Boston University College of Arts & Sciences Associate Professor of History Alexis Peri studies pen friendships between US and Soviet women during the Second World War and the Cold War.
The Soviet participants, part of the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee (later called the Soviet Women’s Committee), were recruited to write to US women asking for more assistance during the war. Despite this purely strategic agenda, the women formed close bonds with one another and were able to maintain respect for their overseas counterparts by discussing personal issues that hint at larger political themes. Her study of the letters exchanged between these Allied women is presented in her recently published book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women.
What led you to study US-Soviet women’s pen friendships, and write Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women? How did you discover their pen friendships were occurring?
I was in the archive researching a totally different topic. My first book was on the Siege of Leningrad, and I really focused it on people’s survival strategies. From that, I got interested in the immediate postwar period, and thinking about women in particular. They represented the vast majority of the able-bodied population of the Soviet Union because of the enormous war casualties. So, I was in the archive researching how Soviet women rebuilt the USSR—its roads, its buildings, its subways, everything–after the war. I was looking at files about the Soviet women’s committees that organized a lot of their political work, and I started to find these letters. Boxes of them. I had no idea they were there. I didn’t know they even existed. I kept looking, and found more and more of them. In the end, I found thousands of letters. I started in the Second World War, when the project began, and I cut off my study in the mid 1950s. But there are many more letters after that. It turns out the Soviet Women’s Committee started these pen friendships with women in many, many different countries. So there are tens of thousands of letters in Russian State archives today.
Are these types of pen friendships still going on today?
I don’t think it’s still happening, not in this sense, but I think this pen-pal project should raise in our minds questions about how we can form human connections that transcend the tensions and disinformation campaigns between Americans and Russians today. This program I studied had strategic motivations. It started off during the war with the Soviet women basically getting orders from the party that they need to cultivate closer ties with their Western Allies in the war. Those included British women, French women, women in the British empire and American women—those were the highest priority groups. Soviet women were told to contact them in order to get more, for example, American involvement in the war—to send more troops, send more supplies, etc. to the eastern front. So the project really started with that strategic purpose, and then it continued into the Cold War where the USSR’s official purpose shifted to glorifying and promoting the Soviet way of life— especially Soviet policies on gender equality. But what was really interesting about the letters was that they don’t actually devote that much time to this official agenda. Almost none of the letters I read from Soviet women to American women actually ask for supplies or more troops, even though the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was overseeing, monitoring, and censoring their letters. That group’s publications were really strident in tone and indignant that the United States wasn’t doing more to help the Soviet Union fight Hitler. The letters, however, are incredibly personal. The writers talk about the loss of their husbands and their sons, they look to other women with whom they can grieve. A lot of the letters are addressed that way—to an American woman whose husband is at the front or who has a son at the front. They really do the work of making the Alliance stronger as they were told to do, but they do it in this incredibly personal way. It’s not the case that they diverge from the political goals, it’s just that they access the political through the personal. It’s an amazing phenomenon to witness unfolding, one letter at a time.
How did the US and Soviet women “access the personal through the political”?
During the Cold War, they continued to do that– both sides– accessing the personal through the political. American women really promote and defend their own way of life, their own values, but they do it in this way that’s incredibly personal and intimate—not just in the sense that the discourse is friendly, cordial, and kind, which it is. Some of it is effusive. They come up with nicknames for each other. They get to know each other’s children. They send little gifts and cards, and they genuinely worry with each other about things. They sometimes tell each other secrets or confide their worries in ways they maybe couldn’t with someone who lived in their own community. But they also defend their own way of life really, really committedly. Yet even there, they take a personal tactic. They did not debate foreign policy or NATO, the UN or the atomic bomb, though they mention those things. Instead, they do it by talking about their own families and their own lives. So they get into friendly debates discussing how you are going to raise your children to be a responsible citizen, or will you pay your children an allowance, for example. Or should you do work in the community for free? There’s all kinds of little conversations that touch on major ideological differences between the countries. There’s a lot of conversation about women’s rights and about if women should work outside the home and how to balance paid work and domestic work. So, they really use the personal–whether in discourse or in subject matter– to connect with each other. They bond, but they also make their own case for their own values and ideals.
Does any single letter you’ve read stick out to you as particularly surprising?
They stand out for different reasons. The ones between war widows are incredibly touching and powerful. There’s an enduring desire to grieve together and look to each other for solace, which demonstrates how the memory of the wartime Alliance continued to be very powerful into the late 1940s and 1950s. It didn’t just go away when the Cold War began, that sense of solidarity between Allies. Also, the letters where women go into great detail about their loss—how difficult it is to look at their children because they resemble their husbands–those stand out to me. And there are a number of letters like that. But there are equally passionate letters about other topics. I found a whole series of letters about Mark Twain, for instance. One of the ways that the women tried to connect and also compliment each other was to talk about each other’s culture, including music and literature. Not that many American women had read Soviet literature, but lots of Soviet women had read American literature, at least authors on the political left. One of the best-known US authors in the Soviet Union was Mark Twain. So, there are some really fun and interesting debates about, for example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and what that book represents. There are a number of American women who talk about how the book represents the great American spirit, the open frontier, and individual liberty through the adventures of this young boy and his friend. But the Soviet women are really quick to point out things like, ‘isn’t Huck compelled to go on this adventure because of his alcoholic father? To help his friend Jim escape his mistress?’ Soviet women gave a clear social and racial critique of American politics using that novel. Whereas American writers, who had this deep affection for the novel, wrote back and say, ‘well, it’s really about American individuality and adventure and entrepreneurship.’ But because they debate such issues through this novel, the tone of the correspondence doesn’t become accusatory. It’s a fascinating way to see how they have these touchstones, like favorite books, and how they tried to make sense of them. I really enjoyed those debates. There’s one line that really stands out in my memory about a woman from a small Washington fishing village who discussed Mark Twain with her pen pal. She says something to the effect of ‘the fact that we have dreamed the same dreams, read the same books, and we have both ventured down the Mississippi River with Huck makes us closer than ever.’ So, even though they disagree on their interpretations of books and other issues, they constantly come back to the fact that these interests and experiences are something that they have in common. And that commonality can be a basis for friendship and understanding, for the US and USSR to put aside differences and get along. For this reason, I think the letters about books, recipes, and fashion are just as poignant and engrossing as the letters about motherhood and mourning.
Interview by Kelly Broder (COM’27)