The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War by David Caute

by David Caute

The 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, the author of The Fellow-Travellers and The Great Fear 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. Major figures central to Cold War conflict in the theatre include Brecht, Miller, Sartre, Camus, Havel, Ionesco, Stoppard and Konstantin Simonov, whose inflammatory play, The Russian Question, occupies a chapter of its own based on original archival research. Leading film directors involved included Eisenstein, Romm, Chiarueli, Aleksandrov, Kazan, Tarkovsky and Wajda. In the field of music, the Soviet Union in the Zhdanov era vigorously condemned 'modernism', 'formalism', and the avant-garde. A chapter is devoted to the intriguing case of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the disputed authenticity of his 'autobiography' Testimony. Meanwhile in the West the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sponsoring the modernist composers most vehemently condemned by Soviet music critics; Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith among them. Despite constant attempts at repression, the Soviet Party was unable to check the appeal of jazz on the Voice of America, then rock music, to young Russians. Visits to the West by the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companines, the pride of the USSR, were fraught with threats of cancellation and the danger of defection. Considering the case of Rudolf Nureyev, Caute pours cold water on overheated speculations about KGB plots to injure him and other defecting dancers. Turning to painting, where socialist realism prevailed in Russia, and the impressionist heritage was condemned, Caute explores the paradox of Picasso's membership of the French Communist Party. Re-assessing the extent of covert CIA patronage of abstract expressionism (Pollock, De Kooning), Caute finds that the CIA's role has been much exaggerated, likewise the dominance of the New York School. 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.

Paperback

First published August 1, 2003

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cold War Porn.

The French have an expression, "drowning the fish," meaning you overwhelm your opponent with data in order to avoid actually answering his point. The Dancer Defects is meant to counter Frances Stonor Saunders's devastating "The Cultural Cold War," published in the UK as "Who Paid the Piper."

Unfortunately, Caute is of that breed of intellectuals whose political stance consists in being neither Right nor Left, but merely standing to the right of the Left and the left of the Right: he counters Saunders by accumulating factoids (fascinating factoids, I'll admit) that are meant to prove that either side in the Cold War was reaching for the lowest common denominator in their rush to use Culture for their own ends. His methodology is that not uncommon subgenre of historical research, the light-scholarly book that relies almost exclusively on press clippings. His stance: "Of course, Communists eat babies; on the other hand, MacCarthyism was bad, because some non-Communists were caught in the net." That there might have been a large number of writers, musicians, dancers, etc., that were caught between the two superpowers, is something Caute doesn't really consider, and that's unfortunate, since that was Saunders' most devastating point.

I'd give Caute an extra star for the factoids (728 pages, including notes), except that after following up on a few footnotes I found that he frequently misquoted or misunderstood his sources. This is not a book, it's a poorly annotated bibliography.