The Fulbright Essay Contest on 200 Years of U.S.-Russian Relations

The Massachusetts Historical Society collaborated with the U.S. Embassy in Russia on an essay contest for high school students to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between our two countries. Why this partnership? John Quincy Adams was the connection: he was the first US Minister to Russia and his extensive private papers are in our collections. The essay contest was open to US students as well as Russian students.

Here is the official press release from the Embassy:

America and Russia: Bicentennial Essay Contest Winners

Space exploration, health care cooperation and people-to-people exchanges were the winning essays in the "Through the Eyes of Youth: 200 Years of US-Russia Relations" bicentennial essay competition for high school students in Russia and the United States. The Russian winners, from Yakutia, Dubna and St. Petersburg, were announced May 10th.

More than 300 high school students from 80 cities, towns and villages in Russia and the United States submitted essays answering the question: "In 1807, the U.S. and Russia agreed to establish official diplomatic relations. In your opinion, what has been the most significant example of U.S. -Russia cooperation in the past 200 years?"

The competition, held in eight regions across Russia's 11 time zones and in Massachusetts, was cosponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the Fulbright Program in Russia, Moscow State University's Foreign Language Division and the Massachusetts Historical Society of Boston. Winners in Russia and the United States include:

• 1st Place Russia Winner Aleksandr Perepechenov, age 15 from Mirny, Sakha (Yakutiya) Republic, who wrote on The First Handshake in Space
• 2nd place, Russia Yelizaveta Chugunova, age 15, from St. Petersburg, who wrote on Cooperation in Healthcare.
• 3d place, Russia Yana Ashmanskaya, age 16, from Dubna, Moscow Oblast, who wrote on Heart to Heart Diplomacy on the Sister City partnership between Dubna and La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Honorable Mentions for Russia include: Yekaterina Shmeleva, Tambov; Yelena Lapina, Cherepovets; Viktoriya Ostroukhova, Samara; Dzhirgal Dzhardzhiyeva, Lagan, Kalmyk Republic; Yekaterina Uemlyanina, Arkhangelsk, Lee Ilia, Ulan-Ude, Buryat Republic and Vladimir Kucheryavykh, Moscow

The top two Russian winners will travel to the United States to take part in the "Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Summer Institute" at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in July. All participants will receive certificates for their contributions with the top schools receiving complimentary books and materials. Winning essays are posted on the U.S. Embassy's web site at www.usembassy.ru.

The top US essay winner was Amanda George. Amanda is a high school junior at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a double language student in Russian and French. Her interests include international relations.
This is her essay:

Student Exchanges

The most significant example of United States-Russia cooperation in the past two hundred years is the U.S. U.S.S.R. student exchanges that took place between the two nations during, and after the Cold War. This partnership was begun during the last few years of the Cold War. It allowed students to see similarities among the people of the United States and Russia, despite very different lifestyles and political views. President Dwight D. Eisenhower began exchange programs with the Soviet Union in 1955.In Waging Peace, President Eisenhower wrote that “If we are going to take advantage of the assumption that all people want peace, then the problem is for people to get together and to lead governments if necessary to evade governments to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other.”

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Cooperation and Exchange Program between the United States and the USSR for 1989-1991, which was the final agreement between the two nations in the series of exchanges created between the two nations starting with Eisenhower. Alfred J. Rieber, an American who studied at Moscow State University as a graduate student from 1958 to 1959, and who was trustee of the history department at the European University in Saint Petersburg, stated that he “must attribute many of [his] opportunities to influence the future development of education in Russia to the long experience of participation in the exchanges and the reservoir of trust built up over the years. . . Many of the deepest influences [of the exchanges] are just emerging or are yet to come.”¹ Exchanges allowed the students to understand their counterparts, and, later, to influence each country.

The agreement between Reagan and Gorbachev also established high school exchanges between high school in the United States and high schools in the Soviet Union. The Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts took part in an exchange with the Soviet Union in 1989, and has had an exchange with its sister school 1232 in Moscow every year since. The Soviet high school students reactions after spending time in the United States demonstrate Eisenhower's idea that if people “gradually learn a little bit more of each other,” then peace between nations is possible, since the students realized that, on a basic level, they were not very different from their American counterparts. One of the Soviet students who came to the United States on the exchange in 1989 between Buckingham Browne & Nichols School and its sister school in Moscow said that “There are a lot of differences, like in the furniture, but the people and traditions are the same.”²

The exchanges not only affected the Soviet students, but the American students as well. Exchanges allowed Americans to understand Russia and its culture in the same way that Soviet students came to understand America and its culture. In 1964, Herbert Ellison, an American, was a history student at Leningrad State University. He says that through the exchange, “[He] met and talked with any Russians within and outside academia, and [he] got a real feel for Russia. [He] also got a full exposure to Russia, so to speak, when there was no hot water in our dormitory and [he] had to go to the banya where [he] saw another side of Russia.” ³ If Ellison had not taken part in an exchange, he never would have been able to understand the numerous sides of Russian culture.

The exchanges between the United States and Russia since 1955 have let students gain a sense of independence from surviving in a foreign country, and becoming more fluent in that country's language. The biggest impact of these exchanges, however, is not the proficiency of language that students gain, but rather the fact that the exchanges have given students an understanding of a different peoples customs, ideas, and culture. The exchanges are a symbol that not only are the people of the United States and Russia similar, but that peace between the two nations was, and currently is, possible.

1. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 50.
2. “Soviet Students See Few Cultural Differences,” The Boston Globe, 23 January 1989.
3. 3 Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 52.