“Woman Hopes Baby Will Sway Soviets”: US Media and Soviet-American Families in the Late Cold War

This paper applies the concept of family destabilization to examine the narratives of Soviet-American families separated by the Cold War divide. As a signatory of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the Soviet Union pledged to uphold human rights, including freedom of movement and family reunification. However, it perpetually fell short of that promise by denying some Soviet spouses permission to emigrate. In 1985, a group of Americans awaiting their Soviet spouses formed the Divided Spouses Coalition. Their transnational activist network used letter writing and media campaigns to gain public attention and pressure U.S. politicians to advocate for their cause in negotiations with the Soviets. This paper focuses on the stories of Soviet-American families with children to examine how the American correspondents and members of the Divided Spouses Coalition pushed forward a powerful visual and symbolic message that was adopted by American senators, businessmen, and activists advocating on their behalf. In doing so, it posits family as a transnational, geopolitical unit, rather than a local and personal one. By showing how families made their relationship a policy problem, rather than the usual way policymakers made family their purview, this paper considers questions of agency and power on a global scale.