After Stalin: American Journalists on the Soviet People and USSR in the First Half of the 1950s

Abstract. In the cold war epoch information about the situation within the USSR, as well as the internal development of Soviet society, which was generally perceived in the West as “closed” and completely dependent on state policy, was published not only in scholar works, but also in the U.S. newspapers. Fenced off from the outside world after the end of World War II by the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union, however, was not completely isolated in the late Stalin era thanks to the presence in Moscow of diplomats and some foreign correspondents. The article examines the perception of the Soviet people by American journalists and reporters after Stalin’s death, when foreigners granted the permission to travel around the Soviet Union. The first American correspondents who visited and traveled extensively through the Soviet Union after March 1953 were Harrison Salisbury, Maggie Higgins, and an ambassador Pearl Mesta, who visited the country due to a special invitation of the Soviet authorities. This paper explores their vision of Soviet society on the background of the Cold War. American observers were interested in the way of thinking of the Soviet people, people’s opinions on their own well-being, and their attitude towards the United States. Amidst the acute rivalry between the USSR and the USA, American correspondents paid great attention to comparing the living standards of the two countries, as well as the Soviet rituals of personal interaction and hospitality.

Keywords: Cold War, Stalin, journalism, USSR, USA, Soviet society, rituals.

For citation: Nechiporuk D.M. After Stalin: American Journalists on the Soviet People and USSR in the First Half of the 1950s, in Novoe Proshloe / The New Past. 2021. No. 4. Pp. 38–53. DOI 10.18522/2500‑3224‑2021‑4-38-53.

The article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).