Beneath the strained official relationship between Washington and Moscow, American and Soviet cultural representatives have maintained a long standing cultural intercourse. Only at the depths of the cold war did contacts almost entirely disappear, and then only for a short time. Particularly free and easy during the pre-recognition period, the contacts began to dwindle during the thirties as Stalin purged the Party and consolidated his control, flourished during World War II, and fell off sharply thereafter as Stalin waged an anti-foreign campaign in the USSR. Moscow's actions prompted the United States, in turn, to create its own barriers to American-Soviet contacts and to stage its own version of cultural isolationism. After Stalin's death the Soviets largely took the initiative in restoring contacts, and were largely responsible for the formal exchange agreement signed in 1958 and renewed every two years thereafter.

From the first, Moscow used cultural contacts to serve state purposes, though those purposes were not necessarily inimical to the interests of the United States, while Washington, prior to WWII, viewed such relations as matters of private concern. By the early fifties, however, Washington had likewise learned to use cultural relations to serve the national interest. But while Washington had its own purposes and goals in the cultural realm, it allowed private American citizens to maintain contacts with Soviet individuals and agencies outside the framework of its official proposals. Moscow, to be sure, did not permit that duality.