Douglas M. Bowden, M.d.'s Books

During the Cold War our understanding of life in the Soviet Union was layered with so much ideology and competition that it was difficult to get a feel for the realities of daily existence there. The number of Americans living a normal life in communist Russia was negligible. Western embassy personnel were isolated as potential spies. Western business people and tourists were unwelcome. A number of exchanges of experts in various fields followed Soviet successes in nuclear arms development and Sputnik, but most involved short tours to identify other areas in which the Soviets might be outpacing the West. A major exception was the US-USSR inter-university exchange. In that program graduate students from American universities lived and conducted research in the Soviet Union for substantial periods of time. This book, authored by one of those students, provides a rare, first-hand account of life in the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. It describes the experiences of a culturally inquisitive Stanford medical student in the exchange during 1961-62. He recorded his impressions of historical events, social mores and personal life in a series of some forty letters to family and friends as he participated in brain-and-behavior research at Moscow State University. The author describes shaking hands with Nikita Khrushchev during a Fourth of July celebration at the US Ambassador's residence in Moscow. That event turned out to be the setting for the first contact between an attaché of the US Embassy and the Soviet military intelligence officer who tipped off the West to Khrushchev's intention to install missiles in Cuba later that year. The letters describe typical attitudes of Russian scientists, academics, and university students toward such topics as nuclear disarmament, Stalin's cult of personality, and the likelihood that peoples of the capitalist world could advance to communism without a series of bloody revolutions. They describe prototypic features of life in Soviet Russia including exasperatingly inefficient services and bureaucratic machinations as ludicrous as a Charlie Chaplin skit intermixed with spontaneous acts of genuine compassion and goodwill. They explore typical attitudes toward more personal aspects of life, such as dating, marriage, parenting, professional development, and religion. The author describes how the inter-university exchange operated. While he found his research to be in a field unhampered by free-floating political paranoia, he observed the frustrating experiences of other students who were not so fortunate. Accustomed to freedom of humanities research in US universities, they found themselves in a restrictive environment, pawns in an exchange designed primarily to provide Soviet students access to US knowledge in such fields as advanced physics and computer sciences. At worst students in Russian history, political science, and literature were perceived as potential secret agents collecting information to embarrass or harm the Soviet Union. The letters are amply annotated to clarify, in light of later developments, the historical significance of events that the author observed and to describe changes in his interpretation of events based on numerous visits to Russia over the subsequent five decades. American Letters from Khrushchev's Russia constitutes a new primary source of information for historians, sociologists, social psychologists, and cultural anthropologists who seek to reconstruct the social atmosphere and conventional wisdom of Russians during the early post-Stalinist era. It will enrich their understanding of the interaction of an ultimately transient totalitarian societal structure with enduring Russian familial, educational and religious institutions. The informal style of letters to family and friends will make the book a fascinating read for individuals who have lived, travelled or plan to travel in that exotic part of our world.

Book's by Douglas M. Bowden, M.d.

Disorders of Hemoglobin

Disorders of Hemoglobin

American Letters from Khrushchev's Russia

American Letters from Khrushchev's Russia

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