Chapter 1

CULTURE WARS

A revolution in people’s thinking does not happen as quickly as the nationalization of industry.
—VÁCLAV DAVID, 1950
A “visual extract of the Soviet world” appeared in Prague in April 1947, in the form of a major exhibition of socialist realist paintings from the USSR.1 The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) hailed the exhibition as a means to cement Czechoslovakia’s friendship with the Soviet Union. A headline in the party’s newspaper, Rudé právo (Red Right) boasted, “The Exhibition of Soviet Art: The Further Rapprochement of Soviet Culture and Ours.”2 Yet rather than bring the countries together, the exhibition inspired an extraordinary debate in Czechoslovakia about the merits of Soviet culture and the stakes of the nascent friendship project. This debate developed among critics in the Czechoslovak press and among ordinary viewers in the exhibition’s comment books. “No exhibition has aroused so much interest and polemics,” the newspaper Svět práce (World of Labor) reported.3
The socialist realist art exhibition—along with the export of other types of Soviet culture to Czechoslovakia, including film, music, and literature—marked the beginning of the postwar friendship project between the two countries. Following the Red Army’s liberation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union embarked on the creation of a “cultural sphere” in the region to augment its military power and to combat Western influence.4 Soviet cultural imports in Czechoslovakia and the other future Eastern bloc countries had “ceremonial and didactic functions.” They were supposed to showcase the USSR’s new status as a world power and promote socialist ideology and socialist realist aesthetics to local citizens.5 From the point of view of Soviet officials, the primary purpose of sending films, novels, and paintings to Czechoslovakia and the other countries in Eastern Europe was thus to provide political enlightenment, not entertainment. As the Soviet Ministry of Cinematography explained in an internal document, “Soviet films in these countries play the role of a transmitter [provodnik] of socialist ideals among the broad masses.”6
When representatives of the six political parties that formed Czechoslovakia’s postwar National Front government met for the first time in Košice in April 1945, they agreed that friendship with the USSR was central to the reconstruction of the Czechoslovak state. “As an expression of the Czech and Slovak people’s undying gratitude toward the Soviet Union, the government will make the closest alliance with the victorious Slavic power in the East the unassailable leading line of Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy.”7 The politicians thus framed friendship with the USSR as an expression of fealty, but they also understood it as a means of national preservation. They believed close relations with the USSR were necessary to protect Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty in the event of an attack by a revanchist Germany.8 Their political calculation thus revealed a central paradox of the nascent friendship project: Czechoslovaks viewed Soviet internationalism as a safeguard for their own nationalist project. The KSČ even developed a slogan that encapsulated this paradox, “Without November 7, There Would Be No October 28, 1918!”9 The slogan thus claimed that the Bolshevik Revolution was responsible for the establishment of Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I.
At the beginning of the friendship project, the Soviet government tried to use its paintings, films, and symphonies to achieve very specific goals in Czechoslovakia: to augment the USSR’s prestige and to spread Soviet-style socialism. At the time, the Soviet government allowed few foreigners to visit, and thus Soviet cultural imports were the main way the Czechoslovak public came to know the country that had become their most important ally. Yet during the Third Republic, Czechoslovak politicians, cultural critics, and the broader public used these Soviet imports not to assimilate Soviet politics but to debate and define their nationalist project and friendship with the USSR.
In the first months after the Soviet liberation, Czechoslovaks across the political spectrum welcomed Soviet culture as a means to combat German influence and to cultivate pan-Slavism. By the fall of 1945, however, the reception of Soviet cultural imports in Czechoslovakia had become caught up in new fault lines that developed in domestic politics. For the KSČ, the promotion of Soviet culture was a way of buttressing the party’s long-standing alliance with the USSR and of rejecting Western influence as the cultural Cold War began. In public, the party lavished praise on Soviet cultural imports as symbols of the USSR’s political achievements and as models for the development of Czechoslovakia’s own cultural sphere. In private, however, some of the party’s leaders expressed concern that Soviet films and paintings were too ideologically heavy-handed and simplistic to attract what they saw as their compatriots’ more sophisticated tastes. They thus used Soviet culture as a foil as they attempted to create a unique path to socialism, predicated on Czechoslovakia’s more advanced economy and history of close political and cultural ties with the West.
Czechoslovak non-Communists, by contrast, employed Soviet culture to publicly critique Soviet politics. Non-Communists included members of the Social Democratic Party (a leftist party closely allied with the KSČ); the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (a centrist, nationalist party that acted as the KSČ’s main opposition); and the People’s Party (a Catholic party that promoted Catholic institutions and had the support of many rural citizens).10 Although there was no official censorship in Czechoslovakia during the Third Republic, there was a taboo against openly criticizing the Soviet Union.11 Non-Communists supported a close alliance with the USSR, but they used critiques of Soviet culture to try to influence the broader development of the friendship project. They portrayed Soviet culture as backward and non-Western in order to represent Czechoslovakia as more modern and European. They objected to what they saw as the KSČ’s sycophantic attitude toward the USSR: for Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship to be strong, they argued, Czechoslovaks must be open with the Soviets about the cultural differences between their countries.
The beginning of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia was entwined with the onset of the cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The two superpowers, for all their differences, shared the conviction that culture was a powerful instrument of political influence. In the mid-1940s, Czechoslovakia thus became a staging ground for the broader cultural offensive between the Soviets and the Americans. Officials from both countries sent films and art exhibitions to Czechoslovakia, tried to develop alliances with Czechoslovak politicians, and supported friendship societies in Prague in a bid to attract ordinary Czechoslovaks to their respective ideological camps. Yet this opening salvo in the cultural Cold War in Czechoslovakia was ultimately unsuccessful for both the United States and the USSR. By 1948, the United States had effectively ceded its efforts to use culture to influence politics in Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, viewing Soviet domination of the country as a fait accompli. The USSR, meanwhile, owing to domestic economic and political constraints, had ended up largely outsourcing the promotion of Soviet culture to the KSČ.
In Czechoslovakia, the wide-ranging public debates about Soviet culture and the friendship project abruptly ended in February 1948, when the KSČ took power in a coup and the USSR integrated the country into its “socialist camp” in Eastern Europe. After Joseph Stalin’s split with Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in June, the Soviet leader made it clear to his Eastern European satellites that he would not tolerate “national paths” to Communism. Instead, these countries were to model their political, economic, and cultural life on the Soviet Union. In the cultural sphere, Czechoslovak officials responded in two ways. First, they tried to extinguish competition between Soviet and Western culture by banning cultural imports from the United States and Western Europe. Second, they launched highly detailed Sovietization campaigns that instructed Czechoslovak citizens on how to respond to Soviet films, art, and literature. They thus attempted to secure the hegemony of Soviet culture in Czechoslovakia by ensuring it would no longer serve as a subject of debate.

“The Fresh and Powerful Spring of Russian Art”

In the interwar period, cultural life in Czechoslovakia’s cities was cosmopolitan. Art devotees could choose between French and Russian exhibitions. Literature lovers had access to hundreds of new works by foreign writers in Czech translations.12 In 1938, the most popular film in Czechoslovakia was Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.13 Even in the industrial city of Ostrava, on the border with Poland, “The jazz-age had reached out from that faraway, exotic, bewildering continent that was called America,” remembered Joseph Wechsberg, an American soldier of Czech origin, who returned to Czechoslovakia in May 1945. “Everybody sang ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ in Czech or German translation.… At the theater they played comedies by Verneuil and Birabeau, with the actresses running in and out of bedrooms, undressed in black-lace lingerie.”14
The Nazi occupation curtailed this cultural heterogeneity. The German government banned films, plays, literature, and music from the allied countries in the Protectorate, largely replacing them with German and Austrian works. In the final year of the war, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, shut down all dramatic theaters in the Reich.15 In the bleak conditions of occupied Czechoslovakia, German films as well as those made by Czech filmmakers who collaborated with the occupation regime achieved an outsized importance: “Many consumer goods were unattainable, apartments were unheated, the city was dark, the police checked on people in cafés and restaurants, public dancing was not allowed most of the time, and so it was said that in the evening people went either to the movies or straight to bed.”16
At the end of World War II, the newly reconstituted Czechoslovak state faced severe economic, social, and cultural challenges. When Wechsburg returned to Czechoslovakia in May 1945, he found the country’s infrastructure in disrepair and its social order upended. “In the streets of Prague there was the smell of powder and smoke and dead flesh.” As he traveled across the country, he discovered that trains were dirty and ran slowly because Soviet troop transports had the right of way. At train stations, groups of Sudeten Germans huddled under armed guard, their shirts marked “N” for Němec, the Czech word for “German.” Former concentration camp inmates dressed in their guards’ uniforms were making their way back home.17 With this economic and social upheaval, cultural life in Czechoslovakia continued to deteriorate. The new government in Czechoslovakia, headed by Edvard Beneš, banned German films and othe...