<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Book with the Wrong Title
Review: In most respects this is a very good book. It is wide-ranging, and extremely well-written. It is also well organized around different aspects of culture-stage and screen, music, including ballet, and the visual arts--so that if one is, for example, interested in ballet but not in the lengthy descriptions of the treatment of US soldiers in Stalin-era Soviet films about the Second World War or of the plot of a Sartre anti-American play, it is easy to skip these without loss. The author can be forgiven for excluding literature from this volume, which is already very long, and I for one look forward to his promised book on this. Interesting though it is, however, it is not the book one expects from its title. In the first place there is remarkably little about the organized activities of Western Governments to promote the image of Western culture. Some of this was undercover CIA support of magazines, congresses and festivals-one learns only at the end of the book that the reason for the neglect is that the author considers that this aspect of the cultural war has been overstressed. But the promotion abroad of national cultures by organizations such as the British Council, and their French and American equivalents deserves much more attention; in particular the concern with the American cultural image abroad, especially in Western Europe, was a cold war matter since this image might affect the electoral strength of the large Communist parties of France and Italy, and this in turn influenced President Kennedy's introduction of high cultural activities into the White House, and President Johnson's founding of the National Endowment for the Arts. Second, much of the book has little to do with the Cold War. The sections on the stage and especially on film demonstrate the cultural effects of the Cold War best, although even here it is not clear what the plays of Ionesco and Beckett have to do with Cold War culture. But music and art are neither tools of propaganda nor competitive sports, and the well-known capacity of Soviet institutions for talent spotting and training, whether of athletes, musicians, or dancers enriched the world's supply of performers without amounting to a "struggle for supremacy." More interesting is the Soviet suppression of atonal music and nonrealist art. This is very well described in the book, but it preceded the Cold War by decades, reflecting at first mainly Stalin's personal tastes. But it is to be expected that artistic originality and creativity will be often associated with political and social iconoclasm. In the West, this led creative geniuses like Picasso and Brecht to be attracted by communism, with the amusing consequence that communist parties found themselves trying to exploit their fame while rejecting their work. In the Soviet Union, the clash between artistic innovation and the constraints of a totalitarian regime led inevitably to eventual links with political dissidence. The defections of performing artists, however, were mostly inspired by private ambitions rather than political motivations. Cold Warriors seized on both of these to demonstrate the weaknesses of Soviet society but they were not themselves products of the Cold War.
Rating: 
Summary: THIS is the history of Cold War!
Review: The premise of the book is simple: in no other period in history were there two systems claiming the same civilizational and cultural background (Western Judeo-Christian tradition) but at the same time set to fight each other to death. The means, strategies, individual battles and aims of that struggle are all put before you in this book in a way that has no equal.
One day, when time allows us to look at post-WW2 times from greater distance, I think we will realize that if one wants to understand that period, one should not look at the official political history - but rather at this subliminal 'popular' history. Forget Reykyavik summit or even Cuban Missiles Crisis. The history was made in the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate or in Nureyev's leap to freedom (he was the dancer who defected in the title of the book). David Caute gives you a peek preview of what historians will write about the times we lived in.
He has no qualms about claiming victory - the West won and was always set to win. It was only a question of when the facade on the Potemkin village called USSR will come down.
He has a very broad range, going from ballet through exhibitions to sporting events. If you want to read about the reception of Waiting for Godot in London and Paris, it's there.
He knows lots of details. Example: I personally come from a smallish city in what used to be Czechoslovakia (Liberec, about 100.000 pop.). Caute knows that Vaclav Havel was there during the Soviet invasion in 1968. This is something that only Lokalpatrioten (such as myself) are aware of. Needless to say, I was impressed. These little details and stories make it really interesting.
He does not mind getting mad at his own, so to speak. Like, he ends his book with a strong and witty polemic against the various Kremlin Studies/Cold War Studies/Soviet Studies and other pseudosciences in which wackos and useful idiots inhabit parallel universes where Stalin is a hero and Kennedy a villain. That last chapter alone is worth the money.
Finally, let me add another personal testimony: having lived on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain as a youth, I often struggled to put all the pieces together to make sense of what was going on. Caute supplied them all and the whole picture emerged. Reading the book, I would slap my forehead thinking 'So, THAT's how it happened!'. Every such moment freed me some more from the lies I was spoonfed as a kid and I am really grateful to Caute for that.
<< 1 >>
| 
