from Soviet-related content. Presenting material associated with the Battle of Stalingrad and the wartime alliance made concepts of peace and cooperation ever more urgent.

A brief description of the long Battle of Stalingrad will help clarify an understanding of the way it was depicted in cultural and literary works later leveraged by the NCASF and its associates in the peace and friendship movement. In the late summer of 1942, Hitler believed his army could easily and swiftly besiege Stalingrad and take the oil fields of Baku to the east, announcing an assured victory by September. Few thought the Red Army could withstand the Nazi attack, but a no-retreat order from Stalin led to what the NCASF characterized as a “win-or-die stand.” ¹⁰ Because the initial German blitzkrieg didn’t completely destroy the city’s buildings but made it nearly impossible for tanks to move effectively through the city, fighting took place largely through the infantrymen who fought building to building and along the Volga River for five months, through autumn and into the treacherous winter. The most effective fighters in this situation were snipers, and the Soviets, unlike the Germans, had encouraged sharpshooting skills for both men and women throughout the 1930s. Through surprise attacks, the Soviets began to slowly recover territory in the city. Adding to their ability to hold their ground was their greater preparedness for the winter. The Soviets wore more suitable fabrics and headgear than their German counterparts, and used gasoline in their gun oil to keep their rifles from locking. Finally, the Soviets used a disinformation campaign so that Red Army soldiers (far fewer in number than the Germans) could trick and secretly encircle the German army of three hundred and thirty thousand men outside of Stalingrad. The Germans surrendered, and the Soviet Union radio announcer Yuri Levitan stated on 2 February 1943 that they had “completely finished the liquidation of the German fascist troops.” ¹¹ A correspondent for the Washington Post noted, “Aside from the huge territorial strides of the Russians, the destruction of Axis troops and equipment was regarded as even more important in the Allied fight to force Hitler to his knees.” ¹² For many, this decisive victory was an essential turning point in the war.

Interest in events of the Battle of Stalingrad translated into a renewed interest in Russian life and culture in the United States. The Friends of Soviet Russia leapt into action and began providing cultural and educational materials to all prospective American audiences. Working with the Theatre Wing, an organization that grew out of Actors’ Equity, members of the FSR promoted the staging of the skit “My Brother Lives in Stalingrad” by Sandra Michael at an event by The Artists’ Front to Win the War, at Carnegie Hall on 16 October 1942. The event, presided over by Orson Welles, was organized as a fundraising event for Red Army soldiers and featured Charlie Chaplin as the main attraction. Theatre director Margaret Webster appeared in the cast of the short play along with Selena Royle and Hester Sondergaard. ¹³ The popular piece was also presented on several radio programs, according to Axel Gruenberg, who directed the play for the Carnegie Hall event after doing so for his own radio show in 1942–3. ¹⁴

As indicated by the presentation of scenes from the Theatre Guild’s production of The Russian People at the January 1943 Lenin Memorial mass meeting, the NCASF used live theatrical performance as a means of building empathy and understanding of the Soviets while also celebrating the wartime alliance. After the war, the NCASF held the rally “Get Together with Russia,” hoping to encourage support for postwar cooperation between the two nations. ¹⁵ The rally opened with the performance of a short untitled play, which was most likely presented in the style of Living Newspapers, popularized by the Federal Theatre Project in the late 1930s. ¹⁶ The name of the actor, Paul Mann, who was affiliated with the NCASF through director Harold Clurman, is handwritten on an archived script used for the performance; Mann probably played the narrator. No author or other performers are indicated, but they were likely associates of Webster and Clurman, who both participated often in early NCASF events.

The play opens with four tableaux: a woman rocking a baby to sleep, a couple enjoying the harvest, a young worker looking forward to a vacation, and a young boy reading about becoming a soldier. The idyllic, romanticized depiction of Russia is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of the Nazis. The script notes that Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony plays. The narrator announces that the Nazi “murderers in airplanes, the sadists in straight columns, the apes of the earth” struck “without warning.” ¹⁷ Then the narrator names individual Russian and Soviet cities, stating, “Up!” after each city is named. The actors in the four tableaux arise as their city is named.

Then a voice interrupts. It is Stalin, the narrator tells the audience. Over the radio, “Stalin” basically calls for the total destruction of everything in case of retreat, so the enemy cannot have anything. Immediately the characters move to action with weapons and plans to burn and destroy everything. A woman in the fields of Ukraine (identified in the play as Russia) commands her husband to “destroy the Dneiperstroi [sic] dam on the Dnieper river, which had given light and power to the cities and countryside.” Additional scenes of heroic action by ordinary people are depicted, building to a big emotional finale by the narrator about “how all of us [Americans] owe so much to the women, men, and children of Stalingrad.” The narrator’s final speech ends, “For all those who died, for those who live, for those of the Red Army and Navy, the Red Guerillas [sic], the farmers, miners, children—for all those who with our valiant American armies and navies, the valiant fighters of our allies of the United Nations, let us rise now and sing the national anthems.” ¹⁸ The stage action ends as the audience rises with the music and display of the flags of the United States and USSR.

The play and its performance reinforced the narrative the NCASF had been developing throughout the war years. By depicting the stories of ordinary individuals, rather than political leaders or high-ranking military figures, the notions of “friendship” and shared humanity are emphasized. By cementing an image of Stalingrad as the triumphal turning point, American freedom can be viewed as being associated with Russian action. The depiction of a wartime alliance reinforces the idea that international peace hinges on US–Soviet cooperation.

An essential figure in the American–Soviet friendship movement during these early years of emphasizing the wartime alliance was Soviet journalist, playwright, poet, and novelist Konstantin Simonov. Simonov worked as a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Red Star, and he used his intimate knowledge of key battles and military life in his highly lauded and influential literary works, which reached a massive international audience through the global networks of friendship societies and associated organizations. Through his daily dispatches, poems, plays, and novels, Simonov shaped how both domestic and international audiences viewed the Soviet people in wartime, the Soviet army, and military encounters, especially the Battle of Stalingrad. His plays were staged and broadcast internationally, his novels translated and published widely, film adaptations of his work packed wartime and postwar theatres, and his poem “Wait for Me” (1942) became one of the most often quoted and enduring poems of this time. He became one of the first Soviet literary figures of the postwar era to travel abroad to speak about Soviet art, theatre, literature, and culture. His arrival in the United States in 1946 for a three-month speaking tour ensured his postwar celebrity status and influence.

The writer was introduced to Americans through his 1942 play The Russian People, adapted by Clifford Odets and presented by the Theatre Guild, under the direction of Harold Clurman and with sets designed by Kyiv-born Boris Aronson. After two weeks at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, the episodic play opened at the Guild Theatre on West 52nd Street in New York on 29 December 1942 and ran several weeks. It featured a cast of twenty-five actors, including Leon Ames as a Russian commander of a besieged battalion, Luther Adler as a courageous Russian soldier, Eleonora Mendelssohn as a mother who poisons a Nazi commander played by Rudolph Anders, Eduard Franz as a Russian traitor-spy, Victor Varconi as an aging former Tsarist turned Red Army soldier, and Elisabeth Fraser as a daring Russian girl working as a messenger. ¹⁹

The play centers on a group of individuals in a guerrilla garrison trapped outside an unnamed occupied Soviet town who eventually fight to take back the town. As adapted by Odets, it focuses primarily on the duties and actions of Automobile Battalion Commander Ivan Nikitich Safonov (Ames), compared early in the drama to a young Gorky, who coordinates a plan to lead his outnumbered and exhausted soldiers into the occupied town, surprising Nazi forces with an offensive. Joining him are the thirty-year-old newspaper staff writer Panin (played by Herbert Berghof), who becomes an adept soldier along the way; Valya (Fraser), Safonov’s nineteen-year-old female chauffeur, who risks her life delivering messages before being captured by the Germans in town; Ivan Ivanovich Globa (Adler), an assistant surgeon, who is taken prisoner and killed trying to save Valya; and Alexander Vasilyich Vasin (Varconi), the former Tsarist officer who proves his loyalty to the Red Army by revealing his nephew as a spy.

Interspersed between scenes of this group are depictions of interactions between the Nazis and Russians in the occupied town at the home of Doctor Kharitonov (E. A. Krumschmidt), who has been supporting the occupiers. His wife, Maria (Mendelssohn), proves her loyalty to the Soviets by poisoning the German officer Rosenberg (Anders) with tea. Frustrated with her husband’s complicity, she says both she and her husband are responsible for poisoning Rosenberg, so both will be hanged by the Germans. The play ends when the Red Army arrives at the Kharitonovs’ home, just after Globa is shot offstage, singing a nightingale lullaby. Globa had delivered this message to Valya from Safonov: “‘Tell her’ he said, ‘I love her very much.’” ²⁰ When Safonov arrives with officers of the other Red Army battalions that had aided in the attack and recapture of the town, Valya—whom he assumes had been killed—calls to him, catching him by surprise. With a combination of relief, love, and desire for revenge, Safonov closes the play with this short speech to his commanding officer: “But I want very much to live. And live on for a long time. To live on till my own eyes shall see the very last one of those who did all this lying dead! The very last one, and dead! Right here, under our feet!” ²¹ Thus, the central story of the Soviet battle against the Germans is intensified with the war-time romance and spy intrigues.

The play adheres to the principles of Soviet realism, which required portraying psychologically motivated characters in real-life situations and environments. The official style allowed for melodramatic portrayals of heroic actions rewarded and depictions of the punishments of enemies. At the time, the cultural leaders expected drama to display optimism and hopefulness, as Simonov demonstrated in his valorous ending. Simonov also took the opportunity in the drama to praise Stalin and encourage faith in his leadership. When the elderly soldier Vasin expresses doubt about his mission, Safonov responds:

I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. We all have to move ahead together. Those are Stalin’s words. Together. (Reflectively.) You know, Comrade, sometimes you don’t believe one thing and then another. But I believe him, I believe Stalin everywhere. I was in the hospital, wounded, when I heard his last radio speech. Dammit, if it wasn’t addressed to me personally! You know what it said? “Stand firm, Safonov! Fight on, and stand firm! Not one step backward, Safonov!” ²²

It is the only direct reference to Stalin in the piece, but it reinforced the proper ideological position, and undoubtedly helped secure Simonov the Stalin Prize for the play in 1942.

Earlier, in another short burst of sentimentality, Valya and Safonov praise the motherland through their distinctive memories of home. For Valya, the motherland represents the freedom of childhood in her rural village and swinging on two birch trees on the bank of a stream. For Safonov, it is the laughter of a couple walking down a city street and the kindness and strength of his mother that ignite his passion for the motherland. ²³ These two images importantly secure a sense of an idyllic prewar landscape and portray the Russians as peace-loving people—a key aspect of Soviet Cold War international propaganda that was already being cultivated in the midst of the war. While these moments in the play are thick in sentimentality and nostalgia, they are brief and not characteristic of the rest of it, in which the leading characters are typically emotionally understated and terse as they focus on their present tasks and encounters.

The Theatre Guild’s production was eagerly awaited: it was staged during the Battle of Stalingrad, about which Americans read daily with great interest and anticipation of its outcome. Nelson B. Bell of the Washington Post wrote, “Washington will be the only city to see this widely-discussed play before its Broadway opening.” ²⁴ He noted that the drama was written by “an author who has actually spent a year and a half on the bloodiest battle fronts in history.” ²⁵ Bell’s enthusiasm for the performance was reinforced in his statement, “It adds something of luster to the National Capital,” to have the play premiered there. ²⁶ In addition to the stage presentation of the play, the cast broadcast a performance on “We the People” Radio Washington. Building on Americans’ interest in the events in Stalingrad, the Theatre Guild surely produced the play as part of the extensive effort by American activists, artists, literary figures, and politicians to rebuild Russian–American alliances, guided by the Friends of Soviet Russia in 1942. Director Margaret Webster was the first chairman of the Theatre Committee for the NCASF, after its founding in 1943. Webster and Clurman were featured speakers on theatre at the NCASF’s “First Conference on American–Soviet Cultural Cooperation” in November 1945. The appearance of actors performing scenes at the January 1943 Lenin Memorial rally in Madison Square Garden indicates a clear relationship between Guild members and the Council. ²⁷

American theatre critics reviewed the play with genuine interest and agreed that the acting was notable but the plot lacked dramatic appeal, due to its episodic presentation and documentary approach. ²⁸ The central characters appealed to the critics, who found Safonov, Globa, and Valya particularly endearing and sympathetic. The success of the piece was not so much as noteworthy drama but as generating public interest in, and influencing public opinion of, Soviet Russians. In the theatre, the Guild’s mainstream American audiences surely found this rare depiction of the Soviets informative and inspiring, but at the NCASF rally commemorating Lenin, the self-identified antifascist American progressives packed into Madison Square Garden would have loudly cheered the emotionally compelling defiance of their Soviet allies, using the performance as an opportunity to express their appreciation and support for soldiers of the Red Army in the midst of the bloodiest battle of the war.

Simonov became America’s best-known Soviet writer when his novel Days and Nights, translated by the British author Joseph Barnes, was published in New York by Simon & Schuster in 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Americans received this translation as part of the Book of the Month Club that November. ²⁹ An extended audience accessed Simonov’s work when in April 1946 the film version arrived at the Stanley Theatre in New York, which specialized in Russian cinema, and played in large cities during Simonov’s visit to the United States in that year. American literary critic Alfred Werner, calling Simonov “a masterful reporter of what he has seen himself,” wrote that the “book conveys a good idea of the horrors the Russian defenders went through, of their patriotism, of the enemy’s brutality.” ³⁰

Days and Nights shares similar characters, plot development, ideological underpinnings, and literary devices with The Russian People. In this case, though, rather than an unnamed town under siege in the play, the setting of Stalingrad enables Simonov to chart specific details of place and event. Simonov tracks the progress of the siege of Stalingrad by the Nazis to the retreat of the Germans through the central character, Captain Saburov, commander of a battalion. The novel opens with Saburov moving his battalion of mostly inexperienced fighters across the Volga River into a smoking city so heavily bombarded it had a “special heavy odor of ashes which from then on never left the city through all the months of siege.” ³¹ At the outset, resistance to the German occupation seemed almost hopeless. “On the twenty-first day there came that minute when it might have seemed, to a man believing only in military theory, that to defend the city further was useless and even impossible.” ³² Through Saburov readers meet Officer Vassiliev, a spy for the Germans who sets a trap that nearly kills Saburov; Anya, a young army nurse whom he marries after he is wounded; an assortment of military men whose story lines build empathy, demonstrate patriotism or corruption, and show the complexities of the military operations in Stalingrad; and common, patriotic Russians (typically the elderly or young mothers) who risk their lives to feed the soldiers or deliver messages.

Simonov adhered to ideologically sound Soviet realist representations throughout the novel and echoed many sentiments about collectivism, optimism, patriotism, work, and obedience seen in The Russian People. As in the play, Stalin makes his appearance through a radio announcement in which he speaks “calmly and firmly, like a man who does not doubt victory for a moment.” ³³ The speech made Saburov, who was about to be sent on a reconnaissance mission through enemy territory, easy at heart. With the exception of this scene and a few other moments of heightened patriotism, the novel depicts socialist doctrine in a more restrained manner. In his translation, Barnes offers his British and American readers occasional commentary on ideological aspects, for clarity. “In general,” one reviewer noted, Simonov “refrains from laying on colors too thickly and he even has a fine sense of humor.” ³⁴

The novel ends much less bombastically than the play, which had been written to inspire courage and optimism in the midst of the unknown. Written after the Battle of Stalingrad had ended with the German retreat, the novel closes reverentially with only a quiet sense of national heroism. Saburov and his men, after months of long, winter, building-to-building fighting, have just reoccupied a building in Stalingrad and begin to fortify it, when a strange silence in the city enables them to hear a “distant cannon fire” that signaled the complete encirclement of the German soldiers by the Red Army. ³⁵ Shifting the narrative away from an individual’s perspective on events, Simonov broadens the view to encompass the full population. The novel ends with the line, “Before they went to bed, people listened to the last news broadcasts on the radio and were still anxious in their hearts for Stalingrad, knowing nothing yet of the great fortune of war, won in battle, which was beginning during these hours for Russia.” ³⁶

The same month that Barnes’s translation of Days and Nights was widely distributed in the United States through the Book of the Month Club, the NCASF hosted a Conference on American–Soviet Cooperation focusing on cultural exchange on 18 November 1945. This conference, part of the NCASF’s annual celebration of the founding of the Soviet Union, served as a primer for the first significant postwar cultural exchange: a three-week US tour of three Soviet authors and journalists—Konstantin Simonov, Ilya Ehrenberg, and General Mikhail Romanovich Galaktionov—under the sponsorship of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. At the conference, scenes from Simonov’s play And So It Will Be (1944) were presented. This comedy focuses on a group of people living in a crowded Russian apartment preparing for the reconstruction of Russia, emphasizing collectivity and optimism about the Soviet future. The actors included Thelma Schnee, Grace Coppin, Art Smith, and Eduard Franz, who had played a Russian traitor in the Theatre Guild’s production of The Russian People. At the conference, the NCASF aimed to prepare a broad audience of students, progressives, and intellectuals to participate and engage with the Soviet cultural figures they hoped would arrive with increasing frequency as part of their peace and friendship initiatives.

After a brief stay in Washington, DC, to speak at a conference on journalism organized by their hosts, Simonov, Ehrenberg, and Galaktionov spent most of their time in New York, speaking to various American organizations in both intimate and mass venues, including at the NCASF rally in Madison Square Garden on 29 May 1946. Following this rally, Simonov traveled to California, where he gave regular public presentations. American journalist Robert Brunn, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote extensively about one of Simonov’s speaking engagements, offering insight into the type of audience, characteristics of his speeches and speaking style, and general interest in this cultural exchange encounter. Brunn attended a mass event organized by the American Russian Institute of San Francisco, a West Coast counterpart to the NCASF.

Of the eight hundred members of the audience who came specifically to hear Simonov’s talk, according to Brunn, a quarter were Russian and Eastern European émigrés; the rest were American students, writers, artists, professionals, and scholars. ³⁷ The event began much like NCASF-hosted exchange events, with the singing of the national anthems of the United States and USSR. This was followed by the chorus performing the folk song “We’re in the Same Boat, Brother.” ³⁸ Next, American authors presented Simonov with copies of their books to take back to help rebuild Russian libraries destroyed by the war. Finally, Simonov, “a big, intense man,” spoke in Russian for two hours, pausing often for translation. ³⁹ He began,

I want to speak of three things:

1. 1. Of the necessity for friendship between our peoples.

2. 2. Of the necessity for friendship between our peoples.

3. 3. Of the necessity for friendship between our peoples. ⁴⁰

Simonov argued that without friendship and peace between the United States and USSR, the blood spilled in Okinawa, in Normandy, and in Stalingrad would have been in vain. He drew relationships between the two nations based on their shared antifascist stance, their desires for “true democracy,” and an appreciation of literature and culture. Simonov praised the work of Twain, Poe, Harte, Longfellow, and London. ⁴¹

Simonov also thanked Americans for the technology that supported the Soviet Five-Year Plan, the industrialization of agriculture and production from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Brunn wished that “every man and woman in the United States whose thinking about Russia is prejudiced either because of ignorance or a one-sided news diet” could have heard Simonov speak. He characterized the speech as moving and the audience lively and interested. Simonov closed with an antifascist poem, which the translator did not present in English, but Brunn thought “the power and sincerity of his beliefs were felt.” ⁴² Simonov’s celebrity as the author of Days and Nights, his effectiveness as a speaker, and the rarity of an encounter between Americans and Soviets at the time seemed to make such live and affective events especially influential in building a public for the peace and friendship movement.

Following Simonov’s popular US tour, Harold Clurman staged Simonov’s revised comedy And So It Will Be—adapted by actress Thelma Schnee as The Whole World Over—at the Biltmore in 1947. Featuring celebrated comic actor Joseph Buloff and respected actress of recent Othello fame Uta Hagen, the play centers on the way an odd assortment of characters, finding themselves sharing an apartment in Moscow after the war, rebuild their lives and form new relationships, with the unwanted assistance of the meddling Professor Vorontzov (Buloff). Hagen played Vorontzov’s daughter, Olya, who lost her fiancée in the war and became engaged to a distracted and aloof architect (Sanford Meisner), but eventually unites with a more suitable war hero (Stephen Bekassy). The play, produced by Walter Fried (who coproduced Arthur Miller’s All My Sons that same year) and Paul F. Moss (whose only other Broadway production was the 1929 edition of Grand Street Follies), ran for a respectable one hundred performances, given the renewal that year of anti-Soviet sentiment.

Producing the seemingly benign comedy—called “A Russian Play without Propaganda” by critic Howard Barnes—was very evidently a strategy to support the US–Soviet friendship movement. ⁴³ It was by no means a great comedy, although the leading actors were celebrated for their performances, but it appealed chiefly to critics as a piece that humanized its characters and depicted universal postwar dilemmas. “Although it is set in Moscow, the action, as the title suggests, could concern any group of people in Manchester, Marseilles, Montreal, or Memphis,” wrote a critic for Newsweek, who also delighted in the play for disrupting the stereotype that Russians have no sense of humor. ⁴⁴ New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, despite calling the play an “amateurish charade,” appreciated how it “retain[ed] the hospitality, sentiment and generosity of Soviet people.” ⁴⁵ In terms of the US–Soviet friendship movement, the play provided a way to shift its wartime cooperation advocacy to a postwar contexts. As the House Un-American Activities Committee began to ramp up its attack on communist affiliations in the United States and anti-Soviet propaganda reemerged with full force, the production of the play attempted to counter those narratives by appealing to the shared dreams and commonalities of everyday Russians and their US counterparts.

While Simonov’s tour and Clurman’s productions of his plays had effectively cultivated a diverse American audience for his work, soon after his return to Russia, Simonov depicted a split America and strongly critiqued American capitalism and the United States popular media. In 1947 he wrote the play The Russian Question, which popularized the image of “two Americas,” an enduring idea that became the central metaphor of America used in Cold War Soviet propaganda. The following description is based on the 1948 Soviet film version of the play. The montage opening cements the “two Americas” theme at the outset. Images of Wall Street, glamorous parties of the wealthy, the Rockettes, and an elite pet-grooming salon are juxtaposed against images of soup kitchens, striking workers battling the police, and African American families cooking and doing their laundry in poor, cramped homes. The New York Times Moscow correspondent reported on the first reading of the play in December 1946 in an article entitled “‘Horrible Crimes’ of U.S. Press Seen,” and criticized the play for emphasizing “two Americas, one the progressive, democratic America of Harry Smith, and the other the mercenary, reactionary America of Charles MacPherson and his henchmen. The first finds no grounds for enmity with the Soviet Union, the second finds plenty.” ⁴⁶

The plot centers on Harry Smith, an American journalist and author of a popular pro-Russian wartime book, The Truth about Russia. Smith becomes ensnared in the postwar media shift that encourages outrageous depictions of the Soviets as aggressive and warlike. A fellow journalist warns Smith, who has returned from three years abroad, that during the war, “friendship with Russia was in fashion,” but now their newspaper owner MacPherson is going “too far in reverse.” ⁴⁷ Smith’s friend doesn’t resist his editor’s reversal, but Smith refuses to write his new book about Russia with the title or content suggested by his boss, Why the Russians Want War. In his refusal, he loses $30,000 for the project, an advance of $8,000, his career, and his wife to the revenge-seeking tycoon and his sycophants.

Smith is depicted as an American hero who loses everything to remain honest to his conscience. In the closing lines of the play, he speaks at a large NCASF-like rally and announces, “I used to think there was one America, but there are two. There is no place for me in the America of MacPherson and Hearst, but there is in Lincoln’s and Roosevelt’s!” ⁴⁸ As Rósa Magnúsdóttir has explained in her book on Soviet ideology and propaganda, Enemy Number One, Soviet propaganda during the Cold War presented Americans in two categories that were unequivocally good or evil. She explains that the good Americans were progressive, pro-Soviet, or average Americans oppressed by the evil American capitalist elites and political leaders. ⁴⁹ Harry Smith, wrote Morris Childs after seeing the first production of the play in Moscow, “was no Communist or even a Communist sympathizer. Simonov shows him as just an honest and intelligent American… . Smith’s conflict is not a question of ideology, nor as regards the differences between the systems of capitalism and the Soviet-system, but around the very simple question of truth.” ⁵⁰ Simonov’s work established an example of the “two Americas” that would become more pronounced in creative works and journalism in the USSR, and through its vast network of friendship organizations abroad. The “two Americas” trope enabled the Soviet government to cultivate anti-Americanism in the postwar era while allowing Soviet citizens to maintain sentimental feelings cultivated during the wartime Alliance for “normal” Americans. ⁵¹

The play was extraordinarily popular in the Soviet Union. The New York Sunday Worker Magazine’s Moscow correspondent noted that the play was in production at the Komsomol Moscow Theatre in May 1947 and in rehearsal at four additional Moscow theatres, including the Moscow Art Theatre and the Maly Theatre, and numerous theatres throughout the Soviet Union. ⁵² The Soviet authorities promoted the play because Simonov’s authority as an eyewitness in promoting the “two Americas” trope gave it a feeling of authenticity for Soviet audiences. The 1948 film based on the play won the Stalin Prize. John Steinbeck, who toured the USSR in the summer of 1947, said that he was asked about it so many times that he developed a synopsis for a corresponding “The American Question” that jestfully critiqued Pravda and Soviet censorship in response. ⁵³ Following numerous productions in Russia, the play opened in East Berlin, where it received a mixed critical response but was widely reviewed by European and American presses.

The play turned some American audiences against Simonov. Some felt he had betrayed their appreciation and hospitality. Donald Kirkley of The Baltimore Sun criticized Simonov for writing such a scathing view of America while he was “drawing royalties from another of his plays, now on Broadway,” and noted that The Whole World Over might have been viewed as a “friendly gesture, had [Simonov] not written ‘The Russian Question.’” ⁵⁴ The anti-Americanism in the play and film provided anti-Soviet American officials and agitators easy fuel and the opportunity to attack Simonov and his work in an attempt to undermine his popularity and influence.

For members of the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship, however, Simonov’s film represented its own efforts as heroic. Smith’s defiance, rhetoric, and subdued charisma strongly resembled both NCASF Chairman Corliss Lamont and Executive Director Richard Morford at the time of Simonov’s visit. Lamont and Morford demonstrated Smith’s measured defiance when they went to battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee beginning on 10 December 1945. On that date, Lamont sent a letter to Representative John S. Wood, chairman of HUAC, rejecting its request to examine the organization’s records. The group refused the committee not because it had anything to hide, Lamont noted, but because acknowledging the committee’s request, and even its right to make the request, could erode US–USSR relations and jeopardize world peace. ⁵⁵ The author of a report about Lamont’s rejection in the Daily Worker thought, hopefully, the organization’s “defiance helps expose and undermine [HUAC] and could spur support among Congressmen for the … resolution to eliminate the committee.” ⁵⁶ Lamont’s letter was only the first step in a long fight against HUAC and the anti–“subversive activities” McCarran Act that would land Richard Morford in jail and involve numerous court battles, legal petitions, and emphatic and daring rally speeches. Harry Smith, Simonov’s unglamorous journalist, mirrored the work of the steady Lamont and Morford and appealed to their supporters.

Following World War II and prior to the contentious 1946 midterm elections, HUAC, not yet a permanent committee, began to reinvigorate its existence with several high-profile investigations. The NCASF, due to its visibility and the popularity of its wartime rallies and performances, became one of the first organizations to be investigated by HUAC, which launched an investigation in November 1945. In December of that year, it summoned Lamont and Morford—the latter having just been hired as executive director that month—to Washington to testify and submit to the committee the organization’s records, including a list of sponsors. The Board of Directors had already voted to refuse to give the records to the committee, a position they would reinforce in February 1946 in solidarity with other organizations under investigation by the committee. As noted in the Daily Worker, it was believed that such refusals would strengthen the case that was building against HUAC as illegal and overreaching its authority.

Lamont and Morford complied with the Board of Directors and refused to supply any information or records to the committee. In a statement issued by them both, they argued that “[HUAC’s] attempted investigation of the National Council is, as we have constantly declared, beyond its scope, improper, and unconstitutional. Under no plausible interpretation of the English language or American law can the National Council be regarded as engaging in un-American propaganda activities.” ⁵⁷ Both were charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee, and lengthy appeals processes followed. This marked the beginning of several decades-long battles in the courts where Lamont and Morford pressed back against government overreach, unconstitutional actions, and an infringement on American civil liberties.

Morford (1903–86), a Presbyterian minister with an affinity for Christian socialism and an aversion to the capitalist system, came to the NCASF though his membership in the United Christian Council of Democracy, where he was executive secretary in 1942. As David Byron Wagner has noted, Morford had no real interest in the Soviet Union until after World War II but feared a rivalry between the United States and USSR could ignite further hostilities. ⁵⁸ His interest in the organization grew out of his desire to advocate for international peace, and he knew when he accepted the position of executive director that a battle in Washington was awaiting him.

Lamont (1902–95), a founding member of the NCASF and its first chairman, had been responsible for hiring Morford, the plainspoken Midwesterner without ties to the Communist Party USA, as executive director amid the rising anti-Soviet propaganda that was beginning to fuel the Republican Party’s resurgence. A lifelong civil liberties activist, the fiery and brilliant Lamont viewed the subpoenas and charges against him and Morford as infringements on democratic political freedoms and attacked the legality of the committee’s charges and proceedings. As far as his own defense in an appeal against the charges of contempt of Congress, he maintained that as chairman he didn’t have access to the records of the organization or any authority to release them. The charges against him were overturned, and he soon stepped down as chairman, though he remained a longtime supporter, though not a member, of the NCASF. The organization protected Lamont, a rising star with political aspirations and significant connections, from serving jail time.

As a professor in philosophy at Columbia University and the son of a wealthy businessman, Lamont launched an unsuccessful political career, running for New York Senate in 1952 (with the American Labor Party) and in 1958 (with the Independent Socialist Party). Although he lost both races, as he almost certainly knew he would in such a political climate, he used the platforms that his candidacy enabled to push against Senator McCarthy and provide space to advocate for progressive reforms, civil rights, and US–Soviet cooperation in the public sphere. As he stated in a 1952 interview on the CBS-TV public affairs program Longines Chronoscope, while his two interviewers repeatedly raised eyebrows and expressed dismay at his opinions, he felt the most important two issues of the time were (1) restoring civil liberties for everyone in the country and (2) international peace and disarmament. Following these efforts to work inside the legislative system to enact change, he turned again to the courts as a stage to fight government repressions. He sued and won cases against the Postmaster General (1965), which had failed to deliver mail to him that had been generated in China; the CIA (1972), which had opened 155 of his letters; and the Department of Justice (1979) for improper surveillance, having amassed a 2,788-page file on him. For Lamont, facing members of HUAC in 1946 had simply been a rehearsal.

Morford’s appeals against his contempt charge in 1946 were somewhat less successful. As executive director, he couldn’t argue that he didn’t have access or authority. In the initial contempt case against him, which had a jury trial, he was found to be in contempt. He appealed on the basis that his lawyer had not been sufficiently able to address the jury, and won the right to a new trial. This time, he elected to forgo a jury trial, leaving it to Federal Judge Edward M. Curran to determine his fate. Judge Curran found him in contempt of Congress and sentenced him to three months in jail and a $250 fine. This was a fairly lenient penalty given that the maximum penalty could have been two years in jail and $2,000. Using his final moment at sentencing in 1948 as a platform for his fight for international peace, Morford stated to the court, “American interests ‘will be safeguarded against destructive war only if his [sic] country turns its efforts toward establishing honorable cooperation with the Soviet Union with whom we must live in one world.’” ⁵⁹ He also took the opportunity to announce that the NCASF would sue Attorney General Tom C. Clark for slander against the organization. Morford, who until this time had a low profile and slight influence, gained immense and immediate respect among progressives from New York to Los Angeles, especially communists, for standing up to governmental pressures.

Morford was honored by Jessica Smith at the 1950 annual NCASF rally, the only time he would miss the event in thirty years because he was serving his jail sentence. Attacking the 1950 McCarran Act (also known as the Internal Securities Act or Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950), which passed despite the veto of President Truman, and its predecessor bills, Smith said:

These anti-Constitutional measures are aimed against all who seek peace instead of war, against all who speak out for the democratic rights of the American people. Among the victims is our own Richard Morford, whose thoughts are with us tonight as he sits in the West Street jail, and who will soon be with us in person to resume his noble work for a peaceful world. ⁶⁰

Morford became the iconic figurehead of the NCASF and remained its leader until 1981. A special celebration of Morford was held on January 26, 1966, for his first twenty years of service. Among the speakers were USSR Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin and John Lewis, who was then the chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The invitation noted that Morford “gives of his talents and his great heart wherever they are needed in the struggle for civil rights and democratic liberties, international understanding and peace.” ⁶¹ His brief jail sentence in 1950 amplified his work and strengthened his standing with progressives for decades to come.

Even though he was tracked by the State Department and FBI for the rest of his tenure, never again did Morford face personal charges; yet his fight for the organization had only just begun.

In 1953, the Subversive Activities Control Board charged the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship as a communist-front organization. From May to December 1954, the board heard evidence in the investigative case, Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States v. National Council of American–Soviet Friendship. Brownell petitioned to require the NCASF to register as a communist-front organization under the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, based largely on testimonial evidence associating key members of the organization with membership in the Communist Party USA and suggesting that the Council received guidance and funding from the CPUSA. The Council denied the claims, asserting its self-governance and “that ‘it sets its own policies and makes its own decisions,’ and that it ‘is not directed, controlled, or dominated by … any other organization.’” ⁶² While there were, in fact, known members of the Communist Party in the organization’s leadership, such as Theodore Bayer, publisher of the Russian-language newspaper Russky Golos, and Jessica Smith, Lamont and Morford could be associated with the CPUSA only through a single witness’s testimony. Lamont, throughout his tenure with the NCASF, had publicly criticized some policies of the USSR, and Morford used his position to gently encourage religious tolerance in the Soviet Union.

The climate at the time, however, didn’t allow for slight differentiation in leftist political opinions, and all progressives, especially those who associated openly with Communist Party members, were viewed as engaging in subversive or un-American activities. The NCASF lost the case and remained on the list of communist-front organizations until the US Court of Appeals overturned the decision, based on limited evidence, in 1963. Throughout its existence, the Council fought to designate support for friendship and peace with the Soviet Union, and even agreement with many of its ideological policies, as a civil liberty distinct from subversive and un-American activities.

As we have seen, in the first decades of its existence the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship brought cooperation with Russia as a means of attaining global peace into the public sphere. Using their many public platforms, they first sought to build empathy for the Soviets through depictions of bravery during World War II and to celebrate the pivotal turning point at Stalingrad. Following the war and the renewal of Red Scare tactics that grew increasingly frenzied in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Council shifted its work to smaller arenas, but it never went underground or refused to advocate publicly for cooperation with the USSR in the name of international peace. While building or working to maintain networks of support for its foreign policy peace advocacy, leaders of the NCASF drew attention to domestic policies that limited American civil liberties and equality. Sharing the stage with theatre artists, musicians, and dancers, Corliss Lamont and Richard Morford built a movement for international peace and friendship and demonstrated strategies for activism and influencing public opinion through performance. Nevertheless, the group had indeed provided a platform for Soviet propaganda and the conflation of Soviet and American progressive ideals. A benefactor of the Soviet trope of the “two Americas,” the NCASF helped stabilize and extend that trope, which persists today.