The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War

David Caute is the author of such books as The Fellow-Travellers and The Great Fear.

The cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was without precedent. At the outset of this original and wide-ranging historical survey, David Caute establishes the nature of the extraordinary cultural competition set up post-1945 between Moscow, New York, London and Paris, withthe most intimate frontier war staged in the city of Berlin. Using sources in four languages, Caute explores the cultural Cold War as it rapidly penetrated theatre, film, classical music, popular music, ballet, painting and sculpture, as well as propaganda by exhibition. Artists such as Miller, Picasso, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky became involved in this fierce cultural competition through which each of the major Cold War protagonists sought to establish their supremacy. Caute challenges some recent, one-dimensional, American accounts of 'Cold War culture', which ignore notonly the Soviet performance but virtually any cultural activity outside the USA. The West presented its cultural avant-garde as evidence of liberty, even through monochrome canvases and dodecaphonic music appealed only to a minority audience. Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels wereexceptionally high, but the fear of freedom and innovation virtually guaranteed the moral defeat which accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Introduction: The Culture War; PART I: MARKING THE TERRITORY; 1. Propaganda Wars and Cultural Treaties; 2. The Gladiatorial Exhibition; PART II: STAGE AND SCREEN WARS: RUSSIA AND AMERICA; 3. Broadway Dead, Says Soviet Critic; 4. The Russian Question - A Russian Play; 5. Soviet Cinema under Stalin; 6. Hollywood: The Red Menace; 7. Witch Hunts: Losey, Kazan, Miller; 8. Soviet Cinema: The New Wave; PART III: STAGE AND SCREEN WARS: EUROPE; 9. Germany Divided: Stage and Screen; 10. Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble; 11. Dirty Hands: The Political Theatre of Sartre and Camus; 12. Squaring the Circle: Ionesco, Beckett, Havel and Stoppard; 13. Andrzej Wajda: Ashes and Diamonds, Marble and Iron; PART IV: MUSIC AND BALLET WARS; 14. Classical Music Wars; 15. Shostakovich's Testimony; 16. All that Jazz: Iron Curtain Falls; 17. The Ballet Dancer Defects; PART V: ART WARS; 18. Stalinist Art: Tractor Driver's Supper; 19. Passports for Paintings: Abstract Impressionism and the CIA; 20. Picasso and Communist France; 21. The Other Russia: Pictures by 'Jackasses'; Conclusion; Bibliography; Notes and References