Cold War's Warm Bond: Tashkent-Seattle Sister-Cities’ Transnational Diplomacy

• In Event: Late Soviet Internationalism in Practice, 1953-1993

Abstract

This paper investigates the U.S.-Soviet "Sister Cities" citizen diplomacy initiative established at the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Washington Summit of 1973. Ultimately, the majority of these Cold War-era connections have either been interrupted or altogether discontinued in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but one is still going strong. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the very first (and longest-lasting) American-Soviet citizen diplomacy organizations founded in 1973, namely, Seattle (WA)—Tashkent (Uzbek SSR) Sister City Association (STSCA). A whole slew of new US-USSR sister-city pairings followed in the footsteps of the STSCA between 1974 and 1991, with the Seattle-Tashkent relationship exemplifying the promise of “bridging” the Cold War divide from the “margins”: from the U.S. Pacific Northwest to Soviet Central Asia, from Siberia to Alaska, and beyond.

Author

• Zukhra Kasimova, Bucknell U