Abstract
The “hard” diplomacy of the Cold War was accompanied by sustained cultural engagement between East and West, even at times of intense political tension. The article discusses the formal agreements made between the government of the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom between 1959 and 1987 that regulated cultural and scientific relations between the two countries. Using material from the UK’s National Archives, it analyses the motivation for initiating formal inter-governmental cultural agreements in the 1950s and discusses how the process of cultural diplomacy was sustained over the following three decades. The practical implementation of the agreements was sometimes challenging, but both sides persisted and these agreements were renewed every two years. Cultural and academic exchanges became a regular part of the relationship between the two countries during the 1960s and 1970s, with visits by leading cultural companies alongside individual contacts between academics, scientists and students. The political tensions produced by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the UK’s expulsion of 105 Soviet diplomats in 1971 had immediate impact on cultural relations, but the article argues that these effects were short-lived and that cultural diplomacy returned to normal relatively quickly. Cultural diplomacy proved to be too useful for both sides for it to be abandoned, and the article concludes that cultural relations were important in moderating the wider political tensions between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom during the Cold War.
