Videochatting With Communists

In 1983 President Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” but by the end of his first term, he was wondering if ordinary Russians and Americans couldn’t resolve our nations’s difference by just talking. At the end of a White House speech on January 16, 1984, Reagan imagined an American couple, Jim and Sally, sheltering from a storm with Soviets Ivan and Anya. By some magic, there is no language barrier.

“Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments?” Reagan asked, rhetorically of course. “Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living?”

Actually, we know what they would talk about: pizza. And Pepsi. And their hopes for goodwill among nations. We know this because by the end of the 80s, regular Soviets and Americans were talking to each other, through a strange and glitchy videophone. But the story of how those videophone calls happened in the first one is one full of risk, invention, and very strange characters.

Even before Reagan’s speech, the 1980s were the great era of longing for “ordinary” conversation between Russians and Americans. While governments held formal arms talks, many Soviets lived in closed cities or were, by law, supposed to seek official permission to speak with foreigners. Peace activists in the U.S. were itching for more contact, especially as our government ramped up its anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Today, Americans have largely forgotten what it feels like to be isolated both by analog technology and geopolitics. To peace activists on both sides of the Cold War divide, digital technology was the answer a stuck world was waiting for. What they lacked, the thinking went, was the means to communicate. And in some ways that was true.

All the telephone trunk lines between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. went through Pittsburgh. And there were only 33 of them for the Soviet Union, a nation of close to 300 million. (By contrast, Costa Rica had some 600 circuits to the U.S. at that time). Calls between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had to be scheduled days if not weeks in advance, and even then the quality was terrible. The operators caught a lot of flack.

Then suddenly, with satellite links and then the early Internet, that contact became theoretically possible. And two men, working across the ocean from one another, became united in the quest to make conversations between the two countries happen...