Russians Were Once Banned From a Third of the U.S.

From election interference to alleged nerve poison attacks,
Russian meddling has flung the world into a haze of paranoia. At
the height of the Cold War, similar mistrust of the Soviet Union
led the U.S. to make an extraordinary map showing places where
Russian visitors could not legally go.

During the Cold War, fears of Russian meddling prompted the
United States government to block Soviet visitors from accessing
entire swaths of the country. As of November 11, 1957, when the
above map was made, anyone traveling to the United States on a
Soviet passport was forbidden from visiting Long Island, much of
Northern California, and nearly the entire east coast of Florida.
In all, about a third of the country was off limits to citizens of
the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.

Red patches on the map indicate areas that were inaccessible to
Soviet travelers. Green circles within the red areas mark cities
they were allowed to visit (most major cities were fair game). In
some cases, specific roads were designated for travel through
otherwise closed areas. Conversely, red circles indicate banned
sites within otherwise open areas, mostly in the Southern states
and the Midwest.

The map raises interesting questions: Why was Memphis banned but
Nashville not? Why was the entire state of Washington off limits?
It’s possible there was a rationale for some of the banned areas,
but others were probably chosen more arbitrarily in the attempt to
keep a significant portion of the country inaccessible to Soviet
visitors, just as they did for travelers from the U.S., says Ryan
Moore, a cartographic specialist in the Geography and Map Division
of the Library of Congress. “We simply did not trust one another,”
he says.

Military bases and factories were probably areas of special
concern. A State Department memo published in 1955 lists objects
that Soviet visitors were forbidden to sketch or photograph^[1]; it includes military
installations, fuel storage depots, seaports, power plants,
factories, and communications facilities. They were also forbidden
from taking photos from airplanes on flights over the U.S.

There were likely other considerations, too. “I think we wished
to minimize them seeing Jim Crow conditions and other parts of our
society that they could exploit for propaganda,” Moore says. “After
all, the Cold War was [an] ideological war between East and West.
Any shortcoming on one side was seized upon by the other.”

The restrictions shown on this 1957 map are actually looser than
those that had been in place just a few years earlier. A 1952
immigration law essentially barred visitors from communist
countries from entering the United States at all unless they
received a special exemption from the Attorney General. Only 33
Soviet citizens received this exemption in 1953 and ‘54.

The Soviets, however, was much more permissive of American
visitors, allowing them to visit most of the USSR., The Soviets saw
this as an example of American hypocrisy arguing that the
supposedly more liberal U.S. had far more restrictive policies in
place than they did. As a 1955
National Security Council report puts it,^[2]
“the U.S. is being accused of maintaining an ‘Iron Curtain.’”

The report weighs the pros and cons of loosening the blanket
restrictions. Among the advantages:, the possibility that some
Soviet visitors might defect while Stateside, and an assumption
that a Soviet visitor could not help but be “impressed by the
American scene and American technological accomplishments.”

The disadvantages to loosening the ban ranged from the
possibility of Soviet intelligence agents entering the U.S. to a
general concern that relaxed travel restrictions might loosen U.S.
vigilance towards the “Soviet peril.”

Ultimately President Eisenhower decided to mimic the Soviet
policy for U.S. visitors and allow access to roughly 70% of the
country, including most cities with populations over 100,000, Moore
wrote in a post
about the map^[3]
for the Library’s blog. The restrictions for ordinary Soviet
citizens were lifted by President Kennedy in 1962, but travel
restrictions remained in place for Soviet reporters and government
officials until the end of the Cold War.