David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold
War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 788 pp.
The Dancer Defects is David Caute's ambitious effort to examine the cultural
Cold War. Ranging over a variety of cultural forms but focusing primarily on
the performing and fine arts, as well as architecture, Caute's sprawling and
often overly detailed book is as comprehensive an account of the cultural
conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies as we are
ever likely to have.
Caute suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not only military
and economic but cultural as well. Despite the genuinely talented cultural
figures who either were Russian or embraced Communism—composers like
Dmitrii Shostakovich and Sergei Prokof'ev, artists like Pablo Picasso,
dramatists like Bertold Brecht, extraordinarily gifted dancers and musicians—
Communist ideology stifled creative talent, repressed individuals, and
prevented experimentation and progress. Although the Cold War also affected
American culture, particularly during the McCarthy era, its impact in the United
States was far briefer and far less damaging. [End Page 151]
Both Communism and democracy laid claim to the heritage of the
European Enlightenment. Each saw the cultural productions of its system as
validation of its way of life, and each viewed the cultural life of its enemy as
riddled with flaws. Soviet critics sneered at American commercialism and
vulgarity, and Americans denounced Soviet censorship and crude propaganda.
Each trumpeted its cultural life as a reflection of its achievements and values.
The Soviet Union made no secret of the fact that cultural life was
subsidized and controlled by the state. American cultural life, on the other
hand, was far more diffuse and privatized. In recent years, a spate of books
and articles have appeared accusing the United States of bad faith and
"exposing" the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in promoting magazines,
cultural events, and even genres such as abstract expressionism in art. Caute
observes that it is useful to know "who paid the piper," but he insists—rightly—
that it is more crucial to understand who wrote the tune. He emphasizes that
Western cultural figures, including artists and playwrights, enjoyed far more
freedom to create what they wanted and to offer their own visions. Caute
focuses on the individuals who produced the art, music, plays, and other
cultural artifacts of the Cold War era. On all of this, his judgment could not be
clearer. The West, he argues, won the cultural Cold War in large part because
its governments allowed artists freedom while the Soviet Union imposed a
crushing conformity that froze artistic developments and repressed artists.
The Soviet authorities insisted on politically correct themes and messages
in all Soviet cultural productions. This encompassed not only the proper
heroes and villains in plays and art, but the correct attitude toward the world.
Despairing, angst-ridden art or music was fiercely criticized. Just as
dangerous, however, was the wrong form. Remarkably, for a political
movement so identified with revolution, the Soviet cultural czars were
implacable opponents of modernism in all its forms. Andrei Zhdanov's postWorld War II strictures anathematized atonality and dissonance in music,
forcing Prokof'ev to grovel and Shostakovich to heap abuse on Stravinsky.
Soviet critics were forced to denounce the "Theatre of the Absurd," typified by
Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Even though the East German
government created a theater for Brecht and emphasized his acerbic criticism
of capitalist democracy, his plays were not performed in the USSR until the
late 1950s, after his death. One of the great ironies Caute highlights is that
Picasso, Brecht, Aaron Copland, and Jean-Paul Sartre remained sympathetic
to a regime that persecuted their friends and either banned or censored their
own artistic creations.
Another irony Caute notes is that modernism was also widely disliked in the
West, where it was denounced by traditional critics and shunned by much of
the public. Art for art's sake and deliberately off-putting artistic products
appealed mainly to an avant-garde in the West. In the Soviet bloc these forms
of art were forced underground, and their practitioners were often sent to the
Gulag. Even popular artistic forms like jazz faced difficulties in the Soviet
Union; Caute notes that Anatolii Lunacharskii, the first Soviet cultural
commissar, denounced jazz as a "capitalist plot to make man live through his
sexual organs and forget the class struggle" (p.442). In [End Page 152] 1949
the Soviet government went so far as to ban saxophones! Like Nazi Germany,
the USSR regulated and repressed "decadent" art and enforced a stifling
uniformity that subjected the country's greatest artists and writers to
denunciation or worse— Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Osip
Mandelstam, Isaak Babel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Sergei Eisenstein, to
name a few. Others—Mstislav Rostropovich, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail
Baryshnikov—defected to the West in order to avoid cultural stagnation.
Distrustful of "populism," scornful of American mediocrity, disdainful of the
uncultured commercialism of the United States, the Soviet Union promoted
classical, realist art, was hostile to the avant-garde, and fiercely defended the
cultural heritage ofthe past. Its most pampered institutions like the Bolshoi
Ballet nurtured an extraordinarily high level of talent and artistic excellence but
at the cost of suppressing experimentation and the desire of exceptional
artists to expand their repertoire. Each defection encouraged greater
surveillance and restrictions.
The Soviet system also encouraged and rewarded political toadyism.
American historians have devoted many books and articles to the unpleasant
spectacle of Hollywood figures "naming names" of friends and co-workers who
were once fellow members of the Communist Party. The incomparably larger
number of Soviet cultural figures who were denounced by their colleagues, or
who had to denounce their own works and those of their friends, or who were
sent to the Gulag, is a story that also needs to be remembered.
The Dancer Defects quite sensibly spends more time on the Soviet cultural
scene than on the far more complicated Western one. Even so, the book
occasionally bogs down. The detailed recounting of plots of plays and movies
is sometimes tedious, and minor factual errors occasionally crop up, including
several about Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. Nevertheless, the book is an
indispensable source for anyone interested in how ideological conformity
stifles culture and how the USSR lost not only the political but the cultural Cold
War.
Harvey Klehr
Emory University