Cold War’s cultural front

No feature of modern times has attracted more attention from historians and political analysts than the Cold War. Lasting for more than 40 years, from the end of World War II to the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Cold War was an entirely new phenomenon -- not a war at all in the accepted sense of the word but an uneasy peace, during which two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, built up their economies, armed themselves to the teeth and entered into a worldwide competition for power and influence. True, there were local skirmishes, economic blockades, even regional wars by proxy, but fortunately for humankind the two sides never went head to head, though they came close in the Cuban missile crisis. Many factors have been put forward to explain the victory of the West and the defeat of communism. One was the evident military superiority of the West, another the economic strength of capitalism vis-a-vis its communist rival, a third the determination and staying power of the West’s leaders.

David Caute, in “The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War,” advances a fourth compelling reason. The “mortal stroke” that buried Soviet Communism, he writes, “was arguably moral, intellectual and cultural, as well as economic and technological.” Caute points out that the ideological struggle between the two systems was global in scale and without historical precedent. All earlier conflicts in human history had ended with armed conquest. It was only after the world experienced “total physical war” between 1939 and 1945 that “total ideological and cultural war” broke out, and this was possible due to the emergence for the first time in history of mass media on a truly global scale. Globalization, in Caute’s reading, is not a recent development but has been with us for more than half a century.

Caute’s massive history of the cultural cold war covers multiple fields of endeavor: display arts (architecture and “national achievement exhibitions”), fine arts (painting, sculpture, poster art), the performing arts (theater, cinema, ballet) and music. Conspicuously missing from this list is literature, but never fear: The indefatigable author of these 788 pages assures the reader that he will devote a separate volume to literature, literary criticism, political theory and historiography (a rather odd mixture on the face of it, for the latter pair of subjects would seem to lead away from the arts and in quite a different direction).

“The Dancer Defects” is ambitious enough: Caute, the distinguished British social and political historian and critic, tirelessly documents just about every significant shot fired in the cultural cold war, starting with the radio programs, theatrical productions and art exhibitions that sprouted in the rubble of a war-torn and still exhausted Berlin as early as 1946, and ending with the prolonged struggle of dissident artists to show their work in Soviet Russia before many emigrated or defected to the West in the 1970s and 1980s. In between, Caute covers every conceivable subject relevant to his theme: cultural treaties, exhibitions, Broadway, Soviet theater, Hollywood and McCarthyism, Soviet cinema and Stalinist censorship, the “classical music wars” and jazz behind the Iron Curtain. He also finds room for director Andrzej Wajda and the Polish cinema, for Picasso and the flirtation of French artists with communism, and not least for the “ballet wars” and the notorious defections of Russian dancers that provide the author with his title.

So many are the subjects and so vast is Caute’s canvas that one might well expect such a compendium to devolve into lists, but Caute avoids that trap by keeping his chronological narrative to a minimum and singling out symbolically important and representative events (or works) for more detailed discussion. Thus we get an extended account of the technological rivalry sparked by the space race of the late 1950s and 1960s and descriptions of the huge cultural and scientific exhibitions mounted on each other’s soil by Russia and America, along with Soviet views of Broadway and American views of the Soviet theater. A discussion of the Red menace as seen through Hollywood eyes is balanced by a detailed examination of a widely produced anti-American play by the Soviet author Konstantin Simonov, and so on.

One of the most outstanding sections is devoted to Europe -- the contested stage between the two superpowers, where the struggle for cultural supremacy was fought on multiple levels and the outcome was often in doubt. In a masterly chapter on Bertolt Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, Caute judiciously weighs the personal and ideological arguments for and against Brecht as a theatrical genius, examines the accusations of plagiarism, egocentrism and duplicity that followed him into and beyond the grave and gives a full account of the polemics about the controversial playwright and his influence that have continued to the present day. Another excellent chapter discusses the political theater of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and their falling-out in 1952 (symbolic of a much wider split within the French left). Yet another chapter, surprisingly, considers the Theater of the Absurd in the context of the Cold War:

“The political innocence of the Theatre of the Absurd can be exaggerated. Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ is in one dimension a recognizable rejection of Bolshevik messianism ... and Marxist worship at the altar of Progress. A powerful anti-Communist, anti-Soviet ideological current in mid-century Western culture scorned the vulgar optimism and ‘lofty humanism’ of Soviet message-theatre. In Kafka, Ionesco, and Beckett, Man is found to be solitary, alienated, and bewildered, trapped in a circular time-warp, a slave to language and always aspiring to be and have what is sine die out of reach.”

To this trio, Caute adds two Czech absurdists -- one living in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, and the other in London, Tom Stoppard. For Havel, the stakes were much higher. He suffered official ostracism and outright persecution, was obliged to work as a laborer and went to jail for his beliefs, whereas Stoppard was free to say and write what he liked. But Caute never lets sentiment get in the way of his artistic judgments. Stoppard, according to Caute, is the greater playwright: Havel is “more remarkable for his life, courage, and spirit than for his art,” whereas “Stoppard’s surrealism

Caute is similarly trenchant and penetrating on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s victims, notably Arthur Miller and Joseph Losey, as well as Elia Kazan, carefully sorting artistic success from political success or failure and distinguishing between degrees of accomplishment. He also has an absorbing chapter on that tortured genius Dmitri Shostakovich, the controversy that still rages over the composer’s political allegiances and the authenticity of his contested memoir, “Testimony.” Here, as elsewhere, Caute demonstrates his independence of all “camps,” parties and political groupings and follows his own (excellent) instincts.

One of his most astute observations concerns the paradox of the two types of art embraced by the opposing sides. America, the very epitome of bourgeois capitalist society, embraced the revolutionary artistic doctrine of Modernism, along with its various subdivisions: Surrealism, Dadaism, Abstractionism, the 12-tone musical scale and later, Postmodernism and Deconstructionism. The Soviet Union, by contrast, founded on a revolutionary political doctrine, embraced a backward-looking and conservative bourgeois realism that predated the October Revolution (in art, that is) by at least a couple of decades. The reason for the latter is, on the face of it, mundane: It was the type of art favored by the philistine Soviet leaders. But of course the real reason was the stasis into which the regime had fallen by the early 1930s, which spread to all aspects of life: political, economic, social and cultural.

Caute, a judicious and impartial critic, is not without his own polemical instincts, but his animus is directed not against “right” or “left” wing interpretations of the Cold War but against what he sees as poor scholarship and sloppy thinking. In a fascinating and finely argued conclusion, he identifies three trends in Cold War scholarship that he opposes. The first is a new brand of what he calls Cold War Studies (usually associated with the right) that is revisionist, Americentric and willfully ignorant of other cultures and other languages. The second is a somewhat older brand of post-New Left social criticism that treats the Cold War as “a phoney war waged by America’s Power Elite to conceal or justify real(er) wars at home.” The third is an obsession with covert action and the secret state (common to both right and left) that strives to discover the “hidden hand” behind every manifestation of cultural and political life in the belief that this will reveal the whole truth about what happened in the second half of the 20th century.

Concomitant with this last belief is a fallacy that is directly relevant to Caute’s enterprise -- namely, the idea that almost everything of cultural importance that happened during this period was engineered by one government or another in the interests of furthering its agenda. By this reading, he writes, “hardly any of the players ... picked up a pen, a paintbrush or a violin without some chromium lever being inserted into his or her soul by the ‘secret state.’ ” The autonomy of the artist, in other words, is completely denied, or is regarded as a convenient fiction. It is against this absurdity that Caute directs the core of his book -- hence the independent critical judgments with which it is studded, demonstrating time and again not only the author’s freedom from political bias and cant but also the fineness and discrimination of his artistic tastes.

Earlier volumes, such as “The Fellow-Travellers” and “The Great Fear,” already have established Caute as one of the finest and most intelligent analysts of the political-cultural currents of the last half-century, and this book should consolidate his reputation. It is not without its longueurs. One questions the lengthy paraphrases of movies, plays, ballets and exhibitions that fill so many of its pages, especially when so many of the productions discussed, by Caute’s own admission, are not very distinguished. His very conscientiousness is at times his worst enemy, leading to long explanations and elaborate scene-setting that, to a well-informed reader at least, try the patience. But he is commendably thorough. His research in five countries, four languages (including Russian) and innumerable archives has resulted in a volume that will become an indispensable reference point for anyone seriously interested in the Cold War -- and I should add that in every particular I have been able to check, he invariably gets his facts right. Lest this sound like faint praise, let me add that the clarity and luminous intelligence of Caute’s prose raise this study far above what we normally expect in a work of reference. His book is a tour de force of historical and cultural analysis, destined to occupy an honorable place in the expanding literature on the origins and character of the Cold War. *