Arts & Culture
The power of fear. Jazz was a capitalist plot, abstract expressionism a communist one. Art was always a victim in the cold war. By Frances Stonor Saunders
Published 06 October 2003
The Dancer Defects: the struggle for cultural supremacy during the cold war
David Caute Oxford University Press, 780pp, £30
ISBN 0199249083
In the summer of 1978, I arrived in Romania to find the whole place leaning at an impossible angle. It was a year since a huge earthquake had ripped across the country, and those buildings which hadn't collapsed instantly were now tottering and slanting, as if drunk. These precarious structures were propped up by long, stripped tree trunks. It was a surreal sight, even in a country that had accustomed itself to substituting painted cardboard vegetables for the real thing at agricultural festivals visited by Nicolae Ceausescu.
The local cinema had shifted a little in the quake but was still open, and showing The Magnificent Seven. I queued for a ticket and sat down on one of the hard wooden flip seats (many of which were broken, and refused to flip). I can't remember the infelicities of the subtitling, but I do recall that the reels kept breaking, and while the projectionist fiddled with the frayed film, the audience whistled and booed and stamped their feet in indignation. This was the one and only incident of collective protest I witnessed in Romania. The next day, these same people returned in silent resignation to the routine, idiotic humiliations of a broken country.
The Magnificent Seven may not rank as one of the great paradigms of the cultural cold war but, as David Caute explains, such films held a central place in "the battle for men's minds". Harrison E Salisbury, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, reported that what captivated the Soviet public in the 1950s was an archive of 100 or 200 American films, captured by the Red Army in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. Included in this celluloid loot were four old Weissmuller Tarzans, which were fed, one at a time, into the Soviet cinemas. "People lined up for blocks to get in. Youngsters saw them again and again . . . Many a taxi driver and even schoolchildren asked me whether Tarzan really lived. So great was the Tarzan fad that teenage boys took to wearing 'Tarzan haircuts' - a horrible kind of long bob." The fad became so widespread that the Communist Party started a campaign against it, particularly the Tarzan haircuts and war cries, "which were said to be so piercing that they disturbed the cattle on collective farms and kept cows from giving milk".
From Tarzan to Tarkovsky, from neo-realism to Nureyev, The Dancer Defects is alive to the absurdities, the compromising energies, the sheer psychological pressure that characterised the cultural cold war. A film director faints and soils himself when, at a screening of his film in the Kremlin, he hears Stalin, who is seated behind him, exclaim: "What's this rubbish?" (Stalin was referring not to the film, but to a note passed to him by an aide.) In the Soviet sector of Berlin, artists are shackled to the edicts of an apparatchik called Dymshits. In Russia, jazz is denounced as a capitalist plot to make man live through his sexual organs: the tango, the foxtrot and blues dances are duly banned in Vladivostok; every saxophonist in Moscow is required to bring his instrument to the State Variety Music Agency, where it is promptly confiscated. Stalin's stern schoolmasters denounce decadent and bourgeois art, but at the same time they encourage "powdered princes and pastel princesses" to float across the stages of the Bolshoi and the Kirov in ballets that haven't changed since the tsars sat in the royal box. When the Beatles cry "Yeah, yeah, yeah", the Soviet regime, terrified of freedom, answers with a firm "Nyet, nyet, nyet".
For a time, modernism is attacked by both sides. The Soviets rubbish it as an "infantile disorder", while President Truman declares that "the moderns" are merely "lazy, nutty", "frustrated ham-and-egg men". "If that's art, I'm a Hot-tentot," he snorts, after seeing Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Circus Rider. On the floor of Congress, abstract expressionism - the art the Soviets love to hate - is denounced as a communist conspiracy. Stepping forward to defend it are the mandarins of New York's Museum of Modern Art. As the stench of McCarthyism abates, so the notion that avant-gardism is the talisman of political virtue takes hold. By the late 1950s, abstract expressionism is America's art officiel, the clamorous riposte to the conformist abasement of art behind the Iron Curtain.
The Soviets were ruthless in extracting orthodox sentiment, but they did not hold a monopoly. Returning to the theme of The Great Fear (1978), his influential study of the political witch-hunts under Truman and Eisenhower, Caute re-evokes the atmosphere of dread and betrayal which marked the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) hearings, where prominent artists and intellectuals were "goaded into decency" (or imprisoned for their lack of) by pressuring them to name names. The boos and whistles directed at Elia Kazan when he accep- ted an honorary Oscar in 1999 were a reminder that the legacy of that era is still hard to shake.
Caute is strangely ambivalent when dealing with the witch-hunts. He seems to agree with Arthur Miller's statement that the "great fear" should have been treated "as a tragic thing rather than as a necessary and realistic and highly moral sort of patriotism". Like Miller, Caute views as victims the people whom Huac pressed into "self-discovery". But then, he asks, why should those who were attracted to the idea that there was something morally decent in communism not be held to account for its murderous reality? Caute is especially critical of "magazine articles and television documentaries" for their naive presentation of these veteran lefties: the "now-elderly victims sit beside swimming pools, let drop a hall of fame of glamorous names, declare 'I love my country', present themselves as bastions of First-Amendment liberties, of 'dissent', of 'radicalism', of the New Deal, of blacks and unionised labour". Why, he wonders, were they never asked "why these admirable causes had to be fully dovetailed into a Party line . . . where one man . . . sent millions to forced labour and death while quite loudly and visibly (even from New York and California) imposing a different kind of gulag on literature, the arts and scholarship. In short, was there no available route to socialism without Stalinism?"
Caute knows full well that this was not the question asked by Huac, that its inquisition was not staged on behalf of the people languishing in Stalin's Gulag. Rather, its hearings were convened because a tiny group of people was gripped by an irrational fear that another tiny group of people could contaminate America's ideological gene pool with its dirty ideas. Caute acknowledges as much, but attaches a defence of the hearings by comparing them to "recent legislation directed against racism and sexual discrimination [which] may encourage witnesses to step forward and denounce guilty colleagues". No one objects to this, he argues. "'Whistle-blowing' within the medical profession or the police force is regarded as a public duty - 'informers' become 'informants' performing a social duty with exemplary personal courage."
Is Caute seriously suggesting an equivalence between exposing criminal behaviour and snitching on people for the political or moral (however distasteful) positions that they hold? At the time of the Huac hearings, membership of the American Communist Party (a legal organisation) had skidded to just a few thousand, most of whom were said to be FBI undercover agents. And yet the United States, with the smallest communist party in the world, behaved as if on the verge of a bloody revolution.
Despite the fuzziness of his arguments on this matter, elsewhere Caute cuts through the fog to deliver sharp rebuttals to the fallacies of revisionism. He rightly criticises "the perennial, forked-tongue western nostalgia for the early revolutionary years", and is uncomfortable with the "excitement" of western commentators on learning of the persecution of an Eisenstein, a Pudovkin, a Dovzhenko. He dismantles scholarship which settles on the myth that "the cold war was a phoney war waged by America's power elite to conceal or justify real wars at home". He questions the exalted status accorded today to all art or performance banned under Stalin. And by comparing the narratives of both sides of the Kulturkampf, he moves the history of the cold war on from its arthritic, locked position of partis pris (in this context, subjecting The Mitrokhin Archive, cobbled together by MI6 and its pet historian, Christopher Andrew, to a well-deserved drubbing).
Were it not for his Olympian snobbery about all historiographical approaches other than his own (my book on the cultural cold war seems especially to irritate him), Caute might have benefited from the work of researchers who have examined the structural relationship between political power and cultural expression. True, too much time spent in the archives makes Jack a dull boy, but Caute's suggestion that his own method - exhaustive critical exegesis, line by line, frame by frame, of The Work itself - is somehow more reliable than analysis of primary-source material reveals nothing but his own hauteur. It is this, and not any intellectual consideration, which allows him to dismiss oral history as "interview history", a particularly silly comment, given that his own work leans on first-hand accounts where it suits him.
For all this, The Dancer Defects is a major work (620 pages of text, 100 pages of notes, and a further volume promised). The fault line of cold war history is notoriously unstable, but in the space that he has hollowed out, Caute has erected an impressively solid monument.
Frances Stonor Saunders is the author of Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the cultural cold war (Granta Books)
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