Cold War Pen-Pals

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in 1941 to foster connections with Allied countries and encourage British and US women to ‘invest personally’ in the war effort. Two years later, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship in New York started its own letter-writing programme. The correspondence between a few hundred pairs of women in the US and the Soviet Union – sharing the details of their everyday lives, discovering what they had in common as well as their differences – carried on until the mid-1950s, even as hostilities between their governments escalated. In this episode, Miriam Dobson joins Tom to talk about her recent review of Dear Unknown Friend by Alexis Peri, which documents this ‘remarkable correspondence’. Drawing on her own research, Dobson also discusses other exchanges between ordinary people on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and how the letter-writing changed the women's ideas about their own lives. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/penpalspod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,
0:07.4	Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,
0:12.4	from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works
0:17.2	by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes
0:22.5	for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice
0:28.3	and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with
0:35.5	two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.
0:39.2	And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.
0:43.1	You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:12.0	Thank you. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined this week by Miriam Dobson, who teaches history at Sheffield University. She's the author of Christchof's Cold Summer, Gulag Returnees Crime and the Fate of Reform after Stalin, and is currently
1:18.4	writing a book on unorthodox communities in the Cold War, Protestants, secularisation, and
1:23.9	Soviet atheism, 1945 to 1985. She's been writing for the LRB since 2017 and has a piece in
1:31.2	the last issue of the paper on letters exchanged between ordinary citizens across the iron curtain.
1:36.9	It's a review of Dear Unknown Friend, the remarkable correspondence between American and Soviet
1:41.8	women by Alexis Perry. Hello, Miriam, and thank you so much for talking with me today.
1:46.4	Nice to be with you.
1:47.7	So the letter writing that Alexis Perry writes about in her book was, is this right?
1:52.5	It was an official or a semi-official program established by the Soviet authorities during,
1:57.8	not the Cold War, but earlier than that, during the Second World War.
2:00.3	Yeah, that's right.
2:00.8	It's very much an official program. It started during the Second World War.
2:04.4	And the initiative comes from the Soviet government, that they're wanting to reach out to their allies, this idea of kind of like soft power.
	...

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