The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War Review

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The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War ReviewIn most respects this is a very good book. It is wide-ranging, and extremely well-written. It is also well organized around different aspects of culture-stage and screen, music, including ballet, and the visual arts--so that if one is, for example, interested in ballet but not in the lengthy descriptions of the treatment of US soldiers in Stalin-era Soviet films about the Second World War or of the plot of a Sartre anti-American play, it is easy to skip these without loss. The author can be forgiven for excluding literature from this volume, which is already very long, and I for one look forward to his promised book on this.
Interesting though it is, however, it is not the book one expects from its title. In the first place there is remarkably little about the organized activities of Western Governments to promote the image of Western culture. Some of this was undercover CIA support of magazines, congresses and festivals-one learns only at the end of the book that the reason for the neglect is that the author considers that this aspect of the cultural war has been overstressed. But the promotion abroad of national cultures by organizations such as the British Council, and their French and American equivalents deserves much more attention; in particular the concern with the American cultural image abroad, especially in Western Europe, was a cold war matter since this image might affect the electoral strength of the large Communist parties of France and Italy, and this in turn influenced President Kennedy's introduction of high cultural activities into the White House, and President Johnson's founding of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Second, much of the book has little to do with the Cold War. The sections on the stage and especially on film demonstrate the cultural effects of the Cold War best, although even here it is not clear what the plays of Ionesco and Beckett have to do with Cold War culture. But music and art are neither tools of propaganda nor competitive sports, and the well-known capacity of Soviet institutions for talent spotting and training, whether of athletes, musicians, or dancers enriched the world's supply of performers without amounting to a "struggle for supremacy." More interesting is the Soviet suppression of atonal music and nonrealist art. This is very well described in the book, but it preceded the Cold War by decades, reflecting at first mainly Stalin's personal tastes. But it is to be expected that artistic originality and creativity will be often associated with political and social iconoclasm. In the West, this led creative geniuses like Picasso and Brecht to be attracted by communism, with the amusing consequence that communist parties found themselves trying to exploit their fame while rejecting their work. In the Soviet Union, the clash between artistic innovation and the constraints of a totalitarian regime led inevitably to eventual links with political dissidence. The defections of performing artists, however, were mostly inspired by private ambitions rather than political motivations. Cold Warriors seized on both of these to demonstrate the weaknesses of Soviet society but they were not themselves products of the Cold War.The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War OverviewThe cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was without precedent. At the outset of this original and wide-ranging historical survey, David Caute establishes the nature of the extraordinary cultural competition set up post-1945 between Moscow, New York, London and Paris, with the most intimate frontier war staged in the city of Berlin. Using sources in four languages, Caute explores the cultural Cold War as it rapidly penetrated theatre, film, classical music, popular music, ballet, painting and sculpture, as well as propaganda by exhibition. Artists such as Miller, Picasso, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky became involved in this fierce cultural competition through which each of the major Cold War protagonists sought to establish their supremacy. Caute challenges some recent, one-dimensional, American accounts of 'Cold War culture', which ignore not only the Soviet performance but virtually any cultural activity outside the USA. The West presented its cultural avant-garde as evidence of liberty, even through monochrome canvases and dodecaphonic music appealed only to a minority audience. Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels were exceptionally high, but the fear of freedom and innovation virtually guaranteed the moral defeat which accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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