Dear Unknown Friend by Alexis Peri

Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women

By Alexis Peri

Harvard University Press 2024

Amidst the general conflagration of the Second World War, history flowed through legions of people, the majority of whom found themselves cloaked in the paraphernalia of unbidden roles and duties. In her new book, Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women, historian Alexis Peri (Associate Professor of History at Boston University) explores the interplay between two such communities experiencing relaxed restraints on their personal and public roles, allowing them to engage in foreign relations in a world reeling under the exigencies of modern warfare.

Peri frames her narrative around the pen pal initiative which bloomed between the two allies late in WWII, a program which found renewed impetus under the efforts of the Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee. Women in that war-torn land were encouraged to write to their sister allies over in America, to participate in a citizen diplomacy where they highlighted their sacrifices in the face of unspeakable savagery while pressing their nation's need for material aid, as well as a second front on the continent. The project continued into the post-war years, peaking with 319 pairs of pen pals in 1949 before the growing cold war tensions saw the initiative fizzling away. The numbers may be slightly deceptive as to the reach of these letters, as:

Many pen pals ... shared their letters with relatives, neighbors, and coworkers. They read them aloud at church and club meetings, and they sometimes set up pen friendships between their children. Furthermore, both the pen friends and the project’s organizers sent copies of the letters to the press. Excerpts appeared in pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts throughout the 1940s and 1950s, allowing many more people to participate vicariously in the conversation...

While earlier Soviet programs had arranged correspondence between intellectuals sympathetic to socialism, the net was broadened during the war to include farm workers and women toiling in armament production or mining. Meanwhile the American pool of writers mostly included women with a personal investment in the Soviet war effort— male relatives at the front, or being of a Jewish descent. The initial Soviet group had women from a variety of regions including Ukraine and Central Asia; most of the American first-wave sprung from the Midwest. After the war, the Anti-Fascist Committee replaced the bulk of their correspondents with well educated, urban professionals who were ethnically Russian and instructed to present "great compelling examples" of women's advancement under socialism. Over in America, the pens dropped by Jewish and Christian conservatives were picked up by "self-described progressives", a more racially diverse and well educated middle-class increasingly hailing from the coasts of California or New England.

The author successfully traces the changing demographics of the project, from idealistic war allies, to "Americans noticeably radicalized by anti-communist hysteria" contra "professional activists" proselytising from behind the "iron curtain". She selects snippets from the surviving letters to elucidate the surprisingly personal and touching rapport that many of the pen pal pairs established between themselves, and she highlights the changing dynamic in the correspondence as solidarity for peace expanded to the more general topics of house work, employment, motherhood, and moral upbringing. "The letters’ propagandistic qualities certainly limit their factual reliability", we're told, and while they cannot be used to accurately reconstruct the way we lived then, the women engaged in this discourse often let the ideological needs of their nations drop by the wayside as they participated in a "diplomacy of the heart". Exploring the literary remains of the project offers a compelling view of two cultures exploring their national myths within the bounds set by personal letters; often charmingly naive and sincere, shrewd consumerism is set against communal pleasures in these pages, frustrated home keeping against professional fulfilment. The author doesn't cover many of these, sometimes lengthy, pen pal relationships, but the ones she does really do justice to the remarkable character of the women involved; even under the self-censorship and silences present on all sides, the experience brings forth the catharsis and trust that developed between the participants as they aimed towards peace and understanding between their nations.

While the book is at it's best when the pen pal initiative itself is at the center stage, charting the rise and fall of national interest from both sides over it's decade long existence, exploring the letters, lives, and afterlives of the participants, it struggles to maintain structural coherency when it ventures into the weeds in discussing the functioning of the various committees and subcommittees that midwifed this contact in an atmosphere of rising hysteria. The struggles and benign deceptions these administrators underwent to help these "unimportant" women maintain their ties are interesting to read about, but only diffuse the central thrust of the narrative. And a claim like "the correspondence project suggests that the memory of the wartime popular front was more powerful, the Truman-Stalin era not as isolating, and the “thaw” not as radical a rupture as previously supposed" only invites elaboration to help sustain the charge on the back of admittedly svelte pickings.

“I cannot definitively show that pen friendship ‘won’ over individual minds”, the author admits, “but I do suspect it captured some hearts.” Readers will sustain that suspicion.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi