Scholars have long assumed that there was little contact between Soviet and American civilians during the Truman-Stalin era, a time more associated with the dawn of the Cold War, McCarthyism in America, and the anti-western Zhdanovshchina in the Soviet Union. And yet, during this tumultuous time, American and Soviet women were in regular, intimate contact. Between 1944 and 1955, they exchanged over 500 letters, attempting to safeguard peace and advance mutual understanding by becoming pen-pals. Alexis Peri presented her research on how individual women confronted the complexities of ideology and policy through these letters, and how they negotiated personal, political, national, and international issues even as they became embroiled in Cold War politics.