Creating dialogue and raising more public awareness: this is the goal that we set ourselves with the launch of the Peace and Sport Watch in April 2015. [...] Peace and Sport Watch in partnership with Agence France Presse, a digital platform aimed at fostering the development of the peace through sport movement and offering its stakeholders a neutral, relevant and daily digest of the latest news.

Even during the height of the Cold War with its threat of Nuclear Armageddon, the cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union never ground to a halt. But in the last few years, because of the "boomerang effect of a rancorous legal battle between the Russian government and the Chassidic Jewish group, Chabad" (LA Times 1/17/13), Russia imposed a ban on all art loans to American museums. This legal case is based on Chabad's decades-long effort to recover religious books and manuscripts that the Russians expropriated after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Plisetskaya’s U.S. debut came at a time when ballet made prominent headlines in America—in part because of its role as a tool of Cold War cultural diplomacy between the U.S. and Soviet Union—and dancers regularly became household names. The Bolshoi made the cover of Newsweek the week before we wrote about Plisetskaya’s arrival.