{"id":3656,"date":"2025-10-16T01:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T05:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3656"},"modified":"2025-10-16T01:00:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T05:00:37","slug":"cheapening-freedom-by-over-praising-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2025\/10\/cheapening-freedom-by-over-praising-it.html","title":{"rendered":"“Cheapening Freedom by Over-Praising It”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The journal H-Diplo Review, addressing scholars of diplomacy, foreign relations, and international history, has graciously published <\/em>a little something<\/a> I was invited to write about my 2023 book \u201cThe Propaganda of Freedom<\/strong>\u201d in an attempt to foster cross-disciplinary inquiry:\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My book <\/em>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 \u201cfree artists\u201d in \u201cfree societies\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first task proved surprisingly simple \u2013 and surprising. Kennedy\u2019s central iteration of the propaganda of freedom (at Amherst College on October 26, 1963 \u2013 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\u2019s decades in exile from his native Russia had resulted in a polemic denying that music \u201ccan express anything at all\u201d and dismissing the pertinence of \u201cinspiration.\u201d It was his way of insisting that, as a \u201cfree artist\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s most lavish CCF festival, \u201cMasterworks of the Twentieth Century\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A vignette: In 1958 Van Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow. He became a hero to the Soviets \u2013 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\u2019s expenses even though he could not pay his phone bills). The conductor of Cliburn’s competition performances was Kirill Kondrashin \u2013 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\u2019s 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.\u201d Ives is arguably the supreme genius of American classical music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cf*ck you!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Processing this tale, I explore \u201csurvival strategies\u201d 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 \u201cfreedom not to matter.\u201d  In a fascinating 1954 interview with Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times<\/em>, Shostakovich volunteered his own notion that \u201cthe artist in Russia has more \u2018freedom\u2019 than the artist in the west.\u201d The reason, Salisbury paraphrased, was \u201cwhat might be described as a \u2018principled\u2019 relationship to society and to the party,\u201d versus a \u201chaphazard\u201d relationship to society, as in Western nations. He is accorded \u201cstatus\u201d and \u201ca defined role.\u201d If a composer, his music is paid for, published, and performed. The Times<\/em> saw fit to publish a \u201ccontrasting view\u201d alongside Salisbury\u2019s \u201cVisit with Dmitri Shostakovich\u201d: \u201cMusic in a Cage\u201d by Julie Whitney, who proposed as a \u201cvery serious question\u201d whether Soviet composers \u201cmight not use their talent more successfully if they were out of the \u2018gilded\u2019 cage in which Shostakovich declared they are so content.\u201d Similarly, when Shostakovich visited the US in 1949, he was sagely advised to defect. Shostakovich\u2019s tribulations in Stalin\u2019s Russia were immense, but so was his self-identification as a \u201cpeople\u2019s artist\u201d who bore witness for his countrymen. In retrospect, the cultural Cold War furnishes an inexhaustible exercise in mutual misunderstanding.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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, \u201cmusic appreciation\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I conclude in part: \u201cThat 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.\u201d I also write that, though the US won the Cold War, the cultural Cold War \u201cdid not yield a victor.\u201d My book\u2019s final chapter ponders \u201cculture and the state\u201d yesterday and today. The vexed relationship between culture and democracy, even the elusive nature of democracy itself, have never been more pertinent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more about \u201cThe Propaganda of Freedom,\u201d including a podcast and an NPR feature, click<\/em>\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cThe Propaganda of Freedom\u201d in an attempt to foster cross-disciplinary inquiry:\u00a0\u00a0 As a cultural historian specializing in the history of American music, I have long been aware […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-WY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3656"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3693,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3656\/revisions\/3693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}