Biography | Video Excerpt
Michael Hurley served as an exhibit guide for “Outdoor Recreation,” the “1976 Bicentennial Exhibit,” and “Photography USA.” Following is an interview conducted by Ian Kelly, Director of the Office of Russian Affairs, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.
Ian Kelly: “Mike, why don’t you tell us how you first got interested in Russia?”
Michael Hurley: “Russia goes way back to my father, I suppose. My father, who died in 1963, was a great book reader and he passed that on to me. Once in college, where I started studying Russian, it was the time of the beginning of Détente and the exotic possibilities of study at the time were China and Russia. By coincidence, I happened to be living with a group of guys who experimented with languages. They said hey try Russian, and it wasn’t really a conscious choice at first, however, Russian is one of those languages that once you begin to study it, you find out how rich it is. Russian is a great language for literature and poetry. Then I was hooked.”
Ian Kelly: “I know that feeling. Did you major in Russian?”
Michael Hurley: “It was Russian studies and everything about Russia, including the language, foreign policy, and history. I did my Russian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.”
Ian Kelly: “I understand that you had to have real fluency to be an exhibit guide in an all Russian environment.”
Michael Hurley: “I had done the CIEE program in Leningrad in 1972, which was the summer program, but it was enough of a boost to be there in the environment itself, which is of course the best way to learn a foreign language. That experience gave me the incentive and the ability basically to be able to speak the language. They also called and gave me a language test over the phone for the exhibits program and I passed. And the rest is all history.”
Ian Kelly: “And so the following year you went to the Soviet Union with one of the exhibits. What was the exhibit?
Michael Hurley: “At that time, the exhibit was called “Outdoor Recreation,” and it was an interesting exhibit. The guides usually worked for six months at that time, two months in each city, so of course there were six cities in the whole exhibit. My three cities for that exhibit, and of course this was the Soviet Union, not just Russia, were Yerevan, Odessa, and Chisinau, which are all in different countries now. Those were great cities; they had a huge turnout at the exhibit. People would stand in line for hours and hours and we saw the running total was in the neighborhood of 10,000 people a day that would actually come through the exhibit. I don’t remember the exact hours we worked, but it was sort of the basic business day, though we didn’t run in the evening. The exhibit was open all day long.”
Ian Kelly: “What was your role as an exhibit guide?”
Michael Hurley: “There were roughly 20 of us who were Russian speakers. Depending on where we were, we usually had someone who spoke the language of the particular area. In Moldavia, now Moldova, we had a Romanian speaker.”
Ian Kelly: “You had one?”
Michael Hurley: “One or two. Their role was somewhat interesting politically. They were usually the first to be targeted because it was thought that many of them had relatives that might have been subjected to some kind of pressure “
Ian Kelly: “So they’d be first generation Americans?”
Michael Hurley: “They were people who spoke the language as a native, but somebody who moved away from the area. But the rest of us were Russian speakers and we had regular rotations of individual stands where we worked. One of the stands that I worked on was the gun stand. Something you might’ve thought we wouldn’t have had, but there it was.”
Ian Kelly: “For hunting?”
Michael Hurley: “Yes, kind of a hunting by small caliber hunting rifles and that sort of thing. Another popular stand was the ski stand, which was basically a rung that rotated on two massive rungs on an incline and you could ski down those things, and that was kind of fun. It wasn’t much fun to build, which we guides had to do. One of the most interesting things about the exhibit is that the guides actually built the exhibit. The exhibits were designed and manufactured by US Information Agency specialists and contractors, but we actually had to put the thing together so that when we were in each city for two months, two weeks of that time would be spent building the exhibit and one week would be taking it down and putting it back into containers to either go on a train or truck to the next stop”
Ian Kelly: “Sounds like you really had to wear at least three hats, then? You had to be an interpreter, a subject matter expert, and a carpenter?”
Michael Hurley: “Yes, and a citizen ambassador as well. It was an amazing phenomenon to be talking to people who had likely never had any contact with anyone from the West, much less an American. It was fascinating work, though sometimes it was difficult. Some of the Soviets were kinder to us than the others and it was very interesting to see the shift from the 1970s when I was a guide to the late 1980s when I was in the embassy and I had responsibility for exhibits. I did the advance work and of course went to observe a couple of exhibits. In the old days, in the 1970’s, we got quite a few hostile questions. For example, “Why do we treat African Americans so poorly,” “Why is there poverty in America,” “Isn’t it true that there are slums in every city?” In the late 1980’s, you often would get questions that were leading questions like, ‘Isn’t it true there are stores where you can buy 16 brands of blue jeans?’ And, of course blue jeans are so much a part of our culture that we don’t even think - it’s nothing special - but blue jeans to a Soviet citizen were a status symbol like, you know, the Lexus of outer garmentry, I guess. Jeans were something really desirable to have, especially the coveted brands, like the best known brand - Levis.”
Ian Kelly: “So, you participated in the outdoor recreation exhibit from 1973 - 1974 and then you went back to Russia again?”
Michael Hurley: “They called and we had a Bicentennial exhibit that was between two halves of the photography exhibit. They called primarily on people who had already been an exhibit guide because they wanted experienced guides who didn’t’ have to go through the whole testing and all that kind of procedure. I think they found 25 or 30 of us, and it was a fascinating group to have worked with. We were there for two months in Moscow.”
Ian Kelly: “Moscow only?”
Michael Hurley: “In 1976, the Bicentennial exhibit was held in Sokolniki Park, which of course is the park where the first exhibit was held in 1959 and where the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate was held. From roughly 1950-1991 we had exhibits almost every year. There was a brief break because of the disagreement over Afghanistan in the late 1970’s early 1980’s. Then, there was the whole thing about not going to the Olympics, so they also shut down the exhibits program then.”
Ian Kelly: “You were in four different republics then. Obviously, you were in the Russian Federation of Moscow, and then Armenia, Ukraine, and Moldova.”
Michael Hurley: “With the first exhibit.”
Ian Kelly: “Could you see real differences? Obviously, there were ethnic and language differences, but were there differences in terms of the way Americans were treated of perceived?”
Michael Hurley: “One of the things that struck me was how similar the food in the restaurants was - you could get flattened chicken,
tipiyata tabaka, anywhere in the Soviet Union. Or a beef steak that was always the same everywhere, although we were in places that were distinctly different ethnically. Now one of the very nice things on a personal level in the exhibits program was that we got out of the restaurants and out of the public venues into people’s homes. That was where the real adventure was.”
Ian Kelly: “You received invitations to come to dinner you mean?”
Michael Hurley: “People in the exhibit would say ‘Let’s get together, come over and meet my cousins’ and that sort of thing.” There was no end to the invitations, and some of them were a little risky. Some people got in trouble in those days. People were followed; people lost jobs because they were meeting with us. And we tried to be a little bit careful and, though we had all the wisdom of a normal 22 and 23
year old, sometimes we didn’t exercise the best judgment. And so to answer your question, all the people that we met in the Soviet Union were enormously hospitable. They were often average, you know everybody in the Soviet Union was an engineer who relatively speaking was sort of like middle class, but not like our middle class. They didn’t have a lot of material things, but when they invited you to be their guest, the tables would just be laden with everything from wines to vodka to cognac, to all kinds of food imaginable. The ethnic differences were often in the foods - the foods of Georgia for instance. The next exhibit I worked on was photography and the first place that I went was Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian republic. And of course the foods there were fabulous. The wines were very interesting, very good. In those days the hospitality was, the Russians always said ‘Oh well, the people from the Caucasus are known for their hospitality’ and we had great hospitality in Russia too, but the hospitality was really over the top in Yerevan and Tbilisi. I never did an exhibit in Baku. I did visit there as an exhibit advance once, but hospitality was really something. And, that’s where the ethnic differences came out sort of, especially in terms of cuisine on the table.”
Ian Kelly: “You mentioned that you’d get questions unrelated to the subject of the exhibit, and these were provocative questions, but what other types of questions would you get unrelated to the subject matter of the exhibit?”
Michael Hurley: “Well, people always asked ‘How much money do you make? How much money does your father make?’ And they wanted to know, because Russians are supposedly just like Europeans as well, the measurement living space in terms of square meters, it was always ‘Well how many square meters do you have?’ because they were always making comparisons. And we did make the point that we were there as students. In 1971, I was 23 years old, so just out of college, out of the university. I came from a middle class family, not wealthy by anybody’s standards, and we lived in an apartment. It was a two bedroom apartment for my sister, me, and my mother; my father had died. It was just sort of a standard apartment, I grew up in Seattle. But the dimensions were much larger than the average Soviet would have. In the bicentennial exhibit, I don’t know why, but we had a stuffed longhorn Texas steer, and they would always ask questions about the steer like, ‘How much does the average Longhorn Texas steer weigh in the United States?’ So we’d scramble around and try to figure that out.”
Ian Kelly: “You probably had to send some questions back to the U.S. to get answers for them.”
Michael Hurley: “Yes, and they would try to test out various theories and really be hard on the racial thing, they couldn’t understand why it was, what they were hearing. Of course, in fact there was, there is, racial discrimination, and it was something that required a lot of contextual explanation because it was sort of a part of their mental makeup that Americans abuse black people and they put Indians in jail and on reservations, and there are a lot of poor people who eat out of garbage cans. And those are the types of things we had to confront all day long. Yes there are poor people, and yes black people are discriminated against as someone is always discriminated against all over the world. It’s a terrible thing; it’s not something we’re proud of in the United States. Yes it’s true but, on the other hand, there’s a black middle class, except they didn’t really have the contextual background to understand why these things may or may not have been true, at least the way that they understood it. That was an interesting sort of thing though. We did quite a bit of work on elections. They wanted to know - they couldn’t understand, nobody could understand - about the Electoral College. Of course, none of us Americans understand it either, but ‘What is this type of thing,’ ‘What do you mean there’s no direct voting in the United States?’”
Ian Kelly: “For president.”
Michael Hurley: “Right, right. And how does a bill become a law, and all those sorts of things, but mostly on a personal level, about you, ‘Why are you here? What is your income? How big is your family?’ And that sort of thing.”
Ian Kelly: “I’d imagine it’d be important to have among the guides themselves real diversity with ethnicity and geography. Did the program try in particular to recruit for geographic and ethnic diversity?”
Michael Hurley: “They did. I’m from Seattle, so it wasn’t just East coast elites. We generally had two or three African Americans, one of whom left. She was a woman and Russian speaker but couldn’t take the pressure. It was very difficult; people would sort of poke her ad say, ‘Is this skin real?’ And they would ask questions like, ‘Well, what is your nationality? and she would say, ‘Well I’m an American of course. I was born in the United States. I’m a third or fourth generation American’ and they would say, ‘Yeah but what’s your nationality?’ They couldn’t somehow imagine that this person was just an American – that he/she had to be African somehow. I don’t know. It was yet another cultural difference. In Moscow, there was Patrice Lumumba University, which had a lot of Africans studying, but it was not a happy time for them, and I think they felt isolated and there was a lot of ill feeling.”
Ian Kelly: “Obviously, the main purpose of this was to reach out to the Russians, to give them, as you say, more of a context about America, and to break through the information blockade that the Soviets imposed, but you must’ve also learned a lot too. You had a very unique experience. Most Americans who went to the Soviet Union went to Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev, but you got out further. How did your experiences between 1973 and 1976 in particular shape your view of the Soviet Union?”
Michael Hurley: “Well it’s true because one point that we haven’t discussed was that when we did get an exhibit packed up and put it on a train or a truck we were then free to go pretty much any where we wanted to in the Soviet Union, of course we couldn’t go to closed cities but the rule was as long as we traveled in groups of two, we could go anywhere. It was the mutually agreed upon rule. We were not required to have an guide from
Intourist, the state tourist agency who made their little reports to various agencies but they were usually with tourists who didn’t have an understanding of the language and the culture. We were fortunate to get to go to places like Petagorsk, and into the Far East, Central Asia, Almaty, and Almata. We went to the Baltic; you could just get on a train from Moscow and go to Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius. And it was a fascinating experience, of course, riding on the train in Russia in those days. You would have a four-person compartment and frequently there would be two or three of us, and if that was the case, then they would put a Russian in with us. I don’t remember a case where I felt the person was put there for a purpose like it was some sort of KGB plant or something like that. I remember one time we were rather startled because we were three guys and they put a woman in with us. She was a middle-aged woman, approaching her 50’s, we were in our 20’s and she had a bag full of vegetables and we of course had various things to drink and we just had a grand old time exchanging stories and she couldn’t believe we were who we were. It was just a wonderful evening, regaling her with tall tales and myths and such and all kinds of stories. This happened repeatedly. We often had the sense that we were followed. We were followed. The surveillance was worse in places outside of Russia, sort of off the beaten tourist track. Kishenoff was tough. Almaty was tough. Where you really had people coming up to you at night when you were walking with Russians and harass you, saying ‘You American imperialist. American imperialist bastards’, this type of thing.”
Ian Kelly: “You were the only game in town.”
Ian Kelly: “Obviously there was quite a bit of curiosity about the U.S. and a real thirst for information. Was there ever any sort of control over the information, any kind of censorship?”
Michael Hurley: “There was. The Soviets always asked to look at books before because each of the exhibits had some kind of library where people could come in and look at various books about the United States, and generally quite a few people walked out with them as well. There were some objectionable pictures in the library books in the bicentennial exhibit for instance that they, I’m not sure exactly what they did, in some cases they eliminated the whole book or scribbled over somebody that had too much flesh exposed or something like that.”
Ian Kelly : “They never asked to censor anything political?”
Michael Hurley: “Only if there were books about Soviet-U.S. relations. Later, when I was in the embassy organizing the exhibits in the late 1980’s, it really wasn’t a phenomenon because it was different times under Gorbachev and
glasnost and all that, so we didn’t really see that sort of thing. I sent the last exhibit, “Informatika,” to Khavrobsk and Vladivostok. Vladivostok was a closed city until just before the exhibit got there and it that one was one of the reasons we sent it there. It was a huge hit. In the early days I think there was a forbidden fruit aspect to it, something that they could go into this place and have a conversation with somebody who seemed like a reasonable person and not there to bash the Soviet Union. Our purpose was to say basically positive things about the United States and to provide a reality check for a lot of the myths that they came in with. I think that it was successful. People often asked ‘What difference did it make?’ I have to think that the fact the people stood in line for hours, often in cold weather, at the rate of thousands and thousands of people a day, that it made some difference in the sense that anytime you meet somebody and have an interesting conversation, it may cause you to think of things a little different. You probably won’t change your mind or become a convert, I’m not sure that we converted anyone, but I think we helped to point out the fact that there is another world out there and people ought to look into these questions a little further, so I think that we contributed in some small way to that.”
Ian Kelly: “Informatica was the last exhibit?”
Michael Hurley: “Right.”
Ian Kelly: “Tell us a little bit about Informatica.
Michael Hurley: “It was 1989, 1990, 1991. USIA made a decision to shut down the exhibits program because of the cost factor and because the wall had come down and it was the end of communism. I think there were a lot of people who wished we had continued it a bit more, but, in any case, that was the last U.S. publicly funded exhibit to go around the Soviet Union. By then, they had expanded it to three parts, and we went to nine cities for the last couple of exhibits and it was more bang for the buck. It was some equipment, but the main attraction was clearly the guides and the opportunity to speak to someone who would generally start out on a professional topic. When I was on the photo exhibit, I might have been on the Polaroid stand and start talking about the various characteristics of the Polaroid and there’d always be somebody in the crowd who was an engineer and would say ‘Oh you know the ratio of the gears’ (chuckles). First, it was difficult to follow that kind of technical Russian and the guy probably knew more about the camera never having ever seen it than I did because we were not Polaroid company specialists, but rather people just there to talk about this as a consumer product. That would lead very easily, very quickly, very soon to the usual questions about your income and ‘Are you married?’, and ‘What’s your family like?’ and ‘How many square meters?’ and that sort of thing, and then that would allow opening up a little bit. We’d say, well you know, we’re having an American election this year and there are candidates and we have a history, we developed a two party system, that’s not something that’s mandated in the constitution of course - and all of this kind of explanation and people were either fascinated and listened and asked questions or they were angry and asked ‘What about discrimination?’ ‘What about all those slums?’ What I’ve found over the years is that people aren’t stupid. If you just say, if you just beat them up with American policy then we found that people just turned away. People don’t want to hear that; they don’t want to be sort of taken for granted, but if you establish a context for having that dialogue, which is what we do overseas, we find that it is easier to make those points because once you start giving the context for how a decision is made, then you can talk about why the policy is that way and that allows us to make points essentially that way, but rather real people with real policies and concerns like they have, our audience has.”
Ian Kelly: “If you had to name one favorite exhibit, which one would it be and why?”
Michael Hurley: “Oh I liked them all! Favorite exhibit, that’s a tough one. It would be a little bit different with each because it was a personal experience; we got very close to the people we worked with, the Americans, and they were all a very good group of dedicated, skilled professionals. These are people who have good Russian and were genuinely interested in learning about the country. “Outdoor Recreation” was fun because I’m from Seattle and I like to be outdoors and liked to do all the things that were in the exhibit, except ski down the rug perhaps. But the “Photography USA” was fun because we had a working darkroom in the exhibit and all of us were able to take photos all over the place and then come back and develop them. Everybody developed this hobby of photography. The “Bicentennial” was fun because it was a great phenomenon. It was a wonderful exhibit but a really massive undertaking, bigger than the normal exhibit. And then the exhibits I worked on later, Informatica and others from the embassy were great from an organizational point of view, so I have enjoyed many of these exhibits. I guess I can’t really come up with a favorite one. The favorite one is always the first one somehow, just because that was the first time you had ever done that, but it was a great experience.”
Ian Kelly: “You mentioned that there was a library in these exhibits and occasionally books would walk off, which didn’t seem to bother you, but did you have any other printed material that you were able to hand out?”
Michael Hurley: “We did. All of the exhibits had a brochure and a button that we gave out at the exit, perhaps at the entrance, I’m not sure. But the brochure was usually on the theme of the exhibit. It might have been a little bit about the United States on outdoor recreation or on photography and the button itself this
znachuck was something that people could pin on their sweater and it would have the logo of the exhibit, each exhibit would have its own special logo. And of course it’s a great thing to see these buttons, people have collected them over the years, and I have, I was back in Moscow in June of this year, June of 2007, and on the street saw somebody, there’s always people selling various kinds of pins which of course were very popular in the Soviet Union and were usually some sort of communist ‘decisions of the 27
th party!’ you know, ‘communist power will live forever!’, something like that, but there it was in June of 2007, 16 years after the program had ended, they were selling our
znachki as well, our little buttons from a couple of different exhibits.”
Ian Kelly: “A final word on the importance of exchanges in general, between countries, especially between Russia and the US.”
Michael Hurley: “The exchanges are particularly important now and always, I mean before I joined the Foreign Service for instance I was working at Meridian house, the International visitor program, and there’s nothing quite as convincing as seeing things with your own eyes, and that’s what exchanges do, exchanges give us the opportunities both ways, of course because Americans need to be educated about the outside world, and we need to educate the outside world about the United States. And that’s what exchanges do by and large; there are all kinds of exchanges. There are exhibits, there are academic exchanges, there are professional exchanges where we bring people over to talk to colleagues in their own profession, and so it’s important that we continue to do that, especially because it’s the information age and there’s a lot of small world stories, but even so there’s a huge amount of ignorance in the world because all that information that people see in computers can be rather limiting too. So it’s important that we continue exchanges programs.”
Biography
Michael Hurley was sworn in to the U.S. Information Agency in June 1985. His overseas assignments have included Malaysia, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, Russia and Hungary. The two domestic assignments in Washington were in the Office of the Coordinator of East European Assistance, where he was the democracy projects officer, and the European Bureau’s Office of Public Diplomacy, where he served as Deputy and then Director. Hurley is currently the Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. He is married to Marlena Hurley, and has four children.
