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Review Essay the Politics of Cold War Culture ShawThe Politics of Cold War Culture Review Essay The Politics of Cold War Culture ✣ Tony Shaw Steve Nicholson, British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism 1917–1945. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1999. 195 pp. £42.50. Christopher Mayhew, A War of Words: A Cold War Witness. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998. 148 pp. £25.00. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998. 223 pp. £25.00. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books, 1999. 509 pp. £20.00. Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The U.S. Crusade Against the Soviet Union 1945–56. Man- chester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. 301 pp. $45.00. Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 220pp. $35.00. James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 325 pp. $16.95. All wars, especially cold wars, are fought in part through words and images. Propaganda—the design, production, and dissemination of these words and images—was central to the forty-year battle fought between East and West af- ter the Second World War. As the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals increased in the 1950s and 1960s, a direct military clash between the superpowers was generally considered to be suicidal. The resulting psychological and cultural conºict—an alternative to “real” war—was unparalleled in scale, ingenuity, and power. In a period of information and entertainment overload stretching from the golden age of radio to the birth of satellite television, it seemed al- most impossible not to be touched in some way by the barrage of ofªcial and unofªcial Cold War publicity. Virtually everything, from sport to ballet to comic books and space travel, assumed political signiªcance and hence poten- tially could be deployed as a weapon both to shape opinion at home and to subvert societies abroad. Politics and culture had of course been inextricably intertwined in the So- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 59–76 © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039701750419510 by guest on 28 September 2021 Shaw viet Union from 1917 onward. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, had related the success of Communism to its ability to achieve a complete up- heaval in the cultural development of the masses. Accordingly, scientists, art- ists, writers, painters, and musicians became active ªghters on the ideological front, fostering the principles of Soviet patriotism and proletarian interna- tionalism. As early as 1921 Lenin was promoting the sale of Soviet ªlms to overseas visitors. He and the other Bolsheviks were aware of, on the one hand, the tremendous international propaganda potential of cinema and, on the other, the role that Soviet cultural diplomacy could play generally in under- mining the position of the “capitalist-imperialist” powers and spreading the Soviet regime’s ideas about world revolution.1 The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe during and after the Second World War provided a ªrmer base for this international propaganda cam- paign, and, with the start of the Cold War proper, a greater need to inªltrate the West culturally. Orchestrated by Agitprop (the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Communist Party Central Committee) and Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau, set up in 1947), the cam- paign grew more sophisticated and diverse. “Front” organizations, such as the World Peace Council, joined with sympathetic journalists, trade unionists, and academics in the West in trumpeting Moscow’s quest for disarmament. These and other “agents of inºuence” were on hand to exploit any propagan- da opportunities that should arise, such as the allegations of germ warfare made by Kim Il Sung’s regime against the United States during the Korean War. 2 According to some estimates, by 1960the Soviet Union was spending the equivalent of 2 billion dollars on Communist propaganda worldwide.3 Détente brought a further expansion rather than contraction of overseas cul- tural activities, sport being the best example. In 1975 the Soviet Union main- tained sports contacts with sixty-seven countries, and 32,000 Soviet athletes traveled abroad. During that year sports accounted for one-third of all Soviet cultural contacts with other countries, a reºection of the ofªcially declared 1. Baruch Hazan, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis Publishers, 1982), p. 53. For more on the propagandistic role of Soviet cinema see also Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991: Ideological Conºict and Social Reality (New York: A. de Gruyter, 1993); and Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society 1917–1953 (Cambridge, UK: Cam- bridge University Press, 1992). 2. Milton Leitenberg, “New Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 11 (Winter 1998), pp. 185–199; and Kathryn Weathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in the Korean War,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 11 (Winter 1998), pp. 176–185. 3. P. M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 256. 60 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039701750419510 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Politics of Cold War Culture credo that “sports is a valuable means of strengthening friendship and cooper- ation between young people.”4 The degree to which culture was used as an instrument of state propa- ganda in the West, as opposed to the East, during the Cold War has recently been the subject of considerable scholarly and public interest. In the United States much of the discussion has revolved around the dark days of cultural and political absolutism associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Witness, for instance, the soul searching prompted among many Americans in 1998 by the granting of an honorary award at the Oscar ceremonies to Elia Kazan, the celebrated ªlm director who had gained notoriety for “naming names” in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Similar cries of “betrayal” were heard in the British press in 1996 when the opening of Foreign Ofªce ªles revealed that George Orwell had secretly pre- sented the British government with a list of “crypto-Communists” in the arts and media shortly before his death in 1950.5 This news not only provoked a re-evaluation of Orwell’s iconic left-wing status, but also cast doubt on the in- dependence of other Western intellectuals and commentators during the Cold War. If even George Orwell had succumbed to the blandishments of the “Big Brother”-like agencies, some asked, was there anyone who wrote, painted, acted—even thought—truly freely? Was all culture, on both sides of the Cold War, merely an extension of politics? If so, how should this alter our perception of the conºict? All of the books under review in some way shed light on the speciªc epi- sodes and general questions mentioned above. All of them focus on aspects of American and British Cold War culture, particularly during the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. One or two of the books make only a lim- ited contribution to Cold War historiography, but the others—Scott Lucas’s Freedom’s War and Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper? in particu- lar—add signiªcantly to our understanding of how foreign policy making, domestic politics, propaganda, and culture intersected during the conºict. In British Theatre and the Red Peril, Steve Nicholson examines the por- trayal of Communism in plays written for the British theater between 1917 and 1945. Film historians for over a decade now have been emphasizing the politically conservative nature of British cinema during the 1920s and 1930s. Directors, producers, and censors combined to manufacture “escapist,” con- 4. V. Ivonin, Vice Chairman of the USSR Committee on Sports, “Sport and Physical Culture,” Mos- cow News, No. 31 (1972), p. 5, cited in Hazan, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda, p. 40. 5. Richard Norton-Taylor and Seamus Milne, “Orwell Offered Writers’ Blacklist to Anti-Soviet Propa- ganda Unit,” The Guardian, 11 July 1996, p. 1; and Ross Wynne-Jones, “Orwell’s Little List Leaves the Left Gasping for More,” Independent on Sunday, 14 July 1996, p. 10. 61 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039701750419510 by guest on 28 September 2021 Shaw sensus-building entertainment at a time when Europe was ideologically polar- ized and millions of British movie-goers were suffering the effects of The Slump.6 Nicholson has performed the admirable task of “exhuming” many long-forgotten plays of that period. After examining their political outlook, he reaches similar conclusions about the theater. Nicholson demonstrates how, at a time when the capitalist system seemed to be on the verge of col- lapse, plays like The Bolshevik Peril (1919), set in a Lancashire mill-town, warned British theater goers of the terrible consequences of Communist rule, including sexual depravity, the abolition of marriage, and the collapse of the Empire. Other plays focusing on life in post-revolutionary Russia depicted Communist ideals as impractical and socialists as inherently corruptible. For example, The Forcing House, which was written by the political philosopher Israel Zangwill, portrayed revolutionary leaders who admitted in the ªnal act that socialism is unworkable because “it presupposes a quality which is not in human nature.” Coming from the pen of one of the principal artistic oppo- nents of the British government’s support for the White Russians in the after- math of the First World War, Zangwill’s play was naturally seized upon by the fervently anti-Bolshevik press when it was published in 1922.
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