Alexis Peri is the author of the new book Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women. She also has written the book The War Within. She is Associate Professor of History at Boston University.
Q: What inspired you to write Dear Unknown Friend?
A: For a long time, I have been interested in the enormous role that women played in the Soviet Union after WWII, despite new restrictions of their professional and personal freedom imposed at that time.
I started off researching a book on the tremendous physical labor Soviet women performed to rebuild the war-torn Soviet Union. After all, they made up the vast majority of the able-bodied population in 1945.
As I started digging through files about women and women's organizations in the postwar years, I found some letters. And then more and more letters. By chance I had hit upon thousands of letters between Soviet and American women, which captured some of their parallel struggles after WWII. I was hooked!
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I did the bulk of the research in Russian state and US archives, but I also worked a lot with library materials, and I interviewed some of the descendants of the letter-writers.
Two things really surprised me: First, I was shocked at how two strangers could form an intimate connection and really invest in each other emotionally DESPITE the very real facts that their conversations were censored and subject to state surveillance, both American and Soviet.
Second, I was intrigued by many of the parallels that the letter-writers discovered when comparing their lives as women. Both Soviet and American women struggled with balancing their housework and career ambitions. Both wavered between wanting to be home with their children and wanting to use some kind of childcare. Both chafed against new social and legal pressures to yield to men at home, at work, and in the public sphere.
The discovery of those common experiences, which cut across national and ideological lines, helped many of the letter-writers awake to the realization that the personal is political. I never expected this pen-pal project to kindle feminist consciousness, but it some ways it did.
Q: Can you say more about the impact you think this pen-pal experience had on the women involved?
A: The letters document how pen-friendship impacted them in numerous small ways--they tried new foods, new reading materials, new jobs, new relationships at the behest of their pen-pal.
When I researched what happened to the women after they stopped corresponding, in part by speaking with their descendants, I found many signs of indirect impact. Some women divorced, began careers, continued their education, or--in the case of those living in the United States--shifted their political party allegiances. Those moves were often in alignment with what their pen-pal had advised or modeled.
More broadly, the Soviet organization that ran the pen-pal program used the letters to advocate for greater reproductive rights and workplace protections for women in the USSR. So, these letters created important ripples that affected people and policy alike.
Q: The author Wendy Z. Goldman said of the book, “At a time of deepening nationalist hatred and division, this beautifully written book reminds us that ordinary people are capable of finding profound commonalities and bridging even the most formidable borders.” What do you think of that description?
A: I appreciate the wisdom of her words. Our political moment is a divisive one. Today, Americans of different political stripes, let alone Russians and Americans, have trouble listening to each other.
I believe that the letter-writers’ steadfast commitment to elevated discourse commands our attention and respect. They took great risks in corresponding, writing during McCarthyism and a new wave of Stalinist terror in the USSR.
And they offer a model of how to talk and listen to someone who does not share your views and who is immersed in disinformation about your way of life.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on a history of Soviet beauty pageants, which burst on the scene in the final years before the USSR's collapse. I think these pageants are a terrific way to understand Perestroika, privatization, and all the social and cultural complications those processes entailed.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I don't think so! Thanks for the opportunity to share my work.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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