The campus was in turmoil that early spring morning. It was April 1965. The war in Vietnam was gathering steam. The Cuban Missile Crisis and President Kennedy’s assassination were still fresh in the minds of students everywhere. Civil rights marches were sweeping the country. It was not a time in which politics was taken lightly.

Stepping into this highly charged political atmosphere was Sergei Nesmeyanov, the infamous “Hangman of Hungary,” communist oppressor of human rights. Invited by the Student Council to speak at Thursday morning Collection, Nesmeyanov was described in press releases as the Byelorussian delegate to the United Nations and a key figure in the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

The student response was explosive. Posters calling him “Worse Than Rezelman” were scattered throughout campus. Protestors greeted Nesmeyanov’s arrival, and students jeered and booed and rolled marbles down the aisle during his speech. Meanwhile, members of Students for a Democratic Society stood angrily on their chairs, yelling at students to be quiet and allow Nesmeyanov his right to speak. Tensions were high, and passions were still higher. Nesmeyanov ranted and raved in Russian about “The Decadence of Western Culture” for a full hour, with a translator by his side.

And Ellen NicKenzie Lawson ’66, for one, is still laughing.

After Collection, she recalls, the students began walking toward Sharples Dining Hall, confused and unsure about what to think of what they had just heard. “We were all kind of slowly walking down the hill when people started whispering ‘April Fools’ and stopped still. They couldn’t believe they’d been taken in,” Lawson recalled in a recent interview.

Yes, it was April Fools’ Day 1965 when Nesmeyanov, otherwise known as Bruce Specter of Columbia University, appeared on campus with Robert Lister as his translator. Brought to the College by the Student Council for what Dick Scheinman ’66 called in his April 2, 1965, Phoenix article “a perfect all-college hoax,” Specter and Lister, neither of whom could speak a word of Russian, successfully pulled off the final stage in an elaborate prank many students would never forget.

“They fooled the entire Swarthmore community for a full hour—and a little bit after that,” Lawson recalled. “High SATs and honors programs to the contrary, there were a lot of fools at Swarthmore that day. I totally enjoyed the moment. Savored it even. And retold it at dinner parties for years.”

Ann Mosely Lesch ’66, president of Student Council in spring 1965, remembers the prank fondly. At that time, Collection was held every Thursday morning, and all students were required to attend. The Student Council was traditionally entrusted with planning one Collection per year. “When we heard ours was on April 1, we knew we had to rise to the occasion,” Lesch said. “We thought it would be interesting to see what kind of controversy we could stir up.”

Thus, council members went about planning an elaborate hoax, with Alex Capron ’66, Michael Kortchmar ’65, and the late Douglas Redefer ’65 taking the lead in the preliminary stages. “I don’t remember exactly who got us started, who came up with the idea, but everyone liked it,” Kortchmar remembers. Redefer had a friend at Columbia, Bruce Specter, whom he thought would be interested in playing the part of the obscure but hated Sergei Nesmeyanov. Specter liked the idea and enlisted the help of Lister, an actor friend, to accompany him and act as his translator.

With their actors selected, the council’s next challenge was to create a believable, yet incendiary, character. “We needed to make him a pretty important figure but—at the same time—someone people would not be expected to know. So we made him a part of the Byelorussian delegation to the United Nations,” Kortchmar says.

Kortchmar wrote Specter’s speech, titled “The Decadence of Western Culture,” which he describes as a “sort of heavy-handed, bureaucratic, anti-capitalism speech.” He gave the speech to his mother, Lucy Kortchmar, a native Russian speaker, who wrote a phonetic Russian translation for Specter to recite on stage. She also read the speech into a tape recorder for him to practice orally.

Meanwhile, Lesch and Capron were occupied with the more practical aspects of the hoax. Joseph Shane ’25, a vice president of the College and head of the committee that approved outside Collection speakers, was not convinced that Nesmeyanov was an appropriate selection. He wanted to contact the Byelorussian mission to confirm Nesmeyanov’s credentials—something the Student Council members obviously did not want to see happen. So when Lesch returned home for spring break in March, she asked her father, Phillip Mosely, a leading Sovietologist at Columbia University, to write Shane a letter vouching for Nesmeyanov’s speaking abilities. Satisfied, Shane did not call the mission, and plans for Collection were allowed to proceed without obstruction.

Student Council members then began distributing posters and press releases throughout the campus. Using the Print Club’s old, rarely used letter press in the basement of the student activities building, Capron crafted letterhead for the press attaché at the Byelorussian mission, complete with a believable, albeit fictional, address and phone number. He then used a College mimeograph to create the fake stationery for a press release describing Nesmeynov’s appearance.

“His U.N. colleagues described his supposed biography in the most laudatory terms, but we leaked to The Phoenix that he was known as the Hangman of Hungary, just to stir things up,” remembers Capron.

Capron says that the only outsider let in on the plot was Professor Emeritus of Russian Thompson Bradley: “He agreed to keep a straight face but then floored me when he said he thought I’d been clever with the choice of names because one way to translate Nesmeyanov was ‘he who does not laugh.’”

On the morning of April 1, Kortchmar and Redefer walked to the train station to pick up Specter and Lister. They then brought them back to their dorm rooms to get dressed and do some last-minute practice. When the time for Collection came around, Specter and Lister were loaded into a borrowed black Lincoln Continental, adorned with Soviet flags, for the short ride to Clothier Hall.

Kortchmar was thrilled to see campus conservatives out picketing the speaker’s arrival—“That was exactly what we wanted to see!” Specter, a thin man with a black moustache, his hair grayed at the temples, looked the part as he walked through the protestors and up to the podium to give his speech.

“People booed him, and all the lefties were up there yelling, ‘Let the man speak!’” Kortchmar recalls. “I guess the easiest people to fool are the ideologues—any stripe at all.”

“I kept [from] almost bursting out laughing myself during the Collection,” Lesch said. “I have to admit that during the speech, I was afraid everyone would realize his accent was terrible, and the whole thing would just fall apart. But it was only afterward that people realized they were suckered.”

Most took the hoax in stride, temporarily fooled but good-humored about it. Members of the Russian faculty spent most of the speech bemusedly trying to figure out where that terrible accent had originated. Capron remembers a note being passed to the Russian major sitting next to him asking, “Is he really speaking Russian?” To which came back the reply, “Yes, but with a southern accent.” Students who had protested felt rather embarrassed but soon recovered, although Lesch reports that Vice President Shane never spoke to her again. At the speech’s conclusion, President Courtney Smith allegedly leaned over to tell Dean Susan Cobbs, “I think we’ve been had.”

Not to worry. He was in good company.

Elizabeth Redden ’05 is an English major and Bulletin intern.