“i didn’t know if what i was getting from the Russian students was genuine in terms of their ideas and what they had to say,” Forrester said. “People were inculcated with party ideas for so long—I couldn’t tell if they were just sprouting the new party line.”

Greenfeld echoed similar sentiments about a conference in London in 1987, during which she had met Moscow intellectuals.

When she asked the Soviet group if they were rejoicing over newfound freedom brought about by perestroika, she said, one member of the group became angry.

“Freedom! You talk about freedom!” she yelled. “There is no sausage in Moscow! And you talk about freedom?”

Soon after the Class of 1988 stepped off campus, the remaining structural tensions burdening the relationship between the two countries would shift.

CHANGES ABROAD AND ON CAMPUS

One year after her graduation and far from the gulag camp in Harvard Yard, Li found her- self in Amsterdam on November 9, 1989, the pivotal date that saw the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Two days later, Li took a train to visit the site of the wall firsthand and found her worldview altered.

“It completely changed everything i had ever studied—my whole world,” she said. Li had written her senior thesis on U.S. foreign policy toward declining dictators; now, these dictators were losing power. “The view of the political world that we grew up with and went to college with very quickly changed,” Li said.

Although students such as Horsley noticed “a certain amount of elation watching crowds on top of Berlin wall," the fall of the Soviet Union brought with it other instabilities.

But the end of the Cold War might have marked the beginning of a new mindset on campus—one of optimism for a different future, something Li felt when she returned to Harvard Business School three years later.

“There was a new sense of hope for peace,” she recalled.

—Staff writer Melody Y. Guan can be reached at yguan@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @MelodyGuan.