Soviet Brainwashing, British Defectors and the Corruptive Elsewhere." Science Fiction Cinema and 1950S Britain: Recontextualizing Cultural Anxiety

Jones, Matthew. "Soviet Brainwashing, British Defectors and the Corruptive Elsewhere." Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualizing Cultural Anxiety. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 37–52. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 3 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501322556.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 3 October 2021, 01:55 UTC. Copyright © Matthew Jones 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 37 1 Soviet Brainwashing, British Defectors and the Corruptive Elsewhere In 1955, the British Council fl oated the idea of organizing two fi lm festivals, one in Britain, screening fi lms from the Soviet Union, and the other behind the Iron Curtain, showcasing British cinema to the Soviets. Th e Council invited the Soviet culture minister, Nikolai Mikhailov, to London that summer and discussed the festivals with him directly. Mikhailov, a newcomer who had been in his role for less than a year at this stage and appeared to be more inclined towards good cultural relations with the West than his predecessor, used his time in London to raise a number of similar potential partnerships. Th ose behind these initiatives might have anticipated a series of cultural exchanges of the type that, though reasonably rare, did occur sporadically throughout the 1950s, but the involve- ment of George Jellicoe, a Foreign Offi ce offi cial who handled Soviet relations, in the planning for the fi lm festivals suggests that the possibility of spreading pro- Western propaganda in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev had not been overlooked by the British. Jellicoe himself certainly intended to seize this opportunity, fram- ing the events in his correspondence with Sir Paul Sinker, the new Director General of the British Council, as ‘a rare opportunity for giving wide masses of Soviets an inkling of life in the West and of Western art and culture’. 1 However, despite their obvious propagandistic value, in December 1956 the chairman of the British Council informed A. A. Roschin at the USSR embassy that the recip- rocal fi lm festivals would be impossible due to British ‘public opinion’. 2 Perhaps by this stage there had developed such a depth of anti- communist sentiment in Britain that the display of Soviet art in London was intolerable, or perhaps citing ‘public opinion’ was a diplomatic way for the Foreign Offi ce to deny the Soviets their own propaganda opportunity. In either case, the cancellation of such a strategically signifi cant event suggests that sections of 1950s British society saw Soviet cinema as potentially very dangerous. 99781501322532_pi-222.indd781501322532_pi-222.indd 3377 99/11/2017/11/2017 11:00:37:00:37 PPMM 38 38 Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain Th is was not the only moment in which cinema became a battleground in the Cold War ideological struggle. Th e 1950s science fi ction boom has oft en also been understood in this light. Critics have frequently interpreted those US fi lms that feature a depersonalization narrative, in which aliens possess or duplicate human bodies, as expressions of American anxieties about Communist infi ltration and infl uence. Peter Biskind has argued that such fi lms were overt in their engagement with debates about Soviet brainwashing, but he is far from alone in making this claim. 3 M. Keith Booker, for example, has argued that ‘the notion of stealthy invad- ers who essentially take over the minds of normal Americans, converting them to an alien ideology, resonates in an obvious way with the Cold War fear of communist subversion’.4 For these authors, depersonalization fi lms, including classics of the genre such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), connect the alien with Communism, at least as it was imagined by many Americans, since both alter a person’s internality in a way that is not betrayed by external, visible signifi ers. However, because this interpretation of the depersonalization narratives is predicated on an American perception of Communism, it cannot explain the responses of audiences outside of the United States. For example, in 1952, the British fi lm magazine Picturegoer claimed that the depersonalization fi lm Red Planet (released in that year as Red Planet Mars ) was ‘about Mars, not Communism’.5 Sarah Street has explored the diff erences between British and American science fi ction’s Others in terms of the formal qualities of the fi lms themselves, claiming that ‘whereas American horror and science- fi ction fi lms of the period tend to confi gure the monster, the “Other”, as relating directly to the “Red menace”, i.e. Communism, the British generic variation is slightly diff erent’. 6 While American fi lms and audiences may have been engaged in a dialogue driven by fears of the dangers that lurked behind the Iron Curtain, in other parts of the world these fi lms were watched by people who approached Communism from diff erent perspectives. In countries where brainwashing and infi ltration manifested in public debate in alternative forms or where the Soviets were not deemed to be a threat, audiences might have renegotiated the meanings of the depersonalization fi lms. Britain was one such country where the Communist threat was articulated diff erently than it was in America during the 1950s. Th e nation certainly shared with the United States a concern about Soviet brainwashing, but in Britain subversion and indoctrination were articulated not as local threats to the neighbour- hood, as Amy Maria Kenyon has indicated was the case during the American ‘reds under the beds’ scare, but as threats to what one might call the British 99781501322532_pi-222.indd781501322532_pi-222.indd 3388 99/11/2017/11/2017 11:00:37:00:37 PPMM 39 Soviet Brainwashing, British Defectors 39 Establishment.7 Th is is a slippery term that has been defi ned in a number of dif- ferent ways, but here it is used to mean those individuals or groups perceived to represent the British state during the 1950s, among whom two key groups were the military and the diplomatic services. Each was, in its own way, an emblem of Britain and each was perceived at various times during the 1950s to be under acute threat from Communist infi ltration. As such, the danger of Communist indoctrination was largely imagined to occur in diff erent areas of society in the United States and Britain, with the former looking anxiously at ordinary com- munities while the latter generally eyed its institutions and their leaders with greater suspicion. Th is distinction had signifi cant consequences for the range of interpretations of 1950s depersonalization narratives that were available to these countries’ respective audiences. Anti- communist sentiment in 1950s Britain Th ere were a number of causes for the infl ammation of anti- communist sentiment in Britain during the 1950s, but signifi cant amongst them was the emergence of a series of defectors within the British Establishment. Perhaps most famous were Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who were converted to Communism at Cambridge University during the 1930s and who had spied for the Soviets while working in the Foreign Offi ce and the diplomatic services before their fl ight to Moscow in 1951. Such defections contributed to a loss of confi dence in the British Establishment and its emergence as the key focus of British anxieties about Communist infl uence and infi ltration. An early example of the threat posed to the British Establishment by infi l- tration and defection came in 1953 during Operation Big Switch when prisoners from both sides of the recent Korean War were exchanged. Th e war itself, fought between June 1950 and July 1953, pitted the capitalist Republic of Korea, with backing from the UN, including Britain and the United States, against the Communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, supported by the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. One of the main stumbling blocks during the peace negotiations that concluded the war was the Communist nations’ insis- tence that all captured personnel be returned to their home countries, whether they wanted to go or not. America in particular objected, wishing to allow Korean troops to defect. Eventually the Communist countries relented, but only on the understanding that Western personnel too would not be forced to 99781501322532_pi-222.indd781501322532_pi-222.indd 3399 99/11/2017/11/2017 11:00:37:00:37 PPMM 40 40 Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain return home. During the confl ict, 1,060 British servicemen and women went missing or were taken prisoner. Th ough few opted to remain in China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a handful of Americans and one Scot chose to stay behind when their fellow prisoners of war were repatriated. Royal Marine Andrew Condron refused to return to Britain, choosing instead to remain in Communist China where he lived a ‘lively and cheerful’ life and began teaching English at the Peking Language Institute.8 While Callum MacDonald is correct that ‘the bitter debate about collabora- tion’ that occurred in America aft er the revelation that not all of the country’s soldiers would be returning home ‘never occurred in Britain’, this should not be confused with the British public being either unaware of or uninterested in Condron’s defection.9 Th ough he never worked for the Soviets and did eventually return to Britain in the early 1960s, contemporary media reports reveal that during the 1950s Condron was framed by British public debate as a traitor. Th e Manchester Guardian , for example, reported that Condron and the American defectors ‘rode off into North Korea .

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