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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]
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.
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.
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