Lacy, U.S. President's Special Assistant on East-West exchanges and Georgy Zarubin, Soviet ambassador to the United States.

[5] Before the Lacy-Zarubin agreement was established, at the Foreign Minister's Conference in Geneva in October 1955, the United States, Britain, and France proposed to remove the barriers to “information media, culture, education, books, and publications, science, sports, and tourism” exchange.

[6] The agreement was established during the ‘Thaw’ of the Cold War, an era of peaceful co-existence or temporary relaxation in political tension between the US and Soviet Union.

[7] Nikita Khrushchev was a notable figure in the Soviet government who actively worked to reform the repressive policies of the Stalin regime.

[8]While attempts for exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union began as early as 1945 by President Truman, negotiations to solidify an actual agreement did not start until the summer of 1957.

[2] The United States was fuelled by a motivation to expand its administrative relationship with Soviet institutions in an attempt to improve its understanding of the isolated country and promote detente through cooperation and interdependence.

[4] Due to its centralized government, the Soviets required an official agreement to plan and assign the budget for the exchange activities.

It also sought to improve the Western world's view of the relatively isolated Soviet Union as a country open to cooperation and peace equal to that of the United States.

Many of the U.S. exchanges, including “science and technology, radio and television, motion pictures, publishing, youth, education, performing arts, athletics, and tourism” were conducted by the private sector.

[14] There was minimal opposition from the Congress, and the exchange was welcomed by the civil society, including academia, the media, science community, churches, sports organizations and associations, the industries, and the general public support.

On top of musical and theatrical exchanges, both countries sent dancers, hosted sports competitions featuring their respective athletes, and allowed for the engagement of film and production companies.

It allowed Sovexportfilm, the Soviet Union's most prominent film export/import organization, to engage with and learn from American production companies in Hollywood.

For the Soviets, choosing American films was time-consuming as they had to be largely apolitical or compatible with the government's ideology while appealing to audiences.

[21] The performing arts exchange was conducted through the American commercial impresarios, such as the Legendary Sol Hurok and Columbia Artists Management.

[22] Despite the ongoing efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy in what is known as McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee to strictly distinguish American values from Communist identity, the Dance Company became a nationwide sensation,[23] resulting in mail orders of over $180,000 before the box office opened a few weeks before the first show.

The Soviet government meticulously chose the Moiseyev Dance Company to represent the face of the regime through the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement.

The State Department sold tickets to overseas performances, provided material recordings for radio stations to broadcast, and spread information about jazz stories to newspapers worldwide.

[25] As was the case with the Moiseyev Dance Company, this was done carefully calculated by the United States government in its efforts to push forward the trope of the country as multicultural, friendly and anti-racist.

[33] From there on, “[m]utual polio exchanges between the US and USSR have continued, and the disease has nearly been eradicated in the Soviet Union.”[33] After the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement was signed in January 1958, it provided exchanges of delegations of health specialists, individual lecturers, medical journals, and medical films.”[34] They first worked on eradicating Malaria in cooperation with the World Health Organization.

Eisenhower primarily wanted to invite ten thousand Soviet scholars to the U.S., but his advisors, such as FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover, raised concerns about their domestic impact.

[38] The participating American universities also funded the exchange program by waiving the tuition, housing, and other school fees for the incoming Soviet students.

[39] In addition, there was an immense competitive travel grant for American graduate students pursuing research careers in Music, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology to study in Moscow.

The State Department rigorously screened all applicants to ensure "steeped in the American tradition" and possessed "political maturity and emotional stability."

The successful candidates include Theodore Levin, Richard Taruskin, and several other future-influential scholars in Soviet and Russian music studies.

[39] From 1975, IREX conducted "collaborative research, conferences, and workshops between ACLS and the Soviet Academy under their bilateral Commission on the Humanities and Social Science.

The final amendment to the title was made in 1973, when it was changed to "General Agreement between ... on Contacts, Exchanges and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural and Other Fields.

[62] This was a desirable benefit for the Soviet Union, as there was pent-up demand for travel since they had been relatively isolated from the rest of the world until the late 1930s.

[63] The Lacy-Zarubin Agreement had lasting influences on how the United States and the Soviet Union perceived one another's culture, identity and overall representation.

[64] On the other hand, the United States utilized jazz to set a multicultural image of the country, contrary to the racism and internal turmoil still felt domestically.

First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev was known to be less repressive than Stalin and thus was open to the idea of Western culture to coexist with the United States peacefully.