In 1957, Peggy Seeger took the stage in Moscow to perform for a packed house of the cream of the Soviet intelligentsia.
“Don’t you want to hear all the children singing,” she sang, strumming her banjo, “big ol’ bells a-ringing, come and go with me to that land.”
The crowd responded with stony silence. Worried that the language barrier might be to blame, Seeger tried nursery songs, trying to teach the literati the rhyming choruses so they could sing along. Still nothing. Before the intelligentsia, Seeger was a dud, but she didn’t care. It was the youth of Moscow she had come to perform for, and in the streets of the city, they were going wild.
Seeger was one of 160 Americans invited to Russia for the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students. It was the first time in the event’s history that the festival was held in Russia, which will host it again this October, sixty years later. In 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, the first cracks were appearing in the Iron Curtain, and these cultural emissaries were among the first Americans to slip inside. Fearful that they might be taken in by Communist propaganda, the State Department had discouraged them from making the trip, but they went anyway – coming without preparation, diplomatic training or any support from their government. The result was an unrehearsed and spontaneous fortnight of cultural exchange – something that would never happen again for the duration of the Cold War.
Seeger was 22 when she arrived in Moscow, five-string banjo in hand, after a three-day train ride through Europe. She came from a musical family. Her half-brother, Pete was well known in American folk music and had performed for Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House. Two years before, at the height of the McCarthy era, he had been subpoenaed to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Peggy Seeger was not particularly political when she arrived in Moscow. She had been drawn by the spirit of adventure, curiosity, and romance.
“I was flighty at that time,” Seeger says, “I was just going wherever and just for fun. I got myself into scrapes because I said yes; because I wanted to do everything.”
On arrival, she was taken to the American dormitory, where all nationalities were billeted separately, like an Olympic village.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” she recalls. “I’d been to Germany, France, Spain Italy… This was the first trip I’d taken further east. I had political instincts, but I had no political talk.”