Ekaterina Furtseva and the Impresarios: The Golden Age of Soviet Arts Tours

Abstract: This article discusses the globally celebrated Soviet arts tours to the USA and Britain from the late 1950s to mid 1970s. It uses original, neglected and reassessed evidence to argue that the phenomenon was not a product of the intergovernmental culture exchange agreements’ success but of private, often covert initiative seized from system failures. Its elite excellence and resilience against geopolitical reverses was the product of an unofficial alliance between two Western impresarios and Khrushchev’s Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva, which protected the tours and its elite artists by shifting the trade away from Cold War ideological competition to professional terms.