The Canadian Association of Slavists as midwife: documents from the first International Conference in Soviet, East European, and Slavic Studies in Banff, 1974

Abstract

In summer 2021, the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS) hosts the 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES). Forty-five years ago, our association played the role of midwife at the birth of ICCEES during the first International Conference in Soviet, East European, and Slavic Studies in the Rocky Mountain resort town of Banff, Alberta, in September 1974. To mark this anniversary and to celebrate the opening of the 10th World Congress, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes reprints here three 1974 articles from the CAS Newsletter, which take the reader back to the atmosphere surrounding the founding of ICCEES. The idea for the conference emerged from the opportunities and anxieties produced by the new era of détente in East-West relations. The 1960s had been a period of heightened hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union, the arms and space races, and a series of crises, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, war in Vietnam, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yet the early 1970s saw an easing of these international tensions: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began in Helsinki in late 1969 and, in May 1972, US President Richard Nixon and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev met in Moscow and signed a series of accords on arms control, the prevention of accidental military clashes, co-operation in research and space exploration, and increased trade. In September 1973, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe launched negotiations in Geneva to normalize the division of the European continent that had occurred following World War II and to set the ground rules for new, more open relations between East and West. Our 1974 documents thus refer to the Cold War as a period that had been consigned to the past. For specialists in Slavic and East European Studies, the easing of Cold War tensions appeared to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they warmly welcomed the possibilities for increased travel to the USSR and Eastern Europe and contact with scholars there. On the other, they worried that government agencies and universities were coming to regard their fields as increasingly irrelevant. Thus, in his opening address to the conference, the Canadian host, Professor Adam Bromke, traced the original idea of the