The journal H-Diplo Review, addressing scholars of diplomacy, foreign relations, and international history, has graciously published a little something I was invited to write about my 2023 book “The Propaganda of Freedom” in an attempt to foster cross-disciplinary inquiry:
As a cultural historian specializing in the history of American music, I have long been aware of disciplinary boundaries that can throttle understanding of the American experience. In part, I wrote The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War to invite cross-disciplinary dialogue. My topic is a dysfunction in American diplomacy that has been widely overlooked, comparable in some ways to intelligence failures in, say, Cuba or Iraq when the wrong informants were trusted. I also discovered that the cultural aspirations of the Kennedy White House, though pertinent to the Cold War, had been little explored.
My book was born in 2013 when I happened to attend an event at the National Archives toasting the sophistication of the Kennedy White House. I learned that, when eloquently extolling culture as a civilizing influence, President John F. Kennedy would typically declare that only “free artists” in “free societies” could produce great art. I was stunned by this counter-factual assertion. And yet it was the ideological bedrock of the cultural Cold War as pursued by the US. I wanted to trace its origins and assess its impact on American policy.
The first task proved surprisingly simple – and surprising. Kennedy’s central iteration of the propaganda of freedom (at Amherst College on October 26, 1963 – by which time such Soviet artists as Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and the late Boris Pasternak were widely hailed in the West) was scripted by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Schlesinger was influenced by his friend Nicolas Nabokov (as were George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and other practitioners of Cold War foreign policy). A composer, Nabokov venerated Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s decades in exile from his native Russia had resulted in a polemic denying that music “can express anything at all” and dismissing the pertinence of “inspiration.” It was his way of insisting that, as a “free artist” in Paris or Los Angeles, he did not need his roots in Mother Russia. Nabokov, also in exile from a Russian cultural homeland, suffered a trauma of displacement so severe that he insisted that Soviet Russia was a cultural wasteland and its most famous musician, Dmitri Shostakovich, a cipher and a stooge.
When Nabokov became general secretary of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, this preposterous opinion prevailed at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department. Because the most influential accounts of the CCF are framed by authors, e.g., Frances Stonor Saunders and Hugh Wilford, whose books demonstrate scant knowledge of music, the extremism of the propaganda of freedom as pursued by Nabokov has been insufficiently appreciated. Nabokov’s most lavish CCF festival, “Masterworks of the Twentieth Century” in Paris in 1952, was accordingly denounced by the French artists and intellectuals on the left that the CCF sought to court. Successful propaganda must be credible.
A vignette: In 1958 Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow. He became a hero to the Soviets – and not least to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and his family, who invited him to their dacha. All America knew this story (but notd that the State Department refused to subsidize Cliburn’s expenses even though he could not pay his phone bills). The conductor of Cliburn’s competition performances was Kirill Kondrashin – among the most prominent Soviet musicians; upon defecting, he became conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Cliburn was so impressed by Kondrashin that he brought him to the United States to conduct his concerto performances at Carnegie Hall and on tour. Cliburn and Kondrashin also recorded Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff in New York for RCA. Their recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto became the first classical LP to sell more than one million copies. In 1964, Nabokov reported that he had never heard of Kirill Kondrashin, and that he was “little-known” outside the USSR. At the same time, Nabokov knew so little about American music, which he was charged to promote abroad, that he spelled Charles Ives’s last name “Yves.” Ives is arguably the supreme genius of American classical music.
A turning point was the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement of 1958. On the US side, it began by sending Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev in 1959. Bernstein proved an exemplary cultural ambassador, not least because he obeyed no rules. When Soviet bureaucrats advised him not to program Ives, he exclaimed “f*ck you!” and left the room (this eyewitness vignette was imparted to me by the late Hans Tuch, who assisted Bernstein as an officer of the State Department). In the following years, cultural exchange with the Soviet Union superseded the tendentious tactics of the CCF. Rather than demonizing Soviet Russia, it preached mutual understanding. Nabokov, meanwhile, hysterically attempted to dissuade Stravinsky from visiting Moscow and Leningrad. Stravinsky did so in 1962, to triumphant acclaim. Nabokov himself finally journeyed to Soviet Russia five years later and discovered that composers he had vilified were absorbing and entertaining.
Processing this tale, I explore “survival strategies” pursued by Nabokov and Stravinsky, who were displaced in the US, and also by Shostakovich, who was both cherished and persecuted in the USSR. I suggest that Stravinsky, in residing in Hollywood, enjoyed a “freedom not to matter.” In a fascinating 1954 interview with Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, Shostakovich volunteered his own notion that “the artist in Russia has more ‘freedom’ than the artist in the west.” The reason, Salisbury paraphrased, was “what might be described as a ‘principled’ relationship to society and to the party,” versus a “haphazard” relationship to society, as in Western nations. He is accorded “status” and “a defined role.” If a composer, his music is paid for, published, and performed. The Times saw fit to publish a “contrasting view” alongside Salisbury’s “Visit with Dmitri Shostakovich”: “Music in a Cage” by Julie Whitney, who proposed as a “very serious question” whether Soviet composers “might not use their talent more successfully if they were out of the ‘gilded’ cage in which Shostakovich declared they are so content.” Similarly, when Shostakovich visited the US in 1949, he was sagely advised to defect. Shostakovich’s tribulations in Stalin’s Russia were immense, but so was his self-identification as a “people’s artist” who bore witness for his countrymen. In retrospect, the cultural Cold War furnishes an inexhaustible exercise in mutual misunderstanding.
My book also more broadly contrasts classical music in the US and USSR. With regard to cultural exchange, the Russians took the first initiative, sending their leading instrumentalists to the US along with major Shostakovich compositions and an orchestra of bewildering accomplishment: Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic. This was not merely a foreign policy ploy: classical music mattered more to Soviet Russians than it did to Cold War Americans. Commensurately, I compare the interwar popularization of classical music in both countries. In the US, “music appreciation” was dominated by commercial interests. In Russia, where factories deployed orchestras, choirs, and even opera troupes, ideology dominated. Both approaches were potently pursued and potently flawed.
I conclude in part: “That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.” I also write that, though the US won the Cold War, the cultural Cold War “did not yield a victor.” My book’s final chapter ponders “culture and the state” yesterday and today. The vexed relationship between culture and democracy, even the elusive nature of democracy itself, have never been more pertinent.
For more about “The Propaganda of Freedom,” including a podcast and an NPR feature, click here.
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