Pioneers in politics: how the words of children became the language of war
By Skyler Samuelson, M.A. Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies ‘18
The capstone is an integral part of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) master’s program, and coming into the program, I wanted to get it just right: I wanted a fabulous idea, a supportive faculty adviser and, most importantly, the time to create something worthy of the opportunity. Needless to say none of this happened quite the way I imagined it back in September.
During the first CREEES meeting of the year our cohort was introduced to the Slavic curator Margarita Nafpaktitis. During the lunch following I immediately made my way to a seat right next to hers. If you don’t already know, let me tell you: librarians are a scholar’s best friend. In my first meeting on my first day at Stanford, the seed had already been planted for the tree that would be my capstone (courtesy of my librarian fairy godmother).
In the early 1970s, American black civil rights activist and communist Angela Davis was put in prison in California, on false accusations of accomplice to murder and conspiracy. Her imprisonment became a symbol of the mistreatment of African Americans in the United States, and the Committee to Free Angela Davis received messages from all over the globe advocating for her release. Her image as a persecuted member of the (American) Communist Party loomed large in the imagination of the Soviet Union, and she received thousands of letters of support from children in the Soviet Union in response to letter-writing campaigns initiated there. Almost 200 boxes of these (largely unopened) letters, postcards, and memorabilia sent to Angela Davis are now housed in the Department of Special Collections at the Stanford University Libraries as the “Papers of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis.” In an effort to understand the role of the child in the Soviet propaganda machine, I opened (and read) hundreds of these letters and postcards. I wanted to find out how much these children actually knew about Davis and her situation. Did they understand why she was imprisoned? Did they understand the fight for civil rights in the United States?
Although the special collections librarians gave me the letter opener with trepidation at first, they grew to trust me as I came back to the letters day after day, treating them with respect and delicate fingers. Work with primary materials never before seen has been the most amazing opportunity of my academic career. The letters came from all over the Soviet Union: from Lithuania to the Crimea, from Ukraine to the Lazovsky district. Letters full of hope for a peaceful world and letters crafted in indignant political protest. Working slowly through the hundreds of letters that I read, I developed my own amateur classifications of the letters that eventually informed my analysis.
Hoping to gain further insight into the environment that created these letters, I interviewed a few of my professors who spent their childhoods in the Soviet Union. I asked them some of the questions that had spearheaded my project: did you know who Angela Davis was? What did you understand about the American justice system that persecuted her? My professors shook their heads at these questions. My idea that children in the Soviet Union knew anything about Angela Davis was ridiculous to them. They told me that the letters were simply another cog in the Soviet propaganda machine. No one knew anything about Angela Davis: she remains in their memories as a strawman for aggressive anti-American sentiments. I listened carefully as my project and the questions that drove it crumbled around their foundations.
But then I had the opportunity to speak with someone else who changed my mind. Almost 50 years later, on May 24, 2018, Angela Davis spoke in Cubberly Auditorium here at Stanford University. I had the remarkable privilege of being able to ask her a question about this project. I told her briefly about my research, and then asked if she could speak about the letters: what do they mean to her? Did she read any of them?
She answered quite simply: “I owe my life to those letters. I wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for that international solidarity.” She is probably right. The international response, and consequent attention, to her imprisonment helped to ensure her humane treatment while in jail and eventual acquittal from three death sentences. Davis said that she has had the opportunity to meet with some of the children (of course no longer children when they met), who wrote these letters. She said that, “writing those cards and letters make them feel like a part of something bigger.” She spoke about the importance of internationalism, and international movements, saying that they help us to feel connected to one another.
These letters are both Cold War propaganda and a moment of worldwide peaceful solidarity. Reading them, writing about them, getting the chance to share them with my community and to hear their reactions has made this capstone incredibly special. The CREEES program here at Stanford offered me the opportunity to create a project both rooted in history and temporally relevant. I was inspired by my materials, my mentors and continue to be inspired by the ideas this project has inspired in me.
View more graduate student research projects via the SGS website.
