Research in the Soviet Union Under Glasnost

I spent the 1987-88 academic year in the USSR with a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) to conduct historical research in Soviet archives and libraries. IREX, with government, corporate, and foundation support, administers research exchange programs with the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities. I had been in the USSR during 1980 and 1981, at a time when East-West tensions were high as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter's grain embargo and boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and the Solidarity movement in Poland. On that visit, when I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, my IREX grant allowed me to research my dissertation on Russian public responses to the Greek Revolution of the 1820s. On this recent trip, at a time when East-West tensions had thawed, I had the opportunity to note the effects of General Secretary Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, on Western scholars in the Soviet Union.