Music, Art and Diplomacy: East-West Cultural Interactions and the Cold War

Simo Mikkonen, Pekka Suutari, Simo Mikkonen, Pekka Suutari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317091745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Music, Art and Diplomacy shows how a vibrant field of cultural exchange between East and West was taking place during the Cold War, which contrasts with the orthodox understanding of two divided and antithetical blocs. The series of case studies on cultural exchanges, focusing on the decades following the Second World War, cover episodes involving art, classical music, theatre, dance and film. Despite the fluctuating fortunes of diplomatic relations between East and West, there was a continuous circulation of cultural producers and products. Contributors explore the interaction of arts and politics, the role of the arts in diplomacy and the part the arts played in the development of the Cold War. Art has always shunned political borders, wavering between the guidance of individual and governmental patrons, and borderless expression. While this volume provides insight into how political players tried to harness the arts to serve their own political purposes, at the same time it is clear that the arts and artists exploited the Cold War framework to reach their own individual and professional objectives. Utilizing archives available only since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the volume provides a valuable socio-cultural approach to understanding the Cold War and cultural diplomacy.

Chapter 1
Introduction to the Logic of East–West Artistic Interactions

Simo Mikkonen and Pekka Suutari

The Cold War, as the dominant narrative of the post-WWII world order, emphasises limitations on travel, restrictions on the flow of ideas and bans on the movement of many goods between two major blocs that were dominated by mutually hostile superpowers. As a concept, 'the Cold War' embodies the confrontation of two rival ideologies and economic and political models, hostilities between nations and competition in fields ranging from the military to technology. It is implicitly connected to conflict and straggle.¹ Even if the current approach to the Cold War has become more complex, the persistence of the word 'war', together with numerous related concepts such as the Iron Curtain, emphasises the division and disruption that made any form of interaction and cooperation between the blocs seem like an anomaly. 'The Cold War' is also used in a broader, temporal sense to refer to an era that extended from the end of the WWII all the way up to 1989. While the Cold War era would seem to extend our focus beyond the concept of war,it nevertheless inherently embodies the notion of war rather than peace. Even if both superpowers spoke about peace and cooperation throughout the Cold War era,presenting themselves as heralds of peace and models of progress and prosperity, their actions towards each other were definitely characterised more by hostility and competition.

If we turn our attention to other countries – or, even more revealingly, to people and organisations – conflict and competition suddenly look much less important. The Cold War was not something ordinary people considered to be part of their everyday lives.² To be sure, for many people, Cold War limitations became a normal state of affairs, with some countries simply being mostly beyond reach due to the political situation. But few people paid genuine attention to this. Still, the Cold War affected people's lives indirectly in many ways, for instance by limiting travel to some countries and preferring others. There was,however, one area in which the personal and professional lives of people frequently encountered Cold War politics, that of cultural diplomacy. Through cultural exchanges and different forms of cultural interaction across the Iron Curtain, numerous people who had not previously been involved in foreign politics came to participate in activities of cultural diplomacy, although they did not necessarily always share the views and aims of their respective governments. Cold War era cultural diplomacy enabled novel types of interaction that either had not existed before or that were brought to the centre by the Cold War. In some ways, the Cold War seemed even to have been beneficial to cultural production, with political competition fuelling it and pushing it to new heights. For politicians this might have been about competing with the adversary, but for artists it was more about increased appreciation for their field of art.

If we wish to understand cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era,the conceptual content of the term is of the essence in discussing the Cold War. In the field of history, choices of perspective dictate whether we see conflict and limitations or attempts to create detente and cooperation, and whether the Cold War was a defining element or mainly just a trivial issue in the lives of people.³ Geographical, temporal and structural choices tend to dictate the kind of answers we get. When the aim is to understand the role of culture in international relations during the Cold War era,attention needs to be paid not only to foreign policy and states as actors, but also to the agents who participated in these activities, together with their motivations for doing so and the implications of these activities. States often understood the purpose of these activities very differently from those who were involved in them. Music, Art and Diplomacy deals with East–west cultural interactions and cultural diplomacy, particularly with regard to the arts but not simply from the point of view of state diplomacy. By concentrating on the relationship between the arts, artists and state actors, our aim is to gain a better insight into this particular area of cultural diplomacy and related processes during the Cold War era. Our focus is on activities that cross the systemic borderline between the two blocs, with the main focus being either on the Soviet Union or on activities involving it. The emphasis is on the early part of the Cold War, when the post-WWII situation was still taking shape – from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Even though Cold War studies have tended to emphasise politics, military matters and inter-state diplomacy, the last two decades have seen a growing body of works falling into the category of 'the cultural Cold War', a concept that is as elusive as 'the Cold War' itself. It can be seen as a term to describe the activities used by governments in their foreign policy to further their own aims. These activities were either directed at the supposed enemy or, sometimes, intended to appeal to countries and populations in their own blocs. The studies dealing with these activities have presented culture as an area of conflict and competition between the two blocs.⁴

This body of literature introduces some important insights that Music, Art and Diplomacy aims at further elucidating and substantiating. The first broad point we wish to make is that cultural diplomacy was an even more complex area than traditional diplomacy. The relationship between states and the persons who participated in cultural diplomacy activities was often rather complicated. Sometimes the results of these activities were even contrary to those intended by the administration that was supposed to be in control of cultural diplomacy. While such cases have been previously dealt with in the growing literature on the arts and the Cold War,⁵ Music,Art and Diplomacy pays more attention to this phenomenon by offering several case studies of the relationship between the state and individuals.

Our second point is related to the first, but it goes even further by examining the role of individuals in cultural diplomacy activities. In many cases, the choices made by individuals involved in cultural exchanges were not limited to merely accepting or rejecting the state's objectives. Rather, individuals without an immediate role in the government were in many cases able to directly influence and even change the outcome of the activities.⁶ The third point is related to images and imagination. While traditional diplomacy is often based on realistic calculations and rationality, cultural diplomacy in the Cold War era was about appealing to emotions and creating images, and in many cases indeed it was driven by images and assumptions that were based more on emotions and prejudices than on realism. Therefore we address the subject of images and imagination as an important part of the trade and practice of cultural diplomacy during the early Cold War era.

Cold War studies have tended to emphasise the viewpoint of the United States, the country that supposedly won the Cold War.⁷ While the Cold War illustrates several key features of the era – the threat of nuclear war, fierce competition and tension between the two blocs as well as both real and imagined differences between them – it became a closed subject after 1989. Subsequently. Cold War studies in general have seen a move towards a multi-faceted approach to the Cold War as a phenomenon. The perspective of the United States government, which used to dominate Cold War studies, has been complemented not only with the Soviet point of view but also with that of the Third World and countries within the spheres of influence of the superpowers.⁸ Furthermore, the traditional emphasis on politics and military affairs is no longer the sole way of perceiving the Cold War, even though it is still dominant in Cold War studies. One factor that explains the diversification of Cold War studies following the end of that era is the access to fresh source materials, especially in the former Soviet Union and former Soviet satellites. Despite the many existing limitations to access, especially in former Soviet archives, scholars have repeatedly been able to tap new materials that yield new perspectives or corroborate previous insights. This applies to the chapters of this volume, which all present previously untapped or even disregarded source materials. Although new approaches have been fewer in number than might have been expected, there are several volumes that have brought fresh viewpoints to the study of the Cold War, for example by examining the role of economics and culture in its development.⁹ Perhaps the most profound impact of the end of the Cold War has been on Soviet studies, and this also carries important implications for the Cold War itself.¹⁰

Any research aiming at examining East–West cultural interaction encounters an important question of perspective. After all, the outcomes and implications of official cultural diplomacy look very different when they are examined using state-generated sources than they do when cultural diplomacy is approached from the viewpoint of the individual involved by using source materials ranging from memoirs and interviews to letters and personal files. So far, the viewpoint of governments has been at the centre of Cold War studies, which is one reason for the emphasis on restrictions and conflict. Music, Art and Diplomacy seeks to enrich our understanding of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War era by investigating the interplay of the different layers involved, ranging from individuals to state policies. Furthermore, by affording chapters on cultural relations seen from the Eastern as well as the Western bloc, Music, Art and Diplomacy aims to supplement the picture that has been largely, albeit not completely, dominated by the viewpoint of the United States. And finally, by placing our emphasis on the first two decades after the Second World War, we attempt to dig deeper than would have been possible if we had selected the whole Cold War era. The mid-1960s are a logical closing point in many respects, and they are considered to have constituted a watershed in both the East and the West. Soviet periodisation sees Khrushchev's ousting and the beginning of Brezhnev's period as General Secretary (1964/65) as a point of change. In the West, Europe was becoming free from the postwar restrictions imposed by the United States, with Germany and France in particular becoming more independent and European unification gaining momentum. Furthermore, with decolonisation and the rise of leftist movements in both Europe and the United States from the mid-1960s on, the balance of international relations changed, and this also had an impact on the focus and objectives of cultural diplomacy.

The Cold War is the dominant tool, albeit not the only one, used for explaining post-WWII contacts between the East and the West (referring to the blocs dominated by the Soviet Union and the US, respectively). The problem, however, is that the intention behind foreign political activities even in the East–West context was not always to challenge the other side. This problem becomes particularly difficult when the focus is outside the United States or the Soviet Union. Moreover, the superpowers, too, changed their policies and regarded each other, as well as other countries, differently as the Cold War evolved. For example, contrary to its rhetoric, the Soviet Union did not consider the West to be a monolithic entity: while the Soviet rhetoric publicly placed all Western market economies in the same basket of hostile countries, this was far from the real Soviet view. For example, France and Italy, both with notable communist parties, were considered special cases. Furthermore, Finland and other democratic countries with market economies that claimed to be neutral were not considered to be all the same by the Soviet policymakers. Particularly after Stalin's death, there were major differences in the Soviet attitude towards the countries of the West. US–Soviet relations also experienced notable changes during the first two decades after WWII. While these geographical and chronological differences are important, there were also several other areas of East–West interaction, some of which saw much more intense activity than others. Music and dance were among the more active fields, and there was a lively exchange of films; but the fine arts, for example, faced many obstacles despite several attempts to engage in exchange.¹¹

Because the Cold War has often been interpreted as an ideological conflict, East–West interactions have sometimes been dismissed as taking place between ideologically like-minded parties, for example between the Soviet Union and communists and extreme leftists in the West. A closer look at East–West interaction does reveal a lot of ideologically motivated activities, but not necessarily along the ideological borderlines of the superpowers. The complexities involved in East–West interactions during the Cold War call for careful and detailed analysis if we are to understand not only the development of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era but also the post-Cold War world.

Music, Art and Diplomacy concentrates on investigating East–West interaction through contacts in the artistic world. Of all the areas of East–West interaction, artistic contacts illustrate the temporal and the geographical complexities related to Cold War cultural diplomacy. Political, ideological, commercial, personal and professional motivations are all involved when we examine the logic of East–West interactions in the arts. During the Cold War era, works of art were circulated, tours were made by professional artists, practices and styles were exchanged and trends in the arts were adopted from the other bloc. The so-called Iron Curtain seems only an appropriate term if we limit our attention to evaluating restrictions, such as what art was allowed to circulate, which artists were allowed to travel, and what kind of attempts were made to prevent the adoption and movement of certain practices and trends from the other bloc. Such restrictions existed in both the East and the West, where official Socialist Realist art from the Soviet Union was very rarely exhibited during the Cold War era.

The main focus of this volume is not on Cold War politics as such, but rather on the interplay and impact of superpower politics and the arts on each other. The key concept that we use to describe the relationship between superpower politics and East–West artistic interaction is 'cultural diplomacy'. Cultural diplomacy is typically understood as the means used by states to interact with one another, employing various forms of culture, such as educational and scientific exchanges and the visits of exhibitions, works of arts and sometimes artists themselves. In the Cold War setting, however, there was a very thin line between cultural diplomacy and propaganda.¹² Cultural diplomacy, and here particularly the use of the arts as part of the cultural diplomacy of different countries, is a curious area of foreign political activity.¹³ Music, Art and Diplomacy explicates the insight that, unlike the traditional approach to diplomacy, cultural diplomacy in particular is not only about state aims but can also take on features of informal and even private motivations that may be linked to state aims but are not always folly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to the Logic of East-West Artistic Interactions
• PART I INDIRECT CONTACTS, IMAGES AND IMAGINATION
• PART II HIGHLY PUBLICISED AND SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES OF EXCHANGE OF MUSIC AND MUSICIANS
• PART III RECEPTION AND TRANSFERS IN THE AREA OF THEATRE AND DANCE
• Bibliography
• Index