This article examines how a music festival in a regional Finnish town managed to overcome concrete and imagined Cold War limitations to become a venue for sustained encounters between Soviet and Western musicians starting in the mid-1960s. It explains how the Jyväskylä Summer Festival, which began in 1956 as one of the first festivals of its kind in the Nordic countries, acted as an intermediary and managed to secure contracts for several high-profile Soviet musicians to perform and provide master classes for up to a month, with relatively little surveillance from the Soviet state security apparatus, allowing for deeper interaction among Eastern and Western participants. Although many obstacles and challenges had to be overcome, the use of music and art to ease Cold War tensions proved beneficial to both the USSR and Finland and helped reduce cultural stereotypes, introduce new forms of music, improve performer agency, promote careers, and open doors to opportunities for long-term cooperation between previously separated societies.

This article discusses the abortive U.S. government effort to organize Soviet émigrés after World War II. After years of a lack of interest on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union, Soviet émigrés and émigré politics came to the fore with the onset of the Cold War. The U.S. government sought to use émigrés in political and psychological warfare against the Soviet bloc. The many studies that have looked at Cold War-era psychological warfare have largely ignored U.S. plans to enlist Soviet émigrés on the West's behalf. Attempts to create a political forum for anti-Bolshevik Soviet émigrés were broader than have been understood thus far, revealing important information about the postwar emigration from the Soviet Union, the émigrés' role in the Cold War in general, and the development of U.S. Cold War strategies in relation to the émigrés.