Nick Rutter
Brown University, B.A.
My dissertation is a history of the World Youth Festival—from 1947 to 1989 the largest international celebration in history. Festival delegates outnumbered athletes at the Olympic Games, and more flags hung at the Festival than at the United Nations. In 1945 Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman sent their greetings to the founding event in London. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev danced among thousands of 20-somethings (including USA delegates) inside the Kremlin. In 1973 Yasser Arafat’s presence ensured that East Berlin's Festival would not suffer the terror that had shocked the Munich Olympics a year earlier. But despite all this--despite its size, cost, and famous guests--no reliable (i.e. non-Soviet) history of the Festival has appeared since 1973.
As a specialist in German and Russian 20th-century history, my dissertation research has spanned Russian, German, Austrian, American and British archives, supplemented by over 60 interviews with former Festival delegates (from the countries above, not to mention Zanzibar and Mali). I have thus far written two articles (publication forthcoming), one of which won the 2011 Smith-Webb Essay Contest.
When not writing or reading, I play with (and clean) my little daughter, and I doodle, I do the dishes, and I try to memorize good jokes.
