On the afternoon of 17 August 1959, a crowd gathered in the centre of Smolensk, a small city on the western edge of the Russian Soviet Federative Soviet Republic. Though it was Monday, many had stepped away from work, or abandoned their journeys home from school. The rhythms and routines of everyday life had been disrupted by the arrival of a London bus, its bright red set against the turquoise of the city’s cathedral.

As the crowd jostled for position, the bus opened its doors. 36 students disembarked. The majority were associated with the University of Oxford, but some had just come for the ride. They were greeted with enthusiasm, questions and requests to swap cigarettes. One of the thirty-six was asked about the price of a cow in the United Kingdom. Another fielded questions about English food. Much of the attention was centred on Wale Olumide, a Nigerian student, who was garlanded with wreaths and presented with bouquets. He was bombarded with questions about the life of ethnic minorities under capitalism.

The red London bus arrived in Smolensk as the contours of Soviet life were being re-drawn. The death of Stalin in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s ascension to power instigated a shift in the Soviet state’s relationship to its people.

The period, which came to be known as the Thaw, offered hope, as well as trepidation. In 1956, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denounced the mass terror of the Stalinist era. In the following years, Gulags released many of their prisoners, Stalin’s body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum, limited dissent was tolerated, a new consumer culture developed, and artists and writers were afforded more freedom. Four decades after the revolution, society continued to grapple with what it meant to be Soviet.

The fizzing energy unleashed by the Thaw was also directed outwards. After the war, the death of Stalin, and the hardening of Europe’s divides, Khrushchev moved towards a policy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. The inherent antagonisms between the two systems remained, but an unprecedented opening of the Soviet Union fostered a spirit of cooperation and exchange.

In 1959, following reciprocal state visits by Khrushchev and Harold Macmillan, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a cultural agreement, providing opportunities for students, workers, scientists and cultural figures to travel between the two countries. The agreement built upon the burgeoning cultural exchange movement. In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union signed similar agreements with Argentina, Belgium, Burma, Ceylon, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Norway, Iceland, and the USA.

The defining moment of the Khrushchev era’s internationalism came in the summer of 1957, as Moscow hosted the World Youth Festival. From 28 July to 11 August, 34,000 visitors from 131 countries descended on the Soviet capital. They were met by 120,000 travellers from inside the Soviet Union. Together, they staged a carnival on the streets of Moscow, the great coming out party of de-Stalinisation.

The festival was a landmark, and a formative event for a new, post-war generation of Soviet youths. Parades, music, dances, and speeches created long-lasting contacts between Western and Soviet youths, fostering a sense of shared international culture. Romance blossomed, leaving the enduring mythology of bi-racial ‘festival children’. The festival, a unique event in the history of the Soviet Union, embodied the changes wrought by the Thaw. Its legacy, and the atmosphere of openness it created, would survive, despite the vicissitudes of Cold War politics.

Little over two years after the World Youth Festival, the red London bus left Smolensk for Moscow, a city growing accustomed to the presence of foreign visitors. The journey began on 10 August at the Chiswick bus depot in West London. John Cochrane, the treasurer of the Oxford University Conservative Association, and Carey Parker, an exchange student from Princeton University, collected the bus, which the group had purchased from London Transport. They set off in the morning, first for Dover. From there, they drove through France, Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, the People’s Republic of Poland and the Soviet Union, arriving at Moscow State University (MGU), where they would spend 11 days.

It was almost midnight on 17 August when the red London bus pulled up outside MGU. As the 36 students disembarked, they were directed to their dormitories by two guides, Natasha and Liliya, who had been provided by Intourist, the Soviet tourism operator. Each morning, Natasha and Liliya drew up a loose, optional itinerary for the students. They arranged a visit to the Bolshoi theatre, a fashion show at the Lenin Stadium, and a drive to Red Square and the Kremlin.

The bus caused confusion on each of its organised forays. Until their arrival in Moscow, the 36 students had given little thought to a Guinness advertisement pasted onto the right side of the bus. The image, intended for a London audience, depicted a zookeeper frantically trying to retrieve a pint of Guinness from the open jaws of a crocodile.

But Soviet students deduced a political underpinning to the advertisement. In a 50^th anniversary booklet compiled by the 36, John Cochrane, one of the two drivers, remembered being confronted by Soviet students, who criticised the ‘insulting’ and ‘highly political’ cartoon. The Soviets, Cochrane remembered, interpreted the zookeeper as the Soviet commissariat and the crocodile as the capitalist West, tempting the commissariat to their deaths with consumer goods.

Despite Natasha and Liliya’s plans, the British students found time to roam around Moscow unsupervised. In 2017, I met up with two of the 36, John Selborn—then a peer in the House of Lords—and James Vallance White, a former clerk in the Houses of Parliament. They remembered Natasha and Liliya ‘really despairing’ at the task of managing the trip. ‘They eventually gave up,’ Selborn recalled.

Striking out on their own, many of the group took the Metro to and from central Moscow. They spent time wandering the city’s central boulevards, browsing art galleries and hanging out in parks. One of the students, David Callard, remembered being beckoned into the shrubbery at Gorky Park. He was greeted by a young Russian man who wanted to exchange clothing, music and books. Selborn recalled striking up a conversation with two women in an art gallery. One of the women was from Soviet Estonia, he learned. Selborn, to his embarrassment, could not remember the name of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, but the conversation continued unhindered. He formed a long-lasting friendship with the woman, sending books and letters to her for many years after the trip. Most of the books reached their destination, Selborn told me, but some, including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, were rebuffed by the Soviet censors.

In the evenings, the 36 returned to MGU, where they hosted a series of probing discussions with Soviet students. After dinner, as the summer light faded, they gathered in the university’s communal spaces, breaking off into smaller discussion groups. Eight of the 36 had Russian language training, while some Soviet students were conversant in English. Others spoke together in German, or French. Colin McNicoll recalled ‘a-thousand-and-one questions’.

The Soviet students were ‘fantastically curious’ about life in the West. They inquired about literature, the arts, education, Christianity, British National Service, and the possibility of happiness under capitalism. In return, the Oxford students asked about Soviet life and the Thaw. As Selborn remembered, one of the motivations for the trip was to ‘see whether the Khrushchev reforms were bearing any fruit.’ He found the Soviet students believed in Marxism. They were committed communists. But, in the spirit of the Th

aw, they insisted that genuine Bolshevism had been distorted by Stalin.

As they reflected on the discussions, the British students revaluated many of their preconceptions. Writing in the 50^th anniversary booklet, Elizabeth Flint recalled ‘it was useful for us to examine our prejudices in looking at the West through their eyes.’ The 36 learned to appreciate the Soviet war experience, the great suffering and hardship endured by the Soviet people. They also gained an understanding of some of the fundamentals of Marxism and the Soviet state. As Robert Cookson told me in 2017, the discussions were ‘my first introduction to the ownership of the means of production as the big issue.’ Selborn developed a greater appreciation of ‘the whole principle about Marxism and capitalism’.

Though these discussions provided the British and Soviet students with a window into each other’s ways of thinking, the Soviet leadership remained deeply anxious about the influx of foreign ideas. Khrushchev, the architect of the Thaw, was wary of the metaphor. In a series of interviews with William Taubman in the late 1960s, he said ‘We were afraid the Thaw would unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control, and which might drown us.’ Rather than a gentle transition to spring, Khrushchev saw the possibility of slush and mud, confusion and disorientation.

To alleviate their concerns, Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership mobilised the Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth wing. Beginning in July 1958, the Komsomol set up a Bureau for International Youth Tourism, which oversaw foreign visits. The Bureau trained guide-interpreters to manage their guests. It established panels of academics, journalists and political workers to formulate appropriate responses to questions posed by visitors. By 1960, it was responsible for 14,000 annual travellers, while between 1957 and 1965, a total of 1 million foreign tourists visited the Soviet Union.

But the Soviets did not always get along with their visitors. In September 1956, five students from the University of Cambridge visited MGU. Two of the students, James Woodburn and Michael Frayn, who would later become an author and translator, published an article in the MGU newspaper criticising their overbearing guide-interpreters. It caused a storm.

Galya Dolmatovskaya, a student at MGU, wrote an excoriating response. She reprimanded Woodburn and Frayn for their questions about prevalence of Lenin in Moscow, and took aim at her fellow students, who had welcomed the Cambridge group to evening discussions. ‘Everything is so fine and sunny that one might think capitalism had ceased to exist on earth,’ she wrote. She ended her response by qualifying the rhetoric of the Thaw. ‘Yes, our hearts are open,’ she said, ‘but not for everyone. They are open for all peace-loving and honest people.’

Three years later, the 36 found friends in Moscow, rather than enemies. After 11 days at MGU, the red London bus departed amid an atmosphere of sadness and regret. With John Cochrane and Carey Parker sharing driving duties, they headed to St Petersburg, spending a couple of nights at the Astoria Hotel. From there, the bus journeyed towards the border with Finland and through Scandinavia, before taking a ferry back to the United Kingdom. Back in London, the students were met by a media fanfare. In the autumn, they returned to university, emboldened by their memories of Smolensk, Moscow, and St Petersburg.

In the following decade, as the 36 graduated and began their careers, the initial optimism of the Thaw dwindled. In 1964, Khrushchev was bundled out of power by Leonid Brezhnev and his allies, ushering in period of reaction and stagnation.

Yet, as the years passed, and an older generation of communists succumbed to retirement and death, younger cadres began to reappraise the Thaw period. For this generation, who became known Shestidesiatniki (roughly the ‘sixties generation’), the Thaw was a formative, transformational moment. They were the first generation to enjoy the proliferation of cultural exchange programmes. They grew up with memories of the carnivalesque joy of 1957 World Youth Festival. In the 1980s, after assuming positions of influence, they went on to guide the Soviet Union towards perestroika and glasnost.